Following up from yesterday’s post, here’s Chris Green again from chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation. In understanding our Christian vocation, Green says, we need to see our role as not against the world, but for the world. (Emphasis mine in the quote below.)

Often, when we are talking about the church as called out from the world, we imply a contrast between the humanity of believers and the humanity of non-believers. Truth be told, Scripture itself often seems to speak this way. For example, Ephesians 2 contrasts ‘the children of wrath’ - those who are ‘dead’ in sin, ‘following the course of the world’, dominated by the ‘passions of the flesh’ (Eph 2.1-3) - with the ‘one new humanity’, which is created in Christ’s body as the ‘household of God’ (Eph. 2.15, 19). If we are not careful, then, we leave the impression that the saints have a different humanity ‘in Christ’ than does the rest of the world ‘in Adam’.

But such a reading misses the point. The line of thought in Ephesians 2 does not end with the contrast between the family of God and the children of disobedience. Instead, Paul goes on to insist that this ‘one new humanity’ constituted in and as Christ’s body ‘is joined together and grows into a holy temple… a dwelling place for God’ (Eph. 2.21-22). What is this temple if not a holy ‘place’ set aside for the world to meet with its God and for God to act on the world? The church, participating in the renewed humanity created in Christ as a priestly people, opens a space in the midst of the world so that heaven and earth, the new creation and the old, can touch. We are made by the Spirit the temple for the sake of others, so they can encounter Christ in the room he has made for them in our lives.

–Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 31

That last sentence is a feast! It’s not a new teaching, or anything contradictory to things I’ve been taught before, but that particular color on it: that others would “encounter Christ” when they encounter me. Wowza.