At Pentecost, remembering Peter

"Laying aside all malice, and treachery/guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and slander, as newborns desire the pure milk of the Word, that you may grow from it: if you have tasted that the Lord is gracious." (1 Peter 2:1-3)

Sometimes I have a tendency to think of Peter as the Apostle who was a little too eager to talk, and ended up with his foot in his mouth. I see his journey -- and his public mistakes -- and tend to forget that he spent three years learning from Christ himself. Who could come away from that unchanged? 

Somewhere there is a line between staying humble about our human leaders who all have human faults, and refusing them respect. Even the high priest had to offer sacrifices for his own sins; who among us is without faults? And so it is with some late-remembered humility of my own that I think twice about the layers of depth of what Peter wrote. 

The evils that he mentions are evils that come into the world mostly through words: malice, treachery/guile, hypocrisy, envy, slander. He contrasts the with the Word, and quickly draws a contrast that God's word is logical, healthy, pure, growth-promoting, and gracious. He leaves the listener to work out that the opposite is true of our sinful words: unreasonable, unhealthy, impure, corrupting, and ungracious. And we know the difference by the taste they leave in our mouths. He doesn't focus so much on whether we are consuming words or speaking words or pondering words; he focuses on whether they are words of purity and God's grace. If there is a source of pollution which we can address by our smallest actions, here it is: the words we hear, the words we amplify, the words we use to grow our souls in the direction they grow. 

Thank God for the words of Peter.