At church today, I was pleasantly surprised to see Lloyd and Joseph. Now I am intrigued with what Lloyd blogged:

The sermon was about being in exile, and being a chosen people. The former condition is one I'm very familiar with; as for being "chosen," I dunno... something about that notion feels disharmonious to me with actual reality and history. But I'm just an ant on the almost infinite scale of the universe, so what do I really know of the whole picture?

I'm still not sure what I heard, or what really happened, but am now beginning to have a vaguely troubling attack of the guilts.

The rhetoric of exile has certainly been strongly sounded deeply at FPCB and also "chosen people" -- but not in any sense of "oh, how special and privileged we are" but more "how much we have to live up to given how much God has given us in His love and mercy".

I walked away wanting to ponder the text of the sermon at greater length (1 Peter 2:1-10) for applications to my own life. I've not been terribly successful at deeply integrating what I've been learning at church with the rest of my life. Maybe I'll do better this week.