There is a sentence in this Sunday’s second reading that I want to put in front of you before you come through the door on Sunday, because I think it is one of the most radical things in the entire New Testament, and it gets domesticated into a pleasant affirmation far too quickly.
First Peter 2:9. Here it is in the Catholic Public Domain Version, translated directly from the Latin Vulgate:
“But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, an acquired people, so that you may announce the virtues of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9, CPDV)
Read that slowly. Chosen generation. Royal priesthood. Holy nation. Acquired people.
Peter is writing to communities of displaced people. Sojourners. Immigrants, in the most literal ancient sense: people living in regions that are not their homeland, without the full legal and social protections of citizens, subject to the suspicion and hostility of the dominant culture. And he tells them: you are the chosen generation. You are the royal priesthood. Not the empire. Not the establishment. Not the people who have the power to decide who belongs and who does not. You.
That is not sentimental. That is a direct theological confrontation with the logic of every authoritarian system that has ever decided to define a nation by who it excludes.
What the Spirit Builds: BELONG
This Sunday is the fifth week of our Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. We have walked together through TOGETHER, OPEN, WALK, and TEND. This week the word is BELONG.
BELONG is the word the series has been building toward since Easter Sunday. You cannot have a community that is TOGETHER without asking who is in it. You cannot be OPEN without asking what you are opening to. You cannot WALK beside someone without asking where they started and what they left behind. You cannot TEND without knowing whose names you hold.
BELONG is the answer to all of those questions. The Spirit builds a community where no one has to earn their place. Where belonging is not contingent on language, citizenship, documentation, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, or the particular shape of your theology. Where the table is set for the person who just arrived, not just the person who has always been here.
The early church was not born that way easily. Acts 6 shows us that even in the first weeks after Pentecost, the community was already failing some of its members. The Hellenist widows — the Greek-speaking, diaspora Jewish women who were arguably the most vulnerable people in the community — were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. This was not a theological dispute. It was a justice failure. People who belonged to the community were not being treated as though they belonged.
The Twelve’s response is the model: they did not minimize the complaint, explain it away, or ask the Hellenists to be patient. They acted, and they gave the affected community power over the solution. Every one of the seven appointed to oversee the distribution has a Greek name. The people who were being overlooked were put in charge of fixing the oversight.
That is what BELONG looks like in practice. Not just an open door and a warm welcome, but genuine structural accountability to the people most likely to be left out.
Many Dwelling Places in a Country That Wants Fewer
Jesus says, in the Gospel of John this Sunday: “In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places.”
The word in the original Greek is mone, from the verb menein, to remain, to abide, to stay. The Father’s house is not a transit facility. It is not a processing center. It is not a place where some people are admitted and others are turned away at the door. It is a house of permanent dwelling, a house of staying, a house built large enough that there is a place for everyone who arrives.
I want to say something plainly, because I believe a pastor’s job is to name what is in the room.
We are living in a country that is in the process of deciding, as official policy, that there are not enough dwelling places. That some people’s presence here is inherently criminal. That families who have built lives, raised children, paid taxes, buried their dead, and woven themselves into the fabric of their communities over decades can be removed from those communities by armed agents of the federal government with no hearing, no counsel, and no appeal.
That is not a description of a political position I support or oppose. That is a description of what is happening, right now, in our country. In some cases, in our city.
The theological claim of John 14:2 is not a metaphor for heaven. It is a statement about the character of God. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God who builds a house with many dwelling places. A God whose first instinct toward the stranger is not removal but welcome. A God who, when he describes his own home, describes it as a place where there is room.
Every government policy that treats the immigrant as a threat to be neutralized rather than a person to be received is operating from a theology. It is just not a Christian one.
Fascism and the Royal Priesthood
I use the word fascism deliberately and without apology because I think imprecise language has protected the precise reality for too long.
Fascism is not simply a political style. It is a specific ideology built on the premise that the nation is an organic body with a pure identity, that certain people belong to that body and others contaminate it, and that the health of the nation requires the removal or suppression of those who do not belong. It always presents itself as protection. It always claims to be defending the real people from the threatening outsider. It always uses the language of crisis and emergency to justify the suspension of ordinary legal and moral constraints.
First Peter was written to communities living inside the Roman Empire, which was the first-century world’s preeminent expression of exactly this logic. Rome defined itself by conquest and by the absolute distinction between Roman citizens and everyone else. The people Peter was writing to were, in Rome’s terms, the threatening outsider. The contaminating presence. The ones who did not belong.
And Peter tells them: you are the chosen generation. You are the royal priesthood. You are the holy nation.
Notice what Peter does not say. He does not say, “You are citizens of Rome who happen also to follow Christ.” He does not say, “Be grateful for your tolerated presence and do not make trouble.” He says, “You are a people.” You have an identity that the empire did not give you and cannot take away. You have been called out of darkness into marvelous light by someone whose authority exceeds Caesar’s, and that calling is the most fundamental fact about you.
That is the theological foundation of every act of resistance to authoritarian power that the Church has ever undertaken. Not a political calculation. Not a partisan alignment. A claim about who people are before they are citizens of any earthly nation.
The immigrant families in this community, the undocumented neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes, the people who are being told by the most powerful government on earth that they do not belong here: they are a chosen generation. They are part of the royal priesthood. They are the people God acquired. And no executive order changes that.
The Way, and the Truth, and the Life
Jesus says something else in this Sunday’s Gospel that I think is worth sitting with. Thomas says, “We do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” And Jesus says, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.”
In a moment when the word ‘truth’ has been so thoroughly weaponized that many people have given up on the concept entirely, this claim lands differently than it used to. We are living in an information environment deliberately designed to make people doubt whether truth is accessible at all, because a population that cannot distinguish truth from fabrication is a population that can be led anywhere.
The claim that Jesus is the Truth is not an abstract metaphysical proposition. In John’s Gospel, truth is closely tied to faithfulness, to the quality of being reliable, to the character of a God who does what God promises. Jesus is the Truth in the sense that he is the one whose character does not change based on what is politically convenient, whose words do not shift based on who is in the room, and whose treatment of people does not depend on whether they are useful.
That is the kind of truth this community is called to embody. Not merely factual accuracy, though that matters enormously. But the deeper truth of a consistent character is that we are who we say we are, that we treat people the way we say people should be treated, and that our welcome is not conditional on the political climate.
When the world is lying, the Church’s most fundamental act of witness is to tell the truth. When the world is deciding who belongs and who does not, the Church’s most fundamental act of witness is to hold the door open.
Come Sunday
On Sunday we will read these texts together, break bread together, and say with Peter what this community believes: that you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. That there are many dwelling places. That the Way and the Truth and the Life belongs to everyone who seeks them, not just to those who already have papers that say they are welcome.
If you have been told you do not belong somewhere, I want you to hear this: the Spirit is building something in this place, and the word this week is BELONG.
You belong here. Not provisionally. Not pending review. Not subject to the political weather.
Here. Now. As you are.
Come and see.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
