“Elijah was sent…only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.” Luke 4:26

4 March 2024   Luke 4:24-30  

It would be nice to think that people are converted to belief in Christ by gentle and genteel means, like conversation, fellowship, and convivial persuasion. To be sure, some are, and in kinder, gentler times, most are. But if the times are neither kind nor gentle, conversion away from secularism and toward Christianity more typically comes by way of catastrophe.

Jews of the first century did not consider their times kind or gentle, and their experience of gentiles mostly persuaded them that gentiles were from Mars. Their treatment of children in particular struck Jews as barbaric – unwanted children were often “exposed,” i.e. left out in the woods or on garbage dumps to die cruelly from animals or the elements. Children rescued from being exposed were raised, and then sold, as slaves, often with the word “Expositus” added to their names, designating someone who had been exposed as a child (from which comes the modern Italian surname Esposito). Many Roman names resembled numbers – Quintus (5), Sextus (6), Septimius (7), Octavius (8). After the first child or two, Romans gave their children numbers for names. Pagan treatment of women was also hideously bad. So when Jesus preached in his home town, declaring that God had in mind all along inclusion of gentiles in the kingdom, people were infuriated. “How could he possibly compare us to them?” They wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff. The Jews thought Romans were too far gone to be converted or cured.

The Jews may have been right. Culture is a people’s attempt to hold off catastrophe, but cultures can become infected with lethal ideas and ideologies that take a long time to be transmitted, weakening cultural institutions a little at a time. The end of Roman paganism wound up resulting from twin catastrophes of infectious disease in the second and third centuries, and civilizational collapse in the fifth. Even after that, there were pagans who were not persuaded by the catastrophic fall of the Roman Empire to look more favorably at Christianity. They wanted to blame Christians instead for weakening Romans’ cultural vitality. St. Augustine’s longest work, in fact the longest work in Latin on a single topic from classical antiquity, The City of God, was written to rebut the claim that the fall of the Roman Empire was Christians’ fault. Even catastrophic failure isn’t enough proof for some people.

Culture is a people’s attempt to hold off catastrophe. Pope Francis has referred to the gender ideology juggernaut of these days as “the most dangerous ideological colonization” of our time. It is too soon to say whether that, even in cooperation with other ideological colonizations, will lead to catastrophe, but it is certainly true that these are neither kind nor gentle times, and people are wondering where they should go to deal with the looming crises of meaning, purpose, family and morality. Many are wondering also whether they may have written off the Church too soon. Podcasters like Joe Rogan have noted out loud how all the people they know who have the greatest meaning, joy, purpose and peace in their lives are serious Christian believers, and they are not inclined to think that is a coincidence.

Culture is a people’s attempt to hold off catastrophe, but if the catastrophe comes, there has to be someplace for people to go to start building new cultural ramparts, a place to hunker down and begin the slow work of creating a new civilization. Fortunately, we Christians have some experience at that. Fortunately, we Christians are a still place where people can go, and start building.