Salting the Earth

Walking Saskatchewan

“Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia: Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” (I Peter 1:1; 1:17-19)


The Apostle Peter’s letters to “exiles scattered throughout the provinces” (roughly present day Turkey, plus) emphasize a few themes:

1. As Christ suffered, so it is not unexpected that his followers will be made to suffer at the hands of the enemies of Christ,
   
2. Your minds have been reborn through the Holy Spirit to a new, spiritual understanding of the world, and earthly pleasures and pursuits must no longer bind you,
   
3. You are always in danger of being seduced back to your earlier condition by false prophets, by the culture around you, by your inability to bear your suffering, and
   
4. The proof of your rebirth rests in your conduct, and it’s on this that you will be judged in the day of the Lord, which is immanent.
   

How important is it to the tone of Peter’s letters that they're addressed to “exiles?” A dictionary definition of the word is “the state of being barred from one’s native country, typically for political or punitive reasons,” and in the harsh environment of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries, CE, the reason for exile would undoubtedly have involved a desire to escape torture and death.


I have no doubt that Peter’s letters—if written to North American Christians in our day—would both have arisen out of different sensibilities and would address major concerns differently. To those insisting that contextual interpretation is a form of revisionism, that may sound heretical, but it’s hard to escape the observation that most of us are neither new converts, nor exiles, nor living under the oppressive thumb of an imperialist dictatorship. Equally obvious is the fact that Peter’s conviction that the recipients of his letter would experience the “Day of the Lord,” (Christ’s return to rule the earth) did not come to pass, at least not in the way the apostles expected.


But Peter’s admonitions to the exiles to stand fast on the principles implicit in Christ’s teaching and example are for all time: feeding the hungry; advocating for justice; faithful, consistent living; honesty; treating others as we wish to be treated, all these attributes modeled by Christ are critical both to the redemption of our church communities and to humanity at large. “You are salt for the earth; if the salt has lost its savour, what’s it good for?” Left for discernment in all our Christian churches and among those who seek to follow Christ outside of the church is the question: “What constitutes salt for the world as we find it?” And the question, “Whose side am I on . . . actually?”


I don’t know what the “Day of the Lord” actually means. Neither do I know why there’s so much speculation and prognostication about its “when.” I’ve long since discarded the dispensationalist, pre-millenialist—millenialist—post millenialist kinds of nonsense with which I grew up. At the same time, I’ve embraced the idea that if we are to understand what Jesus meant by “God,” or “The Father,” we must be able to imagine that God is of the kind that is spirit, and that spirit has only one dwelling place, which is in human consciousness. And when Jesus says, “Inasmuch as you have fed the least of these, my hungry children, you have fed me,” that that is possibly as close to knowing him as will ever be given to us.


But as obscure as these concepts may be, Peter’s admonition to live life in the light of Christ's example presents no great mystery. As Richard Rohr has cautioned us, Christ is first and foremost a model to emulate and not nearly so much an object of worship. I take the liberty here of quoting from his meditation for November 30, 2017:
“Quaker pastor Philip Gulley superbly summarizes how we must rebuild spirituality from the bottom up in his book, If the Church Were Christian. Here I [Rohr] take the liberty of using my own words to restate his message, which offers a rather excellent description of Emerging Christianity:

1. Jesus is a model for living more than an object of worship.
2. Affirming people’s potential is more important than reminding them of their brokenness.
3. The work of reconciliation should be valued over making judgments.
4. Gracious behavior is more important than right belief.
5. Inviting questions is more valuable than supplying answers.
6. Encouraging the personal search is more important than group uniformity.
7. Meeting actual needs is more important than maintaining institutions.
8. Peacemaking is more important than power.
9. We should care more about love and less about sex.
10. Life in this world is more important than the afterlife (eternity is God’s work anyway).”
    

For persons in exile and fighting for their very survival, this would probably have sounded like pie-in-the-sky. But for our day--if the church is to "emerge" to be salt and light to a different world altogether--it rings true. At least to me.