Sermon – Homeless in Farmville
Isaiah 51:1-6; 1 Peter 1:13-25
4/19/26
It is a regular occurrence at my mailbox to get a letter addressed to someone else. Literally, every week or two we get a piece of mail to our address with a name that is not ours. Apparently, there have been enough people who have lived at our place over the last 10 or so years that we get a variety of names on the mail to our address. Most of it is clearly trash. Anything more important should already have a better, up-to-date address on it by now. We do not open the mail, though. Opening mail addressed to someone else feels wrong, which is useful since it is also a federal crime and is most likely on the extended 10 commandments – somewhere around commandment 17 or 18: Thou Shalt Not Open Mail Addressed to Others without a Pressing and Appropriate Reason. It might be some of that “treat others as you want to be treated” idea. I do not imagine that would not want our mail opened by others, so it makes sense to respect that idea the other way around. Mail should be read by the folk named on the letter.
So why are we reading the letter of 1 Peter? This letter is addressed to people specifically spelled out, and it is not us. It does not say “followers of Christ” in Corinth or “the faithful” Rome or “those called to be saints” Thessalonica or “children of God” Ephesus. It is well established that other letters are meant for everyone even though there might be a place name involved. Peter says something that caused me to pause. In verse one, Peter makes a point of stating that this letter is meant for exiles. The first two verses of this letter lay it out plainly:
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,
To the EXILES of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood: May grace and peace be yours in abundance.
I am pretty certain that I have never been nor am I currently an exiled person. I will not ask for a show of hands of people out there who may or may not have ever been exiled. Being exiled could be a tremendously difficult situation. Imagine being forced from your home without anywhere to go. You were not politely or gently asked to leave. You were forced out. In history, this could be because of a crime one committed and rather than being incarcerated, one was forced out. King David did that to his son Absolom after Absolom killed his half-brother for destroying his sister. David could not kill his son or put him in prison, so he sent him away. He made Absolom homeless. You could also be exiled for living in the wrong place at the wrong time or for religious reasons. If you are on the wrong side of the law or the government, and they do not like you or maybe they want your land, they can send you away. Sure, that is better than ending people permanently, but it deeply hurts to be driven from your home and not allowed to return. That was an even bigger deal historically when land might have been in the family for centuries. Picking up and moving was not an option like it is today.
Millions and millions of people out there today, though, are refugees living in situations that would shock us if we saw it. They were forced out of their land and homes, often because of war or some similar disaster, and are unable to return with any safety. What happens when no one allows them to move to a new permanent home? They become a kind of exile – forced to live in a place never meant to be called home.
The first homeless person I met in Farmville is a friend of mine to this day. He admitted recently that he used to live in a tent under a nearby bridge. He has a home and a job and a family now, but nothing in that has been easy. Doors do not open to homeless people. Hands do not extend to those who are on the fringes of society. Arms do not easily embrace the exiled.
The exiled person is driven out by forces greater than they are. They are the unwanted. It was not long ago that a woman with an inconvenient pregnancy could have been exiled to some degree. Mary herself had to live away from home for a while with a baby Jesus inside her. Those who are released from prison can also easily be homeless in social exile. No one wants to be shut out of society, to be homeless in the systems of this world, but those are the kind of people to which Peter is writing. I have never been exiled. I hope you have never been exiled either, but I cannot know that. To get into Peter’s head, though, and to read this letter in his intended way, somehow, we need to relate to the exile.
Peter’s exile is the follower of Jesus who is walking against the flow and facing persecution. He is worried about Christians who are rejected from society and pushed to the fringes of the civilized world. The exiles in Peter’s letter are not at home in the world – in fact, the opposite – they are people who are not at ease, not at comfort, not at home in the values of this world. If you do not feel like this world is your true home, then this letter is for you. Peter understands that those who do not fit in can be exiles. Following Jesus was risky. As the Jewish faith divorced itself from the Christian element, that meant Christians no longer had places to worship. Communities changed. Romans had distaste for Christians, and Christians were the lowest person on the totem pole, easy to persecute. Becoming a Christian did not raise your social status and made it difficult to fit in with a world that wanted to be the world.
It is not like today when Christians have it easy. In the last century, there were times when everyone was expected to be Christian AND to go to church. Those days have passed. There are still vestiges of what is accepted, however. I’m not sure we have gotten to the point of accepting people of other religions. We might tolerate them, but they are “the different ones” in our so-called Christian dominated society. They are closer to the exiles in 1 Peter than we are in that regard.
This letter is for those who deeply recognize that this world, this society, and this culture is not our own. This letter is for those who cannot be at home here and now like everyone else. This letter is for people who need to follow Christ rather than those around them. So much of this world screams for self-love, self-glory, self-satisfaction, self-service. Sin at its heart is a love of yourself more than anyone else. We are our own god in our own little universe created in our heart. So much in our society feeds that “self” idea. It is not all bad, but it can push us to become too comfortable here in this world. We cannot be our own little gods and do well. It is no accident that Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love the actual God with everything we have and our neighbor as ourselves.
Peter agrees. Our lives as people in exile are about giving up the ways of the past. Since Jesus completely changed us, we should never go back. This is a life of action. He is so clear: it is time to get to work; it is time to be holy. It is time to be holy.
That idea makes me nervous, and I think that is a good thing. If I had no issue or no problem with Peter’s charge to be holy, then I would be smug or naive or deluded. Holiness is never something that sits easy in my life. I cannot take it lightly. It is not even something I have earned. Yes, Jesus makes us holy in his holiness. It is up to us to act like it.
It is up to us to embrace our homelessness in this world, to embrace our difference and the change that burns in our hearts. It is our time to own the call to holiness that Peter will build on through his letter. Here, though, he gets us started with the first step. Since we have been made new and since we have been freed to follow Jesus, we love. That is probably not a surprise if you have been paying attention at all in church life, but I want you to notice the modifiers: DEEP and FROM THE HEART. Love on the surface will never sustain us in exile. Love in all the shallow and temporary ways will never sustain us in exile. People who are living intentionally in the holiness that God gives must work for a love that lasts and changes us. It changes relationships, families, communities, and cultures. It is the kind of love I witnessed in Guatemala with CEDEPCA where the true church is so easily dismissed. It is the kind of love I see here when people get past the walls and join hands in the march of faith. It is the kind of love that we probably know the world needs but seems a little scary because it is big and demanding. It is the kind of love that will sustain us as we work for our true home and our true king. Jesus did for us what we are called to do for one another.
If we do hope and trust in Christ, we need to set our minds and hearts in him, not in fear but in deep, heart-love. As people who should want change in the world, we should be that change in the world.
To God be the glory. Amen.