Last week I traveled to a cemetery close to Boston for the burial of a friend. Then I took advantage of the long holiday weekend to visit my hometown and family in the Adirondack Mountains. Spring is a time of explosive life in the mountains: new growth on the trees, new flowers, peepers singing in the evenings, and the arrival of the ducks, geese, and loons. This year one of the duck families has fourteen ducklings. Just around sunset all fourteen ducklings gather in the bushes under their mother’s wings to keep warm and safe through the night. What a sense of belonging together in one family.
St. Peter reminds us today of the importance of keeping that sense of belonging – as Christians belonging to God. Peter reminds us that once we were “no people”. How terrible would life be with no family; no sense of belonging; no guide or tradition; no communion with God. That terrible experience of being “no people”, of aloneness and emptiness, leads our modern culture to fill up the hole in our lives produced from being “no people” with material goods, pleasure, and power.
Yet a Christian has received a new life through God’s mercy. God chose each of us to become part of his chosen people, forming us into a royal priesthood and a royal, holy nation in communion with him. Our primary purpose is to announce and share our experience of God’s love and mercy. While others are concentrated on living in the world and accumulating goods, a true Christian becomes an alien, sojourner, or foreigner in this world primarily looking for ways to share the experience of living in communion with God.
We as Christians, are signs of explosive life in the midst of the darkness of our culture’s emptiness. We are the sign of communion with our source of life, communion with God. How does our daily life reflect the fact that we are now part of God’s people?
Once you were no people
but now you are God’s people