Marginal Christianity

January  2                      Nothing may be more pertinent this new year than learning a genuinely Christian way of encountering and experiencing the risen Christ in our life and world. Mary Magdalene is our mentor here. Lingering, listening, learning. That’s the way she encountered the risen Christ (Jn.20:11-18). -Mary lingers at the tomb. The intersection of death and resurrection is where the risen one is always found. That’s where we’ll find him in our lives. And in our world. The resurrected one turns the stench of death into an aroma of life. Where are the places of death in your life? In your world. Do you linger there expecting to meet him in life-giving power? Is the theology of the cross your theology? -Mary also listens. She is intentional about finding him at this intersection of death-transformed-into-life. Mary searches and wonders and questions. Lingering positions her to encounter the risen Chri...

Institutionalism and irrelevance are two charges regularly levied against the church in our time in North America. Without the proper nuancing here, let me accept these charges as by and large legitimate. I came of age in the sixties and seventies when our basic institutions and arbiters of the “American way of life” were subjected to withering suspicion and critique. And they have never recovered from this crisis of legitimacy. We cannot live without institutions. Nor, it seems, can we live with them. With the flowering of individual autonomy in the sixties and seventies a perpetual anti-institutionalism was (and is) inevitable. Even if we believe in theory that it takes a village to raise a child, in reality we resist submitting to or acknowledging the influence of the village with everything in us. To this degree anti-institutionalism is a function of North American hyper-individualism and a view of freedom gone to seed. However, there comes a time when institutions fail t...