In the summer of 2015 the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment, originally enacted to protect the freedom of slaves, must now be applied to same sex marriages. The shockwaves were immediately felt. Celebrations and protests were heard almost in tandem. New marriage applications were available while some county clerks refused to issue the license out of conscience. The local newspaper, where I lived, conducted interviews with local preachers asking them their opinion and what they were going to do about the new mandate. As expected they stood against the decision and their sermons the Sunday after the announcement reflected their position.
I chose another route.
The struggle with the shifting culture is the disorientation we feel. We tell ourselves how we live in a Christian society with Christian neighbors and laws that reflect our Christian faith. As soon as laws get passed that conflict with our core value-sets our equilibrium begins to tilt and then spin. Sometimes out of control. We can cry “Foul!” or we complain, but no one listens. No one seems to care. The result always damages our witness to those who don’t believe. We are in a post-Christian era trying to view the world through a Christian era lens. We’ve convinced ourselves that we live in Jerusalem when in truth we live in Babylon. We’ve always lived in Babylon.
The following Sunday of the Supreme Court ruling I announced to the church the fall sermon series. I was preaching from 1 Peter. Instead addressing the ruling, I addressed the response to our culture. Peter’s first epistle gives the best possible way to fix, not the ruling, but our equilibrium.
Peter bookends his epistle with two words that convey the imagery he fleshes out in the body of the letter. The first is “diasporas” (1:1b) a word used to describe the Jews who were dispersed and scattered throughout the world when they were taken into captivity. In those days they found themselves in the heart of pagan territory, hostile to their faith and void of the temple which grounded their fidelity. They found themselves as unwelcomed strangers inhabiting a new land, a land they didn’t want. Peter picks up on that theme to say Christians living in a pagan world experience the same kind of disorientation. The place may be familiar but we do not fit in. We’re strangers. We’re sojourners. We’re pilgrims dispersed throughout the world. While we don’t belong, we don’t lose our faith either.
The second word of the bookend comes at the end of the letter where Peter claims he’s writing from Babylon (5:13). The cryptic message is unlikely literal as no record of Peter going into the city exists. More likely, he’s writing from Rome addressing the church in various locations (see 1:1b). By name dropping Babylon, Peter reinforces his theme of strangers living in a strange land.
The word to describe Peter’s message is exile. Located in a place far from home, living among people who do not hold common values. The exilic person feels ostracized, intimidated, and abandoned. No, we’ve probably never been exiled, but we’ve felt something similar to an exile.
In John Mark Comer’s book, Live No Lies (see pg. xxiv-xxvi), he describes the shared experiences of the exiled. First, a shift has occurred where Christians used to be in the majority, but are now a minority. Fewer and fewer people are identifying with a local church and long term trends are anything but optimistic on changing the trend. Secondly, being a Christian was once a badge of honor but now is often viewed as a prison of shame. Instead of the Church as a place to offer a pathway to solving social problems, the Church has too often been part of creating or exasperating the social problems. We’ve created part of the dilemma we live in. Thirdly, because of the first two, a shift has occurred where society may have been tolerant of the Christian perspective but are quickly moving to being intolerant. The result is that people who identify as Christian are in the minority and are bearing the shame of the title finding more and more intolerance toward such perspective. Comer’s description sounds like we’re exiled in our own land.
If Comer’s assessment is right, then maybe we can start understanding how we’re living in a post-Christian era which looks a lot like the pre-Christian era in which Peter wrote his epistle. We start viewing ourselves as exiles in a forsaken Babylon instead of citizens of safe Jerusalem. Some of the themes Peter touches on include hope (1:3-9), a call to living holy lives (1:15-16), accepting social rejection (2:4-8), suffering like Jesus (2:21-24; 3:3-22), living with an unbelieving spouse (3:1-7), living at the end of time (4:7-10), all while staying alert to the dangers surrounding us (5:8-9).
So when the verdict was handed down by the Supreme Court, I chose not to rail against the decision, though I am sure my congregation wished I had. I chose instead to take a different and difficult route. I began reframing our context. Society is far less friendly to the Christian faith then originally believed. Society has always been unfriendly to the Christian faith when it really mattered. The difference is that foreign soil. We’re being forced to reevaluate what following Christ really means, and that really is not so bad. We have a pretty good roadmap and it includes a letter from the Apostle Peter.
Solo Deo Gloria!
(i.e., Only God Is Glorified!)