How do we relate to a sinful world? Are we of the world? Are we above it? Do we separate ourselves from it? Do we wade into its struggles? What is the Church and what is the Culture?
In the New Testament, the ‘church’, those who followed Jesus, began as one ‘stream of thought’ within Judaism. Jesus taught in the synagogue. Jesus’ ministry, with a few notable exceptions, was always within the boundaries, both physical and ethnically, of the Jewish people. He took the lessons of their faith and was revealing their fulfillment in Himself as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God.
In the early church, that began to shift. We see it in the Book of Acts. The ‘Way’, as it is described in Acts, continued within Judaism, but was being spread as the apostles began to move beyond Judea. This is in the context of the prophecy of the spread of the Holy Spirit, in Jerusalem, to Judea, then Samaria, then to the ends of the earth. As it spread, two things began to happen.
The first is that believers in Jesus were separated and eventually censured in the synagogue. The Way of Jesus was not ‘orthodox’ in the Jewish faith. Paul, before his conversion, was living proof of the persecution that started early in the life of the church.
The second is that the “Way” found adherents in the Gentile community. This seemed to begin at the synagogue. It seems that the synagogues of the Jewish communities scattered out into the Roman empire attracted more than just Jews to their worship. There were contingents of Gentiles who found the law of Moses and the way of One God as worshiped in Judaism to be of interest to them.
We saw this even in the gospels, of the Roman centurion that the elders of the synagogue vouched for in asking Jesus to save his servant.
But Judaism was an ethnic identity, bound up in religion, but much more. ‘Conversion’ as we understand it was something that took time and effort to accomplish. The Way of Jesus, centered on His death and resurrection, offered a much easier opportunity to become a part of the faith based community. It seems that the first Gentile converts were those who were already interested in Judaism, already participating as they could in the synagogues.
From there, the faith continued to spread, gradually transitioning away completely from its Jewish foundation. It would spread across the Roman Empire, finally rising to become the predominant religion of the land under Constantine. It would eventually become the instrument of suppression of the other religions.
As the Roman Empire dissolved into chaos, the Church was the one functioning ‘international’ organization and stepped up to maintain ‘secular’ organizations within the ‘sacred’ structure as the political world fell apart. It gained much power, and that use of political power has never been completely shed.
If there is a lesson for this New Year, for considering Jesus as our King and High Priest, for considering the place of the church in the world today, I challenge us to consider what the relationship is to church and state, to the power of God to the power we humans claim in God’s name. How do we do that without falling into the pitfalls of temptation and sin that surround us? History shows that we, as a faith, have fallen hard and horribly into the kinds of behavior that no Christian of good conscience could ever condone, much less claim as God’s will.
Who are we in Christ Jesus?
Pastor Peter
