Ethos | Family | 2 Corinthians 13:11-14 | Week 5

I want to invite you to close your eyes and to pretend the year is 200.  You live around the Mediterranean; you've decided to follow the way of Jesus.  Against the advice of most of the people in your life, you've joined this sort of rogue, rag-tag band of the Jesus way followers.  It's Sunday morning and before you go to work, you head to church.  You get your family ready, you walk through the dusty streets, and you enter into the "sanctuary," which happens to be an apartment building.  You sit around with a number of other believers.  The Way is growing so the room is jammed packed.  You open with prayer and everybody starts to pray around you.  Then you move to the greeting time.  As you stand up, you look somebody else right in the eyes; they're following the way of Jesus too.  You plant a big kiss right on their lips!  {Okay, open your eyes.}  So that's pretty much the way that it went in the early church.  Can you believe this?  We might have an easier time recruiting greeters if we bring this back!  

The early church was known for what they called the "kiss of peace."  Tertullian, one of the early church fathers, wrote that everybody in the church participated in this custom.  Cyprian, another early church father, in 250, was exiled on an island, and here's what he writes:  "There is nothing which could give me greater pleasure or more noble delight than at this moment to be kissing the lips of those who have confessed Jesus as Lord."   The dude is probably starving, right? He hasn't seen his family, and what he's longing for is to kiss another follower of Jesus.  This is strange!  This is different!...