Living in Exile

Here are some thoughts on Sunday's second reading that I shared with the people of St. Timothy Lutheran Church. What are your thoughts?

Second Reading: 1 Peter 1:17-23

¹⁷If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. ¹⁸You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, ¹⁹but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. ²⁰He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. ²¹Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.
  ²²Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. ²³You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

Exile, strangers in a strange land; doesn’t that seem to typify what we are experiencing today? No one knows for sure how long our time of being at home, not physically gathering together as the church will last. This is a strange land for us.

Skip down to verse 23. All the above was so that we have “genuine mutual love.” We are to love one another “deeply from the heart.” We can only do this when we have “purified [our] souls by [our] obedience.” Particularly in this time of exile, we need this love which we show through calls, prayers, cards, and so on.

We can purify ourselves because our faith and hope are “set on God” (v. 21). God does this through us and for us.

The last verse is very meaningful to me. It is used in morning prayer in the ELW, which was what we used most frequently for chapel in seminary. Those words were sung and I often hear them in my mind. We have been born anew through the living and abiding word of God.

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