The Called

To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours ... -- 1 Corinthians 1:2

The church is the ekklesia -- those who are called out.  Our English word church is derived from a different Greek word, kyriakon, from the root kyrios -- lord or master, thus "the lord's house".  The physical structure of a building is not holy.  It serves a holy purpose.  I think a building can develop a holy atmosphere, but it is the saints meeting together in the presence of God that sanctifies a place.  No place can sanctify us.  This is probably harder for some believers to grasp than for others.  Churches with altars and iconography that have been sanctified should be respected and may be venerated, but we are respecting and venerating not the thing itself, which is nothing, but the faith, love, and devotion of those who set it apart, and in which, by the grace of God, we may participate.  God dwells in believers, not stained glass windows or statues or cathedrals.

Because Corinth was such a messed up place, this letter spends a lot of time talking about what the assembly of believers ought to look like, how they ought to behave, and what they really are.  It addresses, point by point in some cases, a variety of questions raised by the local, mostly Greek converts.  Paul, in his linguistically skillful, systematic way, introduces the main point at the start.  We are the church; we are God's people.  We are sanctified, made holy and chosen in Christ.  We are called to be holy and called together.  The only legitimate divisions are geographic ones.  The world, as we shall see further on, will find plenty of reasons to be offended by Christianity, but we should seek to live as inoffensively as possible both with those inside the Body of Christ and those outside.

The verse quoted could be broken down like this:  we are the called-out, called to be saints, who call upon the name of our Lord, Jesus, the Chosen and Anointed One who was called to save us.

That's a lot of calling, but that's what God does. 

We live out in the country, and we have a volunteer fire department.  It is not entirely such as we have some full-time staff, but most of the firefighters and emergency personnel are not just sitting around the firehouse.  They are available and ready to answer the call when it comes in.

We're kind of like that.  We are on-call.  We do other things.  We have a building where we meet every so often for training, strengthening, and encouragement, where we sometimes rally in order to be properly equipped.  We don't actually do our work there any more than firefighters only put out fires down at the station.  Now we are different from the volunteer firefighters in that things are not always on fire, and we are not responding only to emergency situations.  Our work is done daily and everywhere in everything that we do, because, as we are indwelt by the Spirit, we are carrying God into every task that we address and every place that we visit.

That can be a sobering thought for some of us.

We are, or ought to be, learning to give more and more of our lives to the Lord each day.  Saints are not plaster.  There are supposed to be a lot of them.  Jesus said (Matthew 10:34-36) that He would bring division even in families.  The truth may divide us from those who cling to delusions and deceptions, to the idols and false gods of their own creation.  Yet the true joy and, of course, the calling, of saints is in fruit-bearing and multiplication.  Take the call.

No Particular Place To Go

For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. -- Hebrews 9:24

I don’t have much time today.  Paul says we are ambassadors for Christ – someone sent on a mission into an alien environment.  He elsewhere depicts us as soldiers, standing our ground on a hostile field.  We are called by Peter, pilgrims and strangers, echoing Moses’ naming of his son, Gershom, saying, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.”  God invades and rules over the natural world through us.  The full extent of this mastery of the material is seen in Jesus whom the winds and seas had to obey. 

We understand how Christ was an invader in the Incarnation, but when He ascended, He became, in a way, an invader in the halls of heaven.  This may be the most overtly neo-platonic verse in the Bible – at least as far as I can recall right now.  You can read back in Exodus, when Moses was on the mountain, that he was shown the realities and, so far as was possible, outfitted the Tabernacle accordingly.

An aside:  the Tabernacle has long seemed to me to be “better” than the Temple as it better represents both Christ and us.  It was covered in skins, just as we are.  I am suspicious of the Temple as encouraging a strain of apostasy that remains today in a measure of inappropriate reverence for buildings.    Anyway.

The righteous dead went to a place called “paradise” or “Abraham’s bosom”.  It was a place of rest and ease, but it was not heaven.  Hades was a segregated gated community:  paradise on one side, gehenna on the other, kind of like Missouri and Illinois.  But when Christ descended into the realm of death, he “led captivity captive”:  But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.  Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.”  (In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth?  He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.) (Ephesians 4:7-10)

It sounds like Jesus broke the righteous dead out of their somewhat pleasant prison and took them with Him as He returned to heaven, where they (and we), apart from Him, had no place.  Jesus didn’t lie to the repentant thief on the cross.  He said, “This day, you will be with Me in paradise.”  He just didn’t add that it was only a weekend trip.  Then they loaded up the truck, and they moved to Beverly. 

Christ is now in heaven, in that reality which we think of as ideal, representing us, speaking and interceding on behalf of us.  That’s a good thing to know.  Moreover, I am not one who puts much credence in concepts like “soul sleep”.  Paul uses the euphemism “sleep” for the death of the physical body.  I don’t think that those who have died are no longer conscious – though I freely admit I could be wrong.  If I’m not, there’s no reason to think that those who are absent from the body and consequently present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8) are unaware of that which Christ is aware.  I believe that some of those who are now at home with the Lord could well be interceding on behalf of those who remain in their earthly bodies.   

That may not sound exactly earth-shattering, but it is pretty strong stuff for us Protestants.  I don't think anybody is praying to saints or Mary; they are asking the saints for agreement in praying to the Father.  "Pray for us sinners."  I don't see where that is much of a problem.  It would not surprise me to some day hear that an old Baptist preacher goes up every once in a while to remind the Lord to watch out for this old hillbilly.