People’s movements often start in someone’s house, usually around the kitchen table. They tend to bubble up with free flowing conversations and a vision for change. Little by little such movements spread. They can spread so far and wide and deep as to diminish empire. Protectors of empire, more truthfully those who are imprisoned by empire, by all its bureaucracies, boardrooms, and bunkers do what they can to kill such movements. They do their best to kill the people who live them. It is that very killing that protectors and prisoners of empire practiced against Jesus, against Peter and Paul, against union families at Ludlow, against Dr. King, Chico Mendez, and so many more. And yet, church, as the people’s movement gathering in the people’s house, lives on.
House is the original meaning of church. To believe Jesus started a church means Jesus started a house, a People’s House. It flows freely with Christ’s communion, love, and healing power. It’s a House to which all are invited and from which all are sent out. We are sent out in communion to transform empire’s divisions for wealth and supremacy. We are sent out in love to transform empire’s belief that suffering is deserved for those who are poor and hungry. We are sent out with healing power to transform empire’s blood lust for executions and wars. And, as this Sunday’s Gospel says, “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against us.” Those protecting and imprisoned by that which is deadening may do us harm. But they shall not ultimately prevail against the People’s House and our transformation of the world.
In Christ, church is not a building, not an Ark of the Covenant nor a Tabernacle or any edifice built around them. God, the power of Creation, never was imprisoned within the boxes protectors of empire built around ‘him.’ Nor is there any priestly class who arranges access to God through the possession of any keys to these boxes. In Christ, church is the people, commoners like Peter, like you, like me, like neighbors near and far. Church is the people who move out from houses across the world to challenge empire and transform it.
Prayer: Christ, we live as one family, members of one household.
Question: What are some old ideas of church or of God that keep me imprisoned?
June 29, 2014 Gospel Matthew 16:13-19 Feast of Saints Peter and Paul