Just a Few Good Rules

Meditation on Collaboration #4

Discovering what’s really, really important to faith has been the church’s job since forever. What true faith and belief is is not left up to individuals because there are no boundaries on what an individual might believe is truth. That used to tick me off. I wanted to believe what I thought was important about God and jettison the rest. Sometimes when I feel stunted by the church’s insatiable need for conformity, I get hammered by that same spiritual wanderlust—a need to throw off the shackles and go. I mean, where’s the creativity? Where’s the focus? Do we all have to think alike? Isn’t faith more than doing the same thing over and over, or saying the same thing over and over, and hoping it sticks? How can anyone find any meaning in everyone having to agree with others all the time?

One helpful story about dealing with this internal conflict is the scripture in Acts 15. Here’s the way scripture begins:
1Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” “It is necessary for them [everybody] to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.”

It seems the early Jewish/Christian believers needed to agree on whether uncircumcised men could be considered followers of Jesus. The traditional folks said, “of course you do. Jesus was Jewish, the disciples were Jewish, ergo all real believers have to be Jewish, that is, circumcised. Circumcision is the Jewish mark. On the other side were those who believed, “Hey, who can contain God? Look at all these miracles that have been done by God among the non-Jews! Surely we can’t go on demanding everybody has to be circumcised? God is active among those who are Jews and those who are not! “11we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

The groups ranted for a while, then this decree came down from James, who was the head of the believers (traditional folks) in Jerusalem: “19Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, 20but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood.”

So, when the deal went down, the only things that mattered were those that were evidence of God’s presence and to not drink blood, not eat meat sacrificed to foreign gods, and no fornication. Pretty simple, really. Just a few rules.

As groups age and mature, there have to be rules. If dorm life had no rules and the place was run by freshmen, that would be scary. If there were no rules on the highway, that would be deadly. If UNO had no rules, everyone would graduate and not pay a nickel for it and people would, literally, park everywhere!

As the followers of Christ have grouped themselves into churches and believing groups, they have expanded their rules, too. This is predictable because people keep on discovering new situations, and God bless them, they want to know what’s “the right thing to do here.” Seemingly, this request for rules has no end.

But the point for the day is this: collaboration is God’s rule of thumb for groups as well as individuals. It breaks down barriers, gets through our shared fears to our shared lives and promotes a healthy, if slightly rule bound, faith life.

Life together is a grand collaboration. Let’s get to it!

--fred