The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 6, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 06
I have been slowly inching into Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and while the volume is heavy (over 1200 pages), MacCulloch’s prose dances through the pages. He begins not with the birth of Jesus, but a thousand years earlier with the great moments of Greek and Jewish culture and literature.
One of the roots of our way of life and thinking is in the concept of the Greek polis, often translated as “city.” The polis is a group of people who make decisions together in a meeting, not a location. The New Testament took another angle, ekklesia, translated as “church,” meaning people who are called out of our ordinary business to make decisions. The core of the Church’s being is that when we have meetings, where two or three gather together, Christ is among us. Politics become ecclesiastical.
The small villages in colonial times usually had not a church, but a meetinghouse. On Sundays it became a house of worship; on Tuesdays it was the arena for the politics when a town meeting took place. The same space became sacred and profane depending on how people assembled: to worship or to decide how things were to be done in the village.
We assemble today with several spirits: to offer ourselves and our minds to God in worship, and then reassemble to determine and guide our practical steps in how we follow God’s mind. The Spirit enlivens us whenever we meet together. Let us listen, for the time is right.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan