By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
In the liturgy for Baptism in the Episcopal Church, there is a part near the end when the whole congregation welcomes the newly baptized person with these words: “We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.” We receive you into the household of God. Why the word household? Why not family?
The word household has, I think, implications that are different than those of family. You can have family members that you love but rarely see. The people who are in your household, though, are people you see and interact with daily. You may or may not be related to them by blood, but boy do you get to know them. You know who leaves dishes in the sink, who hums while cooking, and who has a low tolerance for noise before 8 AM. Over time, you get to know them so well that you can recognize from afar not only their voices but the sounds of their footsteps, their sighs, and their laughter.
A “household” implies a life together, with highs and lows, but most of all a life with daily routines, chores, habits, tasks, and so on. A household can also include things that aren’t human. Our pets are part of our household, for instance. The physical space where we live is essential in shaping a household—six people living in a small apartment, say, are a different kind of household than the same six people living in a large house with a backyard and a finished basement. They will interact differently, share or not share space differently, have different responsibilities and jobs to do. The same people, occupying a different space and context, might actually become a different household.
In Greek, the word for household is oikos, the same root that forms our English words economy and ecology. The household of God, then, like human households, is an ecosystem. Being a member of the household of God connects Christians to one another in profound and intimate ways. Simply put, we are responsible for one another. We ought not to teach or say or do things as individuals that are detrimental to the whole. Additionally, being part of the household of God means we are not just responsible for other human members of the household, but for the entire context, the whole system that makes up our oikos, our economy or community. Members of a household care for one another, but also care for the place where they live.
Psalm 23 gives us a glimpse of what God’s household, God’s ecology, looks like when it is fully realized. It is a place of flourishing, a place of abundance. It is a place of relationships centered on care, compassion, and tending. I sometimes think we oversimplify and sentimentalize the images from this Psalm and from other Biblical passages that refer to the shepherding aspects of God and God’s chosen leaders. We might see a kind of greeting card image of a nice, clean shepherd, walking serenely on a spotless green lawn, a cute little lamb carried tenderly in his arms. The agrarian people who were the first audiences of Scripture would not have made that mistake. They knew that shepherding was dangerous and dirty work, and that finding good pastures and leading sheep there was anything but simple.
As a culture we have lost so much of our collective agrarian knowledge, and perhaps as a result of that we have also lost our understanding that God’s ecology is diverse, complex, and interconnected. To my mind, God’s ecology probably looks less like a glowing Jesus walking on a pristine lawn than like Darwin’s “entangled bank,” which is, as he put it, “clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” I guess it’s just harder for most of us to think of ourselves as insects or worms than as wooly little lambs!
As I mentioned earlier, an oikos, a household or ecosystem, is about more than the people it contains. The place matters. Think about what the shepherd does for the sheep—the shepherd leads the sheep to cool water and green pastures. This takes deep local knowledge, skill, and insight. You have to know your sheep, and you have to know your landscape, the weather, the places where water can be found even in dry seasons.
These are beautiful metaphors, and they are more than metaphors. They remind us that God is also leading us to the places where we can find sustenance and nourishment. No matter how urbanized or technologically sophisticated our culture becomes, we cannot separate ourselves from our literal dependence on the land, the earth that God created. Food still needs good soil to grow; clean air and clean water are still baseline necessities for life. God gave us these things—everything we need not just to sustain life but to find beauty and pleasure, like the table spread abundantly and the oil of cleansing and healing that is poured out with abandon. God’s care is for body and soul, for people and land, for creatures and community.
The final lines of the Psalm tie this complex portrait together, pointing us toward the goal of dwelling together in peace and harmony. The word “dwell” is like the word “household”—it is richer and more complex than a synonym such as “live” or “reside” and includes a sense of belonging. In an essay on this topic, Charles Hallisey, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, is quoted as saying that dwelling is about remaining in place, being “situated in a certain relationship with existence, a relationship that is characterized by nurturing.”1 When you dwell somewhere you are rooted there, you know it deeply, and you think in the long term, not only about your lifetime but about the generations that have come before and the generations that will follow you. In God’s ecology, the true end is to be able to dwell together forever.
In the last few hundred years, and especially in the industrialized western world, we have lost a sense of dwelling, a real sense of place. Cultural critics from many different backgrounds and traditions agree that this loss plays a pivotal role in the environmental crisis we now face. Terry Tempest Williams wonders if our relationship to the land might be healed in part by seeing ourselves as fellow inhabitants of this planet, part of an earth community. She asks a critical question: “Can residency be found in what we are connected to, rather than what we exploit, ensnare, and exchange, for our own gain by way of property, possessions, and prestige?”2 Wendell Berry puts it this way, “Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.”3 Health, healing, and wholeness are promised to those who live in God’s household, but it follows that we must live in a way that promotes these things and makes them available to all.
God gave us this world as a dwelling place, a place we could tend and keep, honoring the interconnectedness of all things. The great example of how to live in the household of God is Jesus, the one who came to dwell among us as one of us, in a particular place and time and also in a way that changed the horizons of eternity. May we listen to his voice, and go where he is leading. Amen.
1Quoted in Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams, in the essay called “Dwelling.”
2Ibid
3 The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
