Tuesday, June 16, 2026: Peacemaking, forgiveness, and reconciliation are not some kind of ticket to heaven later. They are the price of peoplehood—the signature of heaven—now.

For Jesus, teachings such as forgiveness, healing, and justice work are the real evidence of a new and shared life. 

If we do not see this happening in churches and spiritual communities, religion is “all in the head” and largely an illusion. Peacemaking, forgiveness, and reconciliation are not some kind of ticket to heaven later. They are the price of peoplehood—the signature of heaven—now.

Jesus’s first vision of church is so simple we could miss it: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20). 

This is surely why Jesus insists that the message be communicated not by a lone evangelist but by sending the disciples out “two by two” (Mark 6:7). An individual by herself has a much more challenging time communicating the core message of love and service. 

The apostle Paul wanted to spread the good news and being a born organizer he believed the gospel message needed to have some form of embodiement if it was going to spread. He set about founding what he called “churches,” small faith communities scattered throughout the Roman world, that would function as centers for communities to build upon.

During Paul’s lifetime, the Christian church was not yet an institution or a centrally organized set of common practices and beliefs. It was a living organism that communicated the gospel primarily through relationships. 

Paul’s brilliant metaphor for this living, organic, concrete embodiment is “the body of Christ”: “Just as a human body, though it is made up of many parts, is a single unit, because all those parts make up a single body, so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12). At the heart of this body, providing the energy that enlivens the whole community, although each in different ways, is “the love of God that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5).

This Spirit is itself the foundational energy of the universe, the Ground of All Being, described in the first lines of the Bible (Genesis 1:2). Union is not just pious rambling, but the very concrete work of God. It’s how God makes love to what God created. 

Paul writes that it is precisely “in your togetherness that you are Christ’s Body” (1 Corinthians 12:27). By remaining—against all trials and resistance—inside this luminous web of relationship, this vibrational state of love, we experience a very honest and healthy notion of communal salvation.

The churches or communities Paul founded are his living examples that he can point to inside of a debauched empire (where human dignity was never upheld as inherent) to give credibility to his message. To people who asked, “Why should we believe there’s a new or different life possible?” Paul could say, “Look at these people. They’re different. This is a different social order.” In Christ, “there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). 

This is not just a religious idea, but a revolutionary cultural and socioeconomic message that began to change the world - and still can.

- Father Richard