Even though we might be considered strange now, and even judged because we think and act differently, the world is not the final judge. There is another judgment coming. And that judgment, in a sense, is going to bring about what is real normalcy. Because the way we think? The way we act? These are strange things now, but they won’t be strange then.
Madeline L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time among other things, once said this about her faith: “We try to be too reasonable about what we believe. What I believe is not reasonable at all. It’s hilariously impossible.” And she’s right.
Of course, there are reasonable parts of Christianity – it is reasonable, for example, when you look at the complexity of the world around us to conclude that we do not exist by chance but by intelligent design. That’s a reasonable conclusion. But in other ways, the whole Christian faith and the Christian life that results from it is entirely unreasonable. We believe that there was a man born of a virgin who never sinned. And this man was not only a man, but is also God in the flesh. And we believe that this man died on the cross in our place and then was raised from the dead. We believe in an afterlife despite there not being any way to go there or examine it. This is what faith is, and in that way, it is unreasonable. That’s why it is a matter of faith.
Further, the lives we lead as Christians are strange. Very strange, when you compare them to the normal way of operating in the world. We are a strange people, and Peter knew it. He said as much in 1 Peter 2:11.
He called us strangers. Exiles. Aliens. People not of this world.
Then later, in chapter 4, he recognized that strangeness again.