The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

 In the Chinese tradition the burial of ancestors has a long term effects on their descendants. Elaborate grave sites are developed to insure that the remains of the deceased are properly located through “Fung Shui,” the art of necromancy, so that “chi” forces flowing around the decomposing corpse pool and flow onward to the benefit of future generations.  In some traditions when the body has decomposed the bones are put in ceramic jars and relocated on mountain tops to gain an even greater effect. In the case of families that have migrated to other countries the bones are actually removed from the grave and taken along to the new family home. In Malaysia I’ve seen the opened, and now abandoned tombs of the migrant dead myself.  In the past these traditions resulted, at least in the region around Hong Kong, in numerous lawsuits. Different branches of the same family claimed that the location and orientation of the bones was advantaging one side of the family and disadvantaging another.

Who marks the boundaries between those who are in a church and outside it? And what do the boundary markers look like?  An incessant part of the ongoing conflict within not only the UMC, but virtually every US or US influenced denomination has been over boundaries, determining who is in and who is out.  But this an old story, and one that is inevitably both theological and political  To understand this we need some quick history.  In the New Testament we can see that the early church struggled to define its boundaries. Were Ananias and Saphira in or out? Where did they step over the line? What about the Gentiles, could they be in? What was the line they could not cross?  Paul struggles with these kinds of boundaries in writing the first churches. What are the rules all must obey? What are the rules for leaders, and are they different? Are they different for men and women? How can the body of Christ be free from the Law and yet not be antinomian? What gives the church its identity? It i

A transition took place in Christianity sometime during its first century, a transition solidified over the centuries with the creation of Christendom. What had initially been a gathering of those faithful to Christ as their Lord became a community of shared faith expressed in common creeds and liturgies. The Church evolved from gatherings of individuals who had made the same choice to follow Christ to become a global community with a common culture that insured its members, initiated in infancy, would always share a common orientation within their social world toward the Transcendent.  Another way to put this is to say that Christianity became a religion as defined by Clifford Geertz: " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long - lasting moods and motivations in people formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. ”  To b

". . . the world, which seems, To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;” It has been more than a century since Matthew Arnold's  Dover Beach,  mourned the demise of the old Christendom and the slow withdrawing of the tide of faith. But there seem to be a lot of Christians still dressed in sackcloth and tossing ashes in the air while they long for the return of that lost certitude and all that goes with it.  This Good Friday my church’s choir will sing another one of those modern settings of the passion narrative, with a subtle and inaccurate rewriting that gets to the root of this morning for certitude. As Jesus faces the cross the song-writers assure us that “he knew redemption’s hour had come.”  This is exactly the kind of nostalgia for certitude that infects modern Christianity with nonsense. A quick read of the gospels tell us that Jesus, both as he