Christ Culture?

Change is not welcome. To my personal knowledge, no one likes it. Most of us do nearly anything within our power to resist it. We prefer stasis, reliability, solid foundations upon which we are to store and secure our stuff. When things change, reliability and assumptions fly out the proverbial window. Chaos ensues.There is no control. There is no stability, nothing upon which to safely rely.

There are times, however, when change is good for us and for everyone. This past week's Revised Common Lectionary Gospel text was the Zacchaeus narrative. Zacchaeus knew no grace. He lived a life of demand and supply, collecting taxes for the Roman government in Jericho. He had become rich by collecting more than was owed by the Judaic citizenry. The man cheated others in order to become wealthy. But he was despised. Zacchaeus was a pariah. The mention of his name was accompanied with a sneer, much like the geographically racist term "Samaritan."

When Jesus came through Jericho, on his way to Jerusalem, Zacchaeus was determined to see the embodiment of God's grace. He climbed the now-famous tree. Jesus saw him and called to him. When Zacchaeus ran to Jesus, Jesus embraced him, welcomed him, accepted him. Zacchaeus was not accustomed to such treatment. He encountered grace. As a result, his world changed. Zacchaeus promised, from that moment onward, to give half of everything he owned to the poor and to repay anyone that he had defrauded fourfold. In meeting grace, Zacchaeus becomes grace to, with and in his community.

Apocalyptic works in a similar fashion. Just as Zacchaeus had encountered grace, we begin to corporately and communally imagine a better world, a healthier existence, lives of universal abundance. When we encounter that world as a genuine possibility, we being to shape our behavior according to that world. We change in the process of changing the world in which we live, all in an effort to change the way we live in culture and society.

Zacchaeus changes for the better. He becomes grace in his community. Apocalyptic changes us for the better, compelling us toward a more faithful walk with our Lord. Change can be good. It can be very good!

Which brings me to the point of this week's post. Our culture is in the process of axiomatic change. The old rules no longer apply. The old assumptions no longer hold. The ground upon which we have so reliably stood is shaken and crumbling. According to Phyllis Tickle in her fabulous book, The Great Emergence, such axiomatic cultural shift takes place in human culture every 500 or so years. If the last shift took place in the Great Reformation of the 16th century, then it should come as no surprise to us that one should take place in the 21st.

Since the late 1960's, culture has been shifting. It has been shifting away from authority and power relationships toward egalitarian justice, inclusion, unity and acceptance of diversity. Sectarian kinds, clans, groups, orthodoxies and ilks are being supplanted by the universality of the human condition and the need for mutual support and care. I take this to be a step forward in the cultural evolutionary process, one with which we are uncomfortable still. It pushes us toward sacrifice of privilege and position for the sake of assisting those who lack the power to compete.

In my humble opinion, culture is catching up with Christ. We have evolved to the point of apocalyptic, where we can now exchange one world for the other, where Christ can and may become culture's new reliability and standard for assumption. We can see that such a world is possible. Even though we despise change, we are invited in the process of cultural evolution to embrace it. Maybe it is time that we stop resisting the change and see it as a step forward in our evolution toward Christ.