Changing the Game that Religion Plays

Stories in the gospels were remembered, recorded, and eventually reduced to writing because they represented something important for the community.  Often the stories became representative of something greater than the story itself.

In the Second Chapter of Acts, the disciples begin speaking in many languages, and the visitors to Jerusalem, gathered from throughout the known world, begin hearing the disciples, although Galilean, speaking to them in their own language.  Herein lay a fundamental premise of what the Church understood about itself and its nature, and how it distinguished itself from what came before it.

In the ancient world, religion was literally about the practice of exclusion.  That is, the community created rituals, practices, and beliefs to distinguish itself from what was outside the community.  The rituals and practices themselves allowed the community to define itself.  Whenever there was someone or an element within the community that acted contrary to the rules and practices of the community, the community excluded and cast out the person or element that violated the community's practice.

The Second Chapter of Acts evoked the earlier story of Babel, when the peoples of the earth were symbolically scattered; they began speaking different languages.  In the Second Chapter of Acts, the opposite occurs; the people of the earth are drawn together.  The God who was thought to be the one who scatters is revealed to be instead the God who gathers together.

God's vision, the new salvation history, was not to simply create a new chosen people with a new set of beliefs and practices centered in Christ, but instead to change the very understanding of religiosity as the business of casting out and exclusion.  In Christ, God became the one who was excluded to change our perception of the excluded.  Now, the role of the community is not to cast out those who have violated the terms and practices of the community, but to always seek to gather, as God's will is always the redemption of the fallen and lost.  The Church is called to be the community whose every motivation is to gather together so that the entire world might find redemption.