We are in the middle of a sermon series entitled, “The body” where we are exploring this idea that God calls us to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
The first week, we dipped into 1 Peter and we focused on the key phrase “living stones. Peter says that we are living stones and that together we are the temple of God - the church.
This means that church is not a structure. It’s not an event. It’s a movement made up of people.
And the purpose of our coming together is to reflect God's glory.
So, last week, we turned to Nehemiah because it offered a tangible expression of what it means to be living stones as Nehemiah called the people to rebuild Jerusalem - the city of God.
And we focused in on the key phrase “Next to him”.
You see, there were lots of different people doing lots of different jobs in lots of different neighborhoods, but they were in it together!
And that’s what it takes to be a part of God’s work and reflect God’s glory; it takes next to him, and next to her, and next to him, and next to her; everyone working together in unity for a common goal.
Today we are coming back to 1 Peter and I want focus on a different key phrase because it has been grossly misinterpreted since it was first written.
“You are a chosen race (group, people, generation),” the text reads.
You can see how this phrase could get dangerous when applied in community. In fact, it has been used to exclude people from the church, to declare superiority, and even to hurt groups of people.
It’s language that has resurfaced over the past few years as we struggle to find our identity as a country.
And all of these, misuses of the concept of being chosen, have damaged the transformational work and witness of the gospel in the world. And as you and I know, that’s not what God desires of his people.
So, let’s dive back into these verses to see what Peter was really saying about being chosen. . .
As you might recall, 1 Peter is a letter sent to a group of churches who were experiencing the cost of following Jesus. You see, it was a time that bearing the name Christian was a difficult thing to do. It brought great challenges and suffering and tremendous persecution every day – just because they were called Christians.
And in the midst of all of this suffering, they starting thinking to themselves, maybe I should just dump this whole Christianity thing because it’s going to be a lot easier if I just stopped following Jesus, quit going to church, and started acting like everybody else.
And that's when Peter steps in and writes this letter of encouragement; letting them know that they are not alone, God hasn’t left you, God is as close to you now in your suffering as he’s ever been.
In fact, God has chosen you. He says, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people”.
Wow. Talk about special! Hearing a description like that, it’s easy to see why we’d sit up a little straighter, fix our collars, and adopt expressions of superiority. After all, we are chosen!
But these words were not meant to puff up the early Christians, or us, with self-important arrogance.
Instead, it’s likely the writer of the letter chose these lofty words for two reasons.
First, remember, most of the early Christians reading this letter were Gentiles. If you were a Jewish convert to Christianity, it was easy to reach back into the history and tradition of your Jewish roots and fully understand this concept of being chosen: God’s people through the lineage of Abraham, a corporate identity that reflected generations of shared understanding about who they were.
But Gentiles did not have that reference point. In fact, there was much dissention in the early church about these identities—did you have to become a Jew first, before you could become a Christian? Of, if not, were the Jewish converts to Christianity somehow extra special because Jesus was Jewish?
1 Peter was addressing these tensions when he wrote what he did, and you can imagine how the Gentile audience needed to hear them: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…”, meaning: you belong here.
Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not good enough to be part of this revolution of love.
In using this “chosen language” to describe the first communities of Christians, Peter is saying that everyone is welcome, and all of us together make up the community for which we are responsible to tend and nurture.
He wasn’t, then, stroking their egos. He was critiquing the early church for its infighting and divisions.
A second reason Peter may have used the language is because he was trying to narrate a community identity—to remind them that as chosen people, they carry a holy mandate: to walk in the way of Jesus.
The task they’d taken on was the same task as the one Jesus took on—not exactly a life of ease and popularity, a perch from which to declare one’s superiority.
Jesus was chosen to preach a message of love that made people in power stumble and fall, that challenged the status quo, and because of it, he suffered.
Peter is reminding them; you are a part of this revolution of love. You are chosen people tasked with the risky challenge of living the gospel message for the whole world to see.
After studying this passage, I was reminded of my childhood – Here’s the scene. It’s recess and you want to play a game of kickball and it was time to pick teams.
You know how it goes - all the best athletes got chosen first, one by one. After all of them were chosen, the popular kids got picked. Then the funny ones, and so on and so forth down the totem pole of childhood society, until all the rest of us eventually got chosen for a team, too.
That whole process was a gut-wrenching blow to fragile egos like mine as you realize how far down the totem pole. In some ways it was a gauge to how you are seen by your peers.
But once the choosing was over, it was time for the game to begin.
And no matter who you were or what team you were chosen for, whether you were chosen first or you were the very last person left on the bench, the attention then shifted to the task of working together so we could beat the other team.
The point of this exercise wasn’t really to see who got chosen. Everybody was chosen eventually. The point was to work together with your team, so that the whole team could accomplish its mission.
If people on the team sat around on the bleachers bragging about who got chosen first and why that made them better, there would never be anybody actually playing the game.
Peter wanted Christians to remember that they were all on the same team, they were all chosen. And now that they were there together, it was time to remember the gravity of their task.
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people . . . in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light.”
You are chosen, and because you’re chosen, you have a job to do: to carry of the radical message of God’s light and love to the world by being the hands and feet of Jesus.
We’re here together for a reason, all of us chosen to be in this place in this time. Why?
It surely isn’t because we’re more special than everybody else. No, it’s because we have a job to do; to model for the world the kind of love and hope and promise that Jesus came to teach us.