Alien Life: Inheritance
We Are Given a New Homeland
1 Peter 1:3-9
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. April 16th, 2023
I grew up in a small town, not much larger than Bad Axe, that at one time was among the fastest growing towns in Michigan. In the ten years between 1880 and 1890 Menominee Michigan grew by 223%. At its peak it had almost 13,000 people and produced more lumber than any other town in the United States. It was a bustling town at a time when Europeans from many different countries were immigrating to the land of opportunity and looking for a place to settle.
When I was in high school I spent some summers volunteering at our local museum. A busy afternoon was maybe five families. So I was often given free reign to look at all the different exhibits. One of the items they had was an old map of the town, from the lumbering days, that outlined where the various neighborhoods were. There was the polish neighborhood, the french neighborhood, the irish neighborhood, the anglo neighborhood, and so on. People who had left their homelands but still found each other halfway across the world. The Churches, too, retained an ethnic identity. The museum itself was inside the oldest Catholic Church in town, which was built by the irish. The town’s McDonald’s was built on the former site of the french parish.
These neighborhoods developed not so much out of ethnic tension, though that certainly existed, but so that people who spoke a common language and held common customs could share in a common life. Over time those ethnic differences began to fade. But back in those days to be French in Menominee was to be part of a diaspora, and to live in a strange land among a strange people.
Peter addresses his first letter to a diaspora. “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithnia…” The diaspora Peter addresses is not the Jewish diaspora, which was spread abroad the Roman world for centuries. But a new Christian diaspora. Not because they had been exiled from their homelands, but because they had gained a new homeland. Not exiled on account of their ethnicity, but because they had gained a new ancestry, and a new inheritance.
He goes on to write, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” In other words, by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ we have been given a new birth. We have been regenerated. That New Birth is our own resurrection. A resurrection into a new life. With a new inheritance, one that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. It is a strange new life that makes us strangers. It is a strange new life that puts us out of place in this world.
It is this theme of the strange new life we have in Christ that I want to focus on the next few Sundays using Peter’s letter as a guide. I hope to make Christianity strange. To focus on the oddness of this letter. After all, is it not odd to say that a man has risen from the dead? And is it not also odd to say that we may share in the eternal life he has? Is it not odd to claim our homeland is not America but the New Jerusalem? Is it not odd to put our hope in what we do not see?
The Christians Peter addresses know they are odd, strange, exiled. Some may have been abandoned by their families. None of them participated in the festivals of their cities. Some may have even refused to go to the marketplace, as it was overrun with idols. They knew where they stood in their society.
But we are not always aware of how odd our faith makes us. That being born of God through the Spirit makes us strange. That we believe in virgin births, forgiving (and not just seven times), turning the other cheek, rejoicing in sufferings, and the conquest of death. These are odd things.
Perhaps there was a time when Christianity simply made sense. One became Christian by osmosis, because it was a Christian society. But now we are more like the immigrants of Menominee, Michigan. Members of a dispersion, from a different land, strangers to the land through which we sojourn.
But this is not cause for despair. On the contrary. What makes us strange is our hope. The greatest hope. What makes us strange is the grace of God. What makes us strange is the new life he offers. A life full of adventure. A life full of joy. A life full of peace.