When Peter took up his pen to write the letter we know as 1 Peter, he called his audience exiles. They were different. They didn’t fit in. They were surrounded and outnumbered by people who misunderstood them, tested them and persecuted them. As Christians, they were citizens of heaven, with a culture centered around Jesus. But they were living in the Roman empire, with a very different culture. He was telling them how to be Christians in a very non-Christian world. That way, these exiles could be little colonies of Jesus’ Kingdom in a world that was anything but, like the Roman empire then and the United States today.