House Rules
We Brits have a complex relationship with our houses. The need to get a foot on, and then climb up the property ladder is almost taken for granted. Huge amounts of time, money, physical and emotional energy are daily ploughed into maintaining our houses. Many people spend half their working lives earning enough to keep their homes.
Behind all this activity, we locate much of our value and identity in our properties. In Winston Churchill's words: 'We shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildings shape us.'
'Where do you live?' is perceived to be a crucial question for determining social worth. On a symbolic level, our dwellings condition imagination and expectation. We seek to turn these spaces into homes, use them as canvases for self-expression and places of escape. Houses figure prominently in our memories, our desires and our fears.
Christians would do well to reflect on how houses shape our lives and imaginations. Are our houses idols, burdens or distractions? Can we square our culture's obsession with houses with following the one placed in a manger, with 'no place to lay his head' (Matthew 8:20)? How do we understand Jesus' statement that 'everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life' (Matthew 19:29)?
Interestingly, Jesus makes the house a key locus for his ministry. It is in the home that people are taught (Mark 7:17, 10:10), healed (Matthew 8:14, Luke 8:51) and experience salvation (Luke 19:9). The house becomes a context of God's activity and a place of expectancy. The house itself is thereby radically re-orientated. Jesus does not comment on financial, practical or aesthetic implications when people break through a roof to bring a sick man to him (Mark 2:4). He redirects the activity of a home to make it a place of attentiveness when with Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). He welcomes the outcast into the home of strangers (Luke 7:36) and makes the dinner table a context of intense theological consequence by eating with sinners (Mark 2:15, Luke 5:29, 14:12).
Jesus forces us to question what it means to have our house in order (a question I shall return to in further 'Connecting with Culture' emails over the coming months). Perhaps we should begin by reflecting on this question: are we living to keep a house, or is our house enabling us and others flourish?
Ben Care
Comments
Here's a related issue:are we ready yet to look at the amount of time, energy and money devoted to heating, lighting, maintaining and insuring church buildings, compared with the percentage of church funds avaiable for edifying the church itself (= the people of God), and for doing what Jesus (quoting the OT prophets) calls us to do: bringing good news to the poor, freedom for captives, caring for the fatherless and widow, healing the sick, letting the oppressed go free, and breaking every yoke? (Or is the gospel too radical for today's church?)
What a refreshing counter-cultural post! I have been concerned in particular about the love affair that we home owners have with our nest-egg gains due to rising property values over our liftetimes. Jesus said those who give up land/houses etc for the Kingdom would be rewarded 100 times in this life. It is quite possible for a homeowner to make 100 times original value of their first house in a lifetime just by NOT giving up their house. Quite apart from 'giving up for sake of the Kingdom' the sad (bad?) thing is that these private gains are made on the back of public investment paid for partly by only-renting taxpayers, as improvements are made to our neighbourhoods. It is difficult to see an easy answer as we all have to live somewhere and as Ben says a house can be a valuable part of the help and care we can personally bring to others. For more ideas on this and other fairness issues read my book The Free Lunch - Fairness with Freedom by Charles Bazlinton; also my blog The Free Lunch blogspot.
Today we have the privilege of entertaining for lunch a daughter of a friend who recently died. The daughter lives about 50 miles away - not a great distance in today's world. However she works and she has children, so planning a funeral with her brother who lives even further afield, was not easy. All we offered was a place to rest after she had cleared her mother's effects from the nursing home and a light lunch. It is the ability to offer such hospitality that makes our home what we believe it to be - a place where Jesus Christ resides and where His laws of love, compassion and help are available to those in need.
Date:
2010-06-25 15:10:17
Author:
Douglas R. Allen