Tribal identities

I have been continuing to reflect on the sermon I delivered for Thomas Sunday. That message, that the disciples of Jesus could not draw their status from their proximity to Jesus, has been resonating with me in the political season. It’s hard not to draw our identity from our proximity to people we perceive as successful or powerful, as a way of validating our own existence. It is natural that, as Christians, we seek to put our relationship (either in the modern protestant personal sense, or in the more traditional follower sense) to the front in our interactions with others. I think about the Christian merchants along the silk road, converted to Christianity by the desire to do business with Christian traders (who gave way to the Muslim merchants all around the spice routes when Islam became the religion of trade), and wonder about our own tribal identities.

So much of our Christian (and anti-Christian) discourse begins and ends with the identification with the power dynamics that come with being Christian in America, that I have to wonder about our understandings of our religion. There are no declared atheists in Congress. Would that be true if there were not major political downsides to declaring that one is without religion, and no upside? This is a very different world than the one Christ’s early followers found, and yet we cannot help but return to the themes of persecution in the Bible in reference to ourselves. I began a practice this year of saying, “if you are applying the Bible to your life, substitute ‘the Christians’ wherever you see ‘the Jews’ in the New Testament.” Because the similarity we have to Jesus now is that we are trying to figure out what our religion means in a context where the assumptions of that religion are the background to all our interactions. The challenge, for us, is to find ways to live Christ’s mission even if, especially if, that means stepping away from our comfortable power sources. Can we recognize when we are acting the part of the Pharisee?

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