People have had very different
experiences of life in lockdown.

For some, it's been a frantic time
of trying to look after children

in cramped conditions while
still working full time.

For others, it's been a quiet,
reflective time of reading and gardening.

But for all of us, over the last few
weeks, life has focused on our household.

We may have had to adapt
the spaces in which we live.

For remote working or home schooling,
we may have had a good spring clean,

turned out some cupboards
or even done a bit of DIY.

We may have needed to work our

relationships with those with whom we live
in different ways.

We've all had to work out how to make

the household function best
for everyone who shares it.

The household is the unit of society over

which we have most control
and responsibility.

That's why in the ordination service,

clergy are instructed to order
their household in a Christian way.

But that's true of all the baptized.

And whether we live alone or with friends
in a family group or in community.

Christians should do their best to order

the household in a way that takes account
of everyone within it,

as well as looking generously
and hospitably to those outside.

Although we are told that Jesus himself
was an itinerant without a fixed home.

Quite a few of his parables are about

the ordering of a household
from just stewardship

to showing generosity to neighbours
in the middle of the night.

Even the material that
the house is built on

and the household then becomes

an important metaphor in the New Testament
for the new community of the church.

St Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians
that we are no longer strangers

and aliens, but citizens with the Saints
and members of the household of God.

So the church is meant to be a big
household that, like our own,

takes account of everyone who lives there
because everyone is a child of God.

If we think of the church as a project
of shaping strangers into a household,

then that informs a Christian vision
for our wider society and nation too.

It's worth remembering that the word

economy comes from the Greek word
'oikos', which means household.

And what a pandemic like this brutally

exposes is the people who are overlooked
in the ordering of the household.

The people whose lives and livelihoods are

too precarious to withstand
this kind of disruption.

And that seems particularly unacceptable

when so many of those people,
nurses and care workers,

supermarket employees, refuse collectors,
cleaners are those on whom our economy,

our household is crucially
dependent at this time.

So as the lockdown slowly lifts,

we will be emerging from the confinement
of our individual households.

But let's hold on to that image

of the household,
a place ordered in the interests of all

who share it as the model
for the fairer, kinder world.

We would like to see
when this crisis is over.