May 21, 2017 - Sixth Sunday of Easter - Who are we?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote:

...The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religion-less world? How do we speak of God--without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even "speak" as we used to) in a "secular" way about God? In what way are we "religion-less secular" Christians, in what way are we those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religion-less situation?

Today Pastor Michelle preached about how hard it is to live in "authentic Christian community" and I thought about the implications of the word "Christian" in that context and how that term has a different meaning for different people. For some it means upholding the religious beliefs and traditions of a faith. For others it means less about what individuals believe and more about how individuals engage in the world.

There is a struggle between Christian love and identity moments. In the New Testament the questions used to be about whether an individual needed to follow Jewish dietary and circumcision laws.

The author of 1 Peter 3:13-22 (one of today's lessons) uses words of encouragement to his audience who are willing suffering for their faith. Now we live in a society of instant gratification and where many feel entitled to inflict suffering on others who disagree with their views of who is a *true* Christian.

It is important to remember Christianity today, especially in North America and in Europe is very different than the minority Christians in the New Testament, with very little power or money to change things, let alone challenge the dominant Empire. In contrast, Christians today are often on the side of the Empire. Perhaps suffering in this case precisely means challenging the established order in order to keep a clear conscience.

There are those who want to remake Christianity into an exclusive, tribal-like identity where an individual earns the identity through what they believe and/or how they behave.

The question of Christian identity and who should be embraced as one of us will always be hard.