Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the dispersion…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you.
We are elect exiles. In two words Peter has given us an elegant summation of our life in Christ. These two words pull against each other, laying before us the whole of the Christian life, and so we must walk it, taut as a tight rope. To be elect is to be remade, to be fashioned and formed into citizens of a fundamentally different place than the here of the here and now. And so in election we become exiles, because in election we become new. But ours is not an exile of relocation, but of reorientation. In election the Father foreknows, the Spirit sanctifies, and the Son sprinkles with his blood, so that we are invited to leave the home we have known to venture into the life and community of the Triune God. The Spirit who is the foretaste of our true and better home groans for our true and better homeland, and so do we, longing for the fullness of our life in the Triune God.
And the Creation groans too. This is how we know that our exile can never mean disengagement from the world. To live in exile is not a disembodiment, rather it is a re-embodiment that redeems Creation to us. In that sense elected exile is a homecoming to what we were meant to be. We enjoy this creation in worshipful gratitude of God’s goodness in the here and now and also in anticipation of the world to come. We are not exiled from creation. Instead, our exile means that we are freed from creation as an end in itself. Elect exile is an invitation to transcendence through embodied worship in the world. In election we experience a transformation by which we are able to see the world and its trappings as means and not as ends. All that is is fading. The rot of the fall is comprehensive–all will decay, all will fail. And so it groans for resurrection. Our election tunes our ears to the groan of creation, and we raise our voices too. The song of the elect exile is the straining sigh for resurrection.