WE SAW YESTERDAY that the clergy became dominant and possessive and the laity receded. Gratian leaves no doubt that “the condition of the laity is a concession to human frailty.” To be a layman was to have chosen a second-rate calling and the laity were second-rate people.
But to return to the New Testament. Here this was not true. When the question of distribution of food arose in the sixth chapter of Acts, the apostles called the main body of believers together and said: “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brethren, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:2–4). This has been usually looked upon as a spiritual and wise act and attitude. Actually, I believe it was a very wrong and disastrous move, though well-intended.
They drove a wedge between the material and the spiritual. In Christianity, the material and the spiritual are two sides of one reality. The apostles separated what God had joined in the Incarnation. There “the Word became flesh”; here the Word was to become word and the flesh was to become flesh. The spiritual was to be apart from the material, and the material was to be apart from the spiritual to the impoverishing of both—the spiritual was not to function in material terms and the material was not to function in spiritual terms. One was high and dry and the other low and secular. This division between the secular and the sacred persists until today—a disastrous division. It destroys the essential nature of Christianity. It makes it like other religions where the Word becomes word instead of being true to itself where the Word becomes flesh. This makes the Christian faith less than and other than its true self.
O Jesus, we tear Thy seamless robe when we divide life into sacred and secular. Thou didst teach and heal and feed people in the name of the one gospel. Help me this day to manifest Thee in everything. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All my barriers are down—life is one and that one life is His.
