You, like me, have probably watched it happen. A friend or family member gets excited about Jesus, comes alive to his gospel, joins his mission. In their zeal, they make a clean cut with former sins. They gladly associate with God’s church. They evangelize unashamed. They don’t mind looking strange.
But then, slowly, like the Israelites in the wilderness, they begin to cast backward glances, as if Egypt were calling them home. They remember parts of that former life; they want some things back. And though they once didn’t mind looking strange, now they do. They feel drawn to the normal they once knew.
“The more you feel strange to the people around you, the more help you need to stay strange.”
To bring the point closer to home, you have probably not only watched it happen but felt it happen. Like me, you have probably passed through seasons where you became a little (or a lot) less strange in this world, where you traded your heavenly clothes for garments less conspicuous. You once were quite strange (and happy to be so); then, over time, you became quietly normal.
Christians are, by definition, “sojourners and exiles” in this world (1 Peter 2:11) — strangers. But we do not always live up to the name. We strangers need help staying strange.
Stay Strange
The apostle Peter was a man familiar with strangeness — familiar too with the difficulty of remaining so. As he surveyed his beloved churches, and as he considered his own soul, he saw an array of forces bent on making Christian strangers normal: the unrelenting passions of our flesh (1 Peter 2:11), a surprised and smirking world (1 Peter 4:4), a prowling devil (1 Peter 5:8).
Among these various forces, Peter seems to have been especially sensitive to the normalizing influence of the world — of friends and neighbors and family and coworkers who look at your life and “are surprised” at what you do and don’t do, what you say and don’t say (1 Peter 4:4). As the King James Version puts it, “They think it strange.” They think you strange.
However strong our identity in Christ, Peter knows that quizzical looks, awkward conversations, and constant cultural messaging can take their toll on Christian integrity. The more you feel strange to the people around you, the more help you need to stay strange. And for that, you need other strangers.
And so, amid his calls to Christian strangeness in 1 Peter 4, he describes the kind of community that keeps and cultivates that strangeness. Granted, Peter knows that not even the healthiest community can prevent all apostasy. But he also knows that if strangers do not find a home in the church, then sooner or later they will find a home in the world. Only together do we stay strange.
So, over against the passions and patterns of unbelieving society, Peter mentions four features of a faithfully strange community — churches that offer a home on the journey to heaven.
1. Strange Posture
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8)
In 1 Peter 4:3, Peter lists the kinds of community sins these Christians once enjoyed and that their neighbors still enjoy: “sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry.” His vision of Christian community in verses 7–11 offers an alternative society, a place where such passions are not only renounced but replaced by God-glorifying, soul-dignifying patterns.
The first of these patterns is love — earnest, sincere, sin-covering love. Sinful communities like those of verse 3 may know some kind of friendship or camaraderie; they do not know this kind of love. Nor did we know this kind of love when we were living in “malice and . . . deceit and hypocrisy and envy and . . . slander” (1 Peter 2:1). Back then, we stirred up sin in others and ourselves. Now, however, we cover it.
“Love covers a multitude of sins” means that, when wounded, we forgive, overlook, show mercy, refuse to grow bitter. A brother snubs you; you pray, forgive in your heart, and go on loving him. A sister speaks a shameful word against you; you tell her how that felt, gently restore her, and go on loving her. Some sins we pass over; some we confront — all we cover.
Such love is strange in this world. But every time we practice it, we remind each other of the Christ who “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Sin-covering love not only keeps our strange communities together — it also keeps our communities near Christ, whose nearness makes all our strangeness sweet.
2. Strange Place
Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. (1 Peter 4:9)
Peter’s charge to cover over sins implies we know each other deeply enough to wound each other deeply. It implies relationship beyond acquaintance and fellowship beyond Sunday. Healthy churches know, with Peter, that gathering once a week does not keep Christians strange. And so, throughout the week, we bring our strange posture into a strange place: our homes.
Hospitality (literally “love of strangers”) may have been more common in Peter’s world than it is in ours (at least in the West), but it was not so common that Peter felt no need to command it. Nor was it so easy that he felt no need to add that phrase “without grumbling.” Then, as now, Christian hospitality came with many costs and temptations to complain. If our love covers a multitude of sins, our hospitality covers a multitude of inconveniences.
But when we open our homes to other Christians, especially to those far different from us, we help make strangers feel a bit more at home. We invite each other into a world where, for an afternoon or evening at least, we feel welcomed, at ease, a stranger among fellow strangers — and therefore a stranger among friends. In the home, we catch a small glimpse of Home, and we leave with a little more courage to stay strange.
If our churches are going to feel like a home for Christian strangers, then we will need to open our actual homes — often and without grumbling.
3. Strange Practice
As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace. (1 Peter 4:10)
When Peter’s readers moved about in the world, they were allotted a certain place and significance. Their society paid close attention to whether someone was high-born or low-born, master or servant, man or woman, old or young — and assigned value accordingly.
But when Peter’s readers moved about in the church, these wildly different people found themselves on spiritually level ground. Without losing their earthly identities (Peter still addresses servants as servants, wives as wives, the younger as the younger), they gained a remarkable equality in Christ. “Each . . . received a gift,” each became a good steward “of God’s varied grace,” and each was called “to serve one another.”
An unbelieving neighbor observing such a church would have seen society unstratified, partiality put away, as low served high and high served low — each a steward of the King. Our own worthy Lord did not count himself too high for foot-washing. And in a hundred ways, with a hundred gifts — teaching, leading, exhorting, giving, administrating — his church continues to upend social expectations and wash unlikely feet.
Such communities still seem strange, even in supposedly egalitarian societies. No matter how much we prize equality, we each (apart from grace) have categories of people we will not gladly serve — or be served by. But when, in the church, our service extends to all and receives from all, we embody the coming kingdom, reflect the coming King, and minister the “varied grace” we need to stay strange.
4. Strange Perspective
The end of all things is at hand. . . . To [God] belong glory and dominion forever and ever. (1 Peter 4:7, 11)
The church’s strange posture, place, and practice cultivate and keep Christian strangeness, but not apart from the strangest quality of all: our perspective. So, Peter begins and ends this passage by flipping forward a few pages in the story, reminding us of history’s next and last chapter. In the end, we stay strange by remembering that we live in the end.
Christ has come, Christ has died, Christ has risen and ascended — and now no major event stands between us and Christ coming again. “The end of all things is at hand”; the end of this world is at hand. And therefore, the end of our strangeness is at hand as well.
“If strangers do not find a home in the church, then sooner or later they will find a home in the world.”
Faithful Christians cannot help but look strange to unbelievers of all sorts — progressive and conservative, urban and rural, young and old. But that doesn’t mean we fundamentally are strange, not from the standpoint of eternity. No, from the perspective of “forever and ever,” the strangest thing of all is this present world of sin, this God-ignoring age. Such was not the case in eternity past, such is not the case in heaven now, and such will not be the case everywhere soon. “To him belong glory and dominion” — and to him they will always be.
The more eternity rests on our minds, the more this world, which can seem so normal, will begin to look alien, fugitive, dislocated, strange. And so, together, we pray for God’s kingdom to come. We preach and talk of Christ’s return. And we remind each other that this world is not our home. However strange we seem here, we are not strange to God, not strange to the angels, not strange to the cloud of witnesses gone before us.
Stay strange, then, for a few moments longer, for you live on the threshold of home.