The Kingdom of Sky and Dirt

In the beginning God created the Sky and the Dirt (Gen 1:1)
The kingdom of Sky is at hand (Mt 4:17)

Welcome to the 'Kingdom of Sky and Dirt'!

Let me tell you a story. Stories are how we understand the world.

It is the year 251 CE, the Decian persecution has just ended and a horrific plague is sweeping across the Roman empire. Alexandria's population will decline by 300,000 people1, one emperor dies. The plague will last into the 260s and so many will die that Rome is strained to the breaking point by a deficit of manpower to run the empire. Death stalks the land. In Carthage rotting human remains cover the city and the sick are pushed out into the streets by family members hoping to avoid death2.

In the middle of this carnage Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, issues a charge to his church. Care for the sick. Bury the dead. Not just the Christians, but everyone, including the people who had been murdering them just a few years before. And the church responds. They care for the sick, they bury the dead, they buy food for the hungry. The church funds and staffs a free public health and burial program while they themselves are also dying of the plague.

What kind of people do this? What do they believe that makes this make sense? Whatever they believed, it changed the world. They tell us that it comes from the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, and the whole Hebrew scripture (Lk 24:27).

How do we find these people in the scriptures?

Let's do an experiment. Let's engage in a directed reading3 of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. Let's treat the life of the early church as the canonical shape of Christian life, and find a reading of the scripture that explains why the early church exhibits the works and life that it does.

Can we draw a straight line from Genesis to Cyprian's church? What will we find?

Before we can search the scripture we need to know what we are looking for.

Let's begin to explore the Two Ways

Contemplation

I will sometimes include contemplation material for the ancient practice of contemplative prayer. I invite you to simply sit with these questions, not try to answer them.

The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom (1 Cor 1:25)

Where do you see people in your society, like Cyprian's church, risking their own well being out of love for their neighbors, expecting and receiving no compensation or reward?

Footnotes

  1. One estimate places the total population decline from ~500,000 to ~190,000 during the plague, both deaths, and people fleeing the city hoping to escape the plague. Wikipedia ↩

  2. Pontius, Life of Cyprian, section 9, source ↩

  3. For more on our approach see the About page. All readings are motivated. If we don't know what our motivation is, it will be supplied by our cultural defaults. As a result, we often end up assigning our cultural defaults the authority of God's word. Here we are naming our specific motivation, a search for the scriptural story that generates the life the early church lives out. ↩