Week 06–pilgrimage

This Week’s Reading:

While the wider culture treats immigrants with varying degrees of contempt, the apostle Peter insinuates that citizens of Jesus’ nation have much to learn from our First Nations, African-American, Asian-American, Venezuelan, Ethiopian, Iranian, Nicaraguan, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Sudanese, Afghan, and Myanmarese brothers and sisters who grapple with the history and/or foreseeable future of life as an outsider. Addressing his letter to an ethnically diverse group of believers, Peter trains his listeners to use different language for themselves: he repeatedly calls all of them “foreigners” and “exiles of the Diaspora,” regardless of their race or ethnicity. He then appropriates normatively exclusive, Jewish language for the nation of Israel to refer to believers of any ethnicity (2:5, 9-10, 25; 4:10; 5:2).

Like Israel throughout the story of the Old Testament, God’s people should think first from a “foreign” frame of mind, and testify as a son or daughter of Abraham, “My father was a wandering Aramean….,” (Deut. 26:5). Peter seems to think it biblically important to abandon a “majority mindset,” and be mentored by a minority world-view. To say it differently, we should become “woke,” or “wide awake,” to the real dangers, challenges, and pain of life within a Babylon-ic system (5:13) that creates “fiery trials” (4.12) as a byproduct of its design. Like many marginalized people groups throughout history, our minds must be “prepared for action,” (1:12). Outsiders don’t have the luxury of “just winging” anything. Adversity and suffering can appear in the most mundane moment, and careful, sober-minded attention to God and his purposes is the beginning of wisdom. The warning deserves each of the three repetitions in this short letter (1:13; 4:7; 5:8). 

In addition to sobriety, hope quickly becomes the lifeline for a pilgrimage paradigm. Amidst comfort, hope atrophies–what does a sedentary majority need it for? Life tends to be as they prefer it, or at least easily influenceable in a preferential direction. But for the powerless and poor-in-spirit, hope is firmly toned with repetitive, tense, and focused application. More often than not, life is not as they would prefer, and hope is frequently the last finger-hold. Peter stresses the importance of setting that hope fully on “God’s delight to be showered on them at the revealing of Jesus,” (1:13). For a sojourning people accustomed to “rejection by men,” being “chosen and precious in God’s sight” is a treasured privilege to be savored, and we would do well to acquire the taste.

Pilgrimage can take many forms, but each exercise in pilgrimage trains us to see our lives as such. It helps us understand ourselves, families, and churches as immigrants in a foreign land, longing to arrive home. On pilgrimage we learn from Jesus through the face-to-face stories, exhortations, and corrections of our sojourning family, and the side-by-side dreams, despair, and triumphs of our fellow exiles. We unlearn less-than-helpful language and train our imagination by adopting the language of the kingdom of God (i.e. losing “we” as primarily a pronoun for Americans, and learning to reflexively use it in reference to the global family of Jesus). We were called to this way of life, “because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow in His footsteps,” (2:21). Pilgrimage is sometimes painful, always uncomfortable, and never wasted. As long as we dress for the occasion (5:5-6), we can trust that ours is an upward journey, and, in the meantime, we can “cast all our anxieties” on the One who cares for us most (5:7).