Home
is where your heart is and to be away from home is to be a stranger. Being a
stranger means not belonging but not losing one’s identity. Some years ago my
wife and I visited our great cultural festival, the National Eisteddfod. After
about an hour of recognising only one word in around every four hundred, I
wanted to go home; I felt that I was a stranger. The Welsh word for this is hiraeth,
which everyone says is untranslatable. It means something like a longing for one's home tinged with sadness for the people and place from whom one is separated.
Christian
experience is like this. The apostle Peter, from the very beginning of his
First Letter, reminds us that as Christians we are strangers or exiles journeying to
our real home. We have an identity and
a citizenship but not here. Not that the here and now is unreal or unimportant
but it is transient and on the whole uncongenial. We have to pass this way in
order to get to where we are going and to do this successfully we must fix our
hope firmly on Christ. Only then will we keep our identity, persevere along the
way and finally receive our inheritance. John Calvin writes ‘… if heaven is
our homeland, what else is the earth but our place of exile? If departure from
the world is entry into life, what else is the world but a sepulchre?[1]
The environment in which we live is hostile, the terrain
difficult and we fool ourselves if we think otherwise. Humanly speaking
journey’s end is achieved against all the odds. In her poem inspired by Samuel
Rutherford’s dying words, Ann Cousins wrote, ‘I’ve
wrestled on towards heaven, against storm and wind and tide, Now, like a weary
traveller that leaneth on his guide. Amid the shades of evening, while sinks
life’s lingering sand, I hail the glory dawning from Immanuel’s land.’
Christian reflection tends to individualize experience but for Peter we
make our journey as part of the great pilgrim band. He points us towards our
inheritance as encouragement to persevere against storm and wind and tide. But we are strangers together; ‘you’ and ‘your’ are almost invariable plural, not singular. We are strangers of
‘the dispersion’ – the people of God scattered throughout the world. There is safety in numbers.
There might be something in the movement to reclaim and transform culture
but for the Christians of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bythinia in the
first century, culture was the killer - literally. Whether or not the
persecutions of Nero’s reign form the actual background does not matter, God's people lived with slander, discrimination, deprivation, suffering and the
threat of the ‘fiery trial’ on a daily basis. Such conditions test the
commitment of the strongest, which is why Peter insists that they should live
as people determined to obtain the inheritance reserved in heaven for them.
Carl Truman asks the question “Have you noticed … [how] ‘heavenly mindedness’
has come to be seen by some as the real problem in the church, rather than
worldliness and the aping of secular culture? It is a strange church culture
indeed where such things are now commonplace.”[2]
If First Peter reminds us of anything, it is that we are
strangers together, members of that great spiritual entity known as the
Dispersion, travelling the same road, fighting the same fight and heading for
the same destination as the pilgrims to whom Peter wrote so long ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment