Four Churches On One Road

There are four of them on that road and you can walk the lot in eleven minutes.

She has counted. Everybody in that village has counted, though nobody says so out loud.

The stone one at the top with the yard. The brick one halfway down that used to be a school. The one that meets in what was the Co-op, which the older ones still call the Co-op. And the small one behind the garage that nobody is entirely sure about.

Four roofs. Eleven minutes.

And in her head, since she was a girl, the faith has been shaped exactly like that road. Four buildings, a certain distance apart, each with people in it who have reasons for not being in the others, and all of it adding up to something roughly the size of a village.

Nobody taught her that. She absorbed it walking to school.

And it has cost her something she has never put a name to, which is that when she prays she is praying inside a village. Not on purpose. It is just the size the room in her head is.

Then last winter the water went in three of the four and everybody ended up in the one behind the garage for a fortnight, and it was awkward and cramped and somebody's coat got sat on, and she has not been able to get the map back the way it was since.

So let me ask you.

How many buildings are on the map in your head, and how far apart are they?

He said it about people who had nothing else in common

Paul writes a sentence to Corinth, and I want you to notice who he is talking to before you notice what he says.

That church was Jew and Greek. Slave and free. Rich people with houses and people who did not own their own afternoons. They had almost nothing in common and they were not managing it well, and Paul does not pretend otherwise anywhere in the letter.

And into that, he says this.

For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free, and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.1 Corinthians 12:13

Look at the verb. Were. It has already happened.

You are on the far side of that sentence in 1 Corinthians 12 and not waiting for it, because the Spirit did the baptizing and the Spirit did the giving, and neither of those was ever a thing anybody voted on afterward. It was done to them, all of them, before they had sorted out one single disagreement.

Now, plain talk, because that is how I say things.

I am not going to tell you the four roofs do not matter. They matter to the people inside them and they matter for reasons that go back a long way, and I would not be so rude as to wave that off from a porch.

What I will tell you is that the roofs are not the shape of it.

The word says we were all given the one Spirit to drink, and drink is the homeliest word in that whole chapter. Not a treaty. Not an agreement. A drink, given to everybody, from the same place.

You have had it, and 1 Corinthians 12 says so plainly rather than hopefully, and the Spirit who did the giving did not consult the map afterward. That is the part that undoes the map. If the Spirit in you is the same Spirit in the woman behind the garage, then whatever the four roofs are, they are not four countries, and you have never once been praying inside a village.