1 Peter 1:1-2 – Living as scatterlings, by Rev. Colin Pretorius.
My son and I are both preaching on sections of the first letter of Peter, a letter written to scattered believers in what is today Western Turkey.[1] When we talked about the various sections of the letter, Chris said that Peter was writing to scatterlings about how they should live in a strange land. So today we’re going to use his theme of living as scatterlings.[2]
Scatterlings are people who’ve been displaced from their homeland. They’re wanderers, sojourners, people who don’t quite belong. They’re out of place. And we have to recognise that in many senses we are also scatterlings. We’re disconnected as a church as well as a society at the moment because of the Covid situation. But more than that, as Christians we are scatterlings within this world, a world in which Christians are being pushed to the fringes of society. We find ourselves more and more in a situation similar to that of the New Testament church – being a minority group in society and increasingly viewed very negatively by the world. How are we to live as scatterlings in a society that is ever more hostile to religion or to faith in Christ? The first letter of Peter is especially helpful about what such a life looks like. In the first two verses of chapter 1, Peter tells us two things that are crucial to our understanding of what living such a life looks like. As we work our way through this part of the text, we’ll see that scatterlings are firstly chosen and secondly exiles.
- Scatterlings are chosen;
- Scatterlings are exiles.
[1] Daniel C. Arichea and Eugene Albert Nida, A Handbook on the First Letter from Peter (UBS Handbook Series; New York: United Bible Societies, 1980), 6.
[2] Chris Pretorius, Living as scatterlings, 2020-06-14.