Spiritual Hiccups - Us and Them

I recently heard about a book I want to read.  It's entitled What's the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian?  I think the title a bit misleading.  It's not about a minimalist understanding of faith but rather an attempt to separate the core of Christian faith and life from the image of Christianity that is sometimes out there in popular imagination.

Does God care about the planet, its animals and trees, or just about saving souls?  Can Christians embrace evolution?  Are Jews and others excluded from heaven?  Many who reject the faith have heard answers to such questions only through stereotyped visions of fundamentalist Christianity.  Many agnostics and even some atheists don't really have a problem with God, but with what they've heard about God from some Christians.

Questions about what God is like and what it means to be a Christian are clearly nothing new.  The controversy Paul addresses in today's verses from Galatians has to do with what is necessary to be a Christian, and Paul relates a conflict he had with Cephas, Cephas being the Aramaic version of the Greek name Peter.  Peter, one of the earliest leaders of the Church, seems to have bowed to pressure from James, brother of Jesus and head of the Church in Jerusalem.  He has withdrawn from table fellowship with those Gentile Christians who have not been circumcised, that is have not become Jewish as part of their becoming Christian.

That's hardly a pressing issue for me.  Issues over circumcision and Jewishness eventually faded away as the Church became majority.  So what issues are pressing?  What marks do I assume are necessary in order to be a Christian, and are they really necessary?  What beliefs are essential?  What ways of living are essential?  And which ones are artificial boundaries that I have drawn or simply become accustomed to that seek to confine God's grace to folks like me?

To live out a Christian faith that has any meaning, I need to know what is essential.  I need some guiding image of what it looks like to be a Christian.  But while such images are necessary, they inevitably get mixed with images from my culture, family background, political leanings, and so on.  And so there is always an "us and them" boundary comparable to the circumcision boundary that caused Peter to shun non-Jewish Christians, that prompts people of deep faith to say, "Surely God's love and grace wouldn't go there." 

And so I come back to that fundamental issue of what it means to be Christian and what sort of God I know in Jesus.  Lord, guide me into a faith, and help me lead a congregation, that knows love and grace as big as wide as that shown by Christ.

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