Art is always transgressive. What I always say is, we need to transgress in love. We today have a language to celebrate waywardness. But we do not have a language, a cultural language, to bring people back home.
'Citizenship in the Roman empire, as in others of the sort, depends on lineage, power and financial means, and it classes people into first, second, third categories. Belonging, in Jewish cultural religion, also rested on family line and social status. In contrast, membership in the household of God is a gift: gentile and Jew, slave and free, women and men, old and young, people from South and North, East and West, people without all their limbs and wits and people with them, all belong, thanks to God's reconciling work in Christ.
'This new household, the Church, is built not on money, or power, charismatic leaders or individual saints, but on the foundation of the apostles and prophets: on the whole recorded history of God's work in God's world through God's people. When Rome claims that it's imperial power that holds everything together, and temples become symbols of dominion; and when today we are tempted to place our confidence in nations' military or economic power, big church budgets, or successive business ventures, and when denominational and institutional preoccupations easily become more important than people, then, with Paul, we must counter-culturally claim that Christ is the peace without which the entire construction would crumble apart. He is the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.
'Where, we asked at the beginning, does God live? Paul closes with this amazing and humbling affirmation: in Christ, you are also being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. We, the Church, with all our imperfections, petty concerns, pride and prejudice, are God's holy temple, God's earthly home. Yes, by God's grace it is here: in the immensely diverse, transnational, transethnic, transcultural community, that God chooses to live. God lives in the new humanity, created by God, reconciled by Christ and indwelled and gifted by the Holy Spirit.'
'Let me say without any fear or favour, that any church leader who is not leading in mission loses his apostolicity - simple. The apostles were church leaders because they were leaders in mission. Anytime you get to the point where you’re a church leader and you’re not leading your people in mission, you’ve lost the leadership. You can own the title, drive the cars, own the houses, but you’ve lost it - as far as heaven is concerned.
And I think church leaders need to know that so that they can really be the leaders in mission and create the enthusiasm. Let me tell you: if you are a church leader and you got out on witnessing, and the bank manager sees you and the people see you, it will not be long before your diocese or your circuit or your presbytery begins to say, 'Hey guys, we’d better join this man.' That’s why you’re put there in leadership!'
- Archbishop Ben Kwashi, of Jos, Nigeria
Now rhetoric, preaching, speaking: all these are skills practised and esteemed in Greco-Roman society, to which the recipients of Paul's letter belonged. They're highly aware of the power of the spoken word in building personal prestige and swaying public opinion. But Jesus' peace-preaching had a far more significant impact. It was grounded in his peace-being and his peace-making as expressions of the ongoing reconciling work of God who declares things into being. In the beginning, God, the creative community of love, spoke the world into existence out of chaos. In Jesus, the Word made flesh, God spoke redemption and new life into history. And through the Spirit's breath, God speaks community out of distanced individuals. God speaks and it comes to pass.
Paul had begun his letter by portraying the grand cosmic scheme of things: everything brought under Christ's lordship. He now zooms in on a visible, historical expression of that unity and authority. He leads us not to some ancient temples or some opulent modern church building. No! Instead, he lands squarely on his listeners - on the local community of Christ's followers, v19: 'So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God...'
What God in Christ has spoken into being is nothing more and nothing less than the Church, the body of Jesus' followers, the new humanity, woven together out of people from different ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious strands.
'And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience' Ah, this is about them: the Jewish Christians might have sighed in relief. ... They might have rested assured of their belonging, and believed they owned the right to determine who was in and who was out of the new community being forged by the apostles' teaching. Become like us - the true believers: look at the world through our lenses, and organise your experience into our categories; otherwise, you will only ever be second class. We can tolerate a little colour here and there, a token representative of minority groups, but they must be willing to blend in, to accommodate to our standards and expectations, our jargon, our styles. Yet Paul leaves no room for such smug self-righteousness. He continues: 'We ALL once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of humankind.'
