“As foreigners and exiles”
Beloved, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from the desires of the flesh, which war against your soul. (1 Peter 2:11 BSB)
What it sounds like today
Poetic language for feeling out of place.
The cultural key
Both words were legal categories, not moods: the paroikos was the resident alien, living long-term without citizen rights, and the parepidemos the temporary foreigner passing through, statuses that determined what you could own, whom you could marry, and how courts treated you. Peter's letter is addressed to exactly such marginal populations across five provinces, and instead of promising them status, it adopts their legal disability as the church's proper self-description.
Recovered meaning
Resident-alien status reframed as vocation: of course this world's registry lists you as foreign, your citizenship is filed elsewhere (the Philippians 3:20 entry is this truth in colonial form). Live here as honorable non-citizens whose real passport shapes their conduct.