Once Nobody, Now His People

Peter was still writing. He had just told his friends about a hope that could never spoil or fade, and Silvanus was still beside him with the pen.

Across the sea, in the hill towns of the country we now call Turkey, things had not gotten any easier for his friends. They still would not bow to the statues or go to the wild feasts at the temples, and their neighbors still did not like it one bit.

"Too good for us now, are you?" the neighbors sneered. "Strange people with a strange god!"

The slaves among them still had masters who beat them for doing right. Peter had a plain word for all of them: foreigners. They lived at home, and home did not want them anymore.

Peter knew about names. He had been born Simon, and Jesus had looked at him and called him Peter, which means "Rock." (For a fisherman who once started sinking like a stone in the lake, that was a generous name.) So he wrote to them about stones.

"Come to Jesus," he wrote. "He is the living Stone. The builders threw him away, but God chose him. And you are living stones, built together into a house for God."

Then came the words his friends would read again and again.

"You are a chosen people," Peter wrote, "a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's very own. He called you out of darkness into his wonderful light, so you can tell everyone the great things he has done."

(A priest was someone allowed to come close to God and bring other people near him. In the old days only men from one family could do it. Now God was giving the job to farmers and shopkeepers and slaves.)

For the next part, Peter borrowed from the prophet Hosea, who lived eight hundred years before. When Israel turned away from God, God told Hosea to name his baby son "Not My People," and his baby daughter "No Mercy." (Those are hard names to hear when someone calls you in for supper.) But God made a promise through Hosea too: "I will show mercy to No Mercy. I will say to Not My People, 'You are my people!'"

God had said it about Israel, but Peter could see the promise stretching all the way to people who had grown up bowing to statues. So he wrote it down for his friends. "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy."

When the letter was read aloud in a crowded house, a slave with sore shoulders sat near the back and heard it. He was chosen. He was God's very own. The neighbors would still sneer in the morning, but his name had changed, and nobody could change it back.

Hosea never saw God's promise come true. He wrote it down and grew old and died, and for hundreds of years "Not My People" stayed a sad name in an old scroll while faraway nations went on bowing to statues in the dark.

Then God laid his Stone. He went looking for outsiders: a tax collector up a tree, a woman alone at a well in Samaria, a fisherman who sank, and he called each one out of the dark. Then the builders threw him away. The leaders in Jerusalem rejected him and had him killed, but God raised him up and made him the cornerstone that holds the whole house together.

He has not stopped building. Somewhere tonight another living stone is being set in place, and it rests on Jesus, the Stone God chose.