Boundaries for a Good Christian

“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”

Today is Rogation Sunday—one of those medieval Catholic things that largely fell out of use in the 70s, even while it continued in Anglicanism, and has now been brought back through the Ordinariates. In some places, it probably never left. It comes from the Latin rogare, “to ask,” and it is a time for processing around and singing litanies—litanies to the saints, litanies about the upcoming growing season, litanies about good weather and protection from plagues. This comes in part from the practical need to mark a transition period between spring and summer, from the time of celebrating Easter to the hard work of tending crops and flocks and all the work of summer. (If you want to see a nice historical reconstruction of Rogationtide as it would have been in the early sixteenth century, the series Tudor Monastic Farm is a good place to start.)

So one of the things that happened, especially in the early modern Rogation processions, was marking the boundaries of the parish. Parish boundaries are pretty abstract these days—and even more so in the Ordinariate—but in a medieval parish, this had a practical use for establishing formal lines of the village, where one person’s field ended and another’s began.

The fact that we don’t do this anymore—that we don’t even really know how to do it, aside from a generic ode to the upcoming agricultural season—is characteristic of where and who we are. In the end, we do not like boundaries very much. We might talk about setting boundaries when it comes to what we discuss with our boss, or when and where we might take a work call after hours, but one of the reasons that we find even those things hard to do is that we have, as a culture, assumed a deep suspicion of all boundaries.

This sense of individual boundaries comes to us from the modern liberalism that forms the foundation of modern conservatism and progressivism both. The assumption behind both of these dominant political philosophies, which are really two sides to the same coin, is that the ultimately meaningful thing is the individual and his will. So, in the words of one recent Supreme Court justice, “the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence.” And so modern politics is really nothing other than different interest groups fighting for power about their own self-definitions. We have abandoned reason, and argument, for the sake of this autonomous liberty.

“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”

Jesus, like Moses before him, and like the medieval rogation processions, seems to think that there are boundaries—lines that mean something—that we did not choose. He couldn’t be clearer when he says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit.”

This is not opposed to freedom. Freedom here runs deep: “Whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” But this freedom, this power of intercession, has definite boundaries. Boundaries that we did not choose. Boundaries that exist independent of our will, independent of our sense of self, our desires, our personal definitions.

This is in large part what Peter learns in our reading from Acts. He encounters the centurion Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile, and realizes that the boundaries that he had drawn, that he had assumed, based on a combination of personal preference and cultural history, might be the norm . . . but God makes it clear that his boundaries are wider.

The story of Peter in Acts is a hard one. Many Christians—like many of our friends in the mainline Protestant world—have argued that Peter’s encounter with Cornelius is the model for an ever-increasing inclusivity that ignores all boundaries. But it’s important to note that the specific boundary here is an ethnic one, not a moral one. Cornelius does not, importantly, suggest a radically different form of life, a different model of morality. It’s simply that he is not a child of Abraham. And those of us who are not the direct descendants of Abraham can be grateful that this is the moment when promises of Jesus become more visibly available to all people.

The boundaries, in fact, remain. Part of how Peter was able to recognize God’s presence in these unexpected places was precisely in that they maintained the basic boundaries of the universal moral law. They also recognized the specific bounded nature of Jesus himself—the particular content of the gospel of the kingdom.

In other words, the invitation of Jesus is truly universal. The invitation is not some vague nice thought about goodness; it is an invitation to find ourselves, and to identify ourselves, not with what we want, or with how we define ourselves on our own, but in him. The universality, the inclusivity, of the Christian message is meaningless if not grounded in the specificity of Jesus and his commandments, which are not the end of the law, but its fulfilment and purpose. To follow the moral law is ultimately to love him. To love him is to follow his law. There is in the end no separation between love and obedience, between duty and affection. As human beings in the grip of sin and death, we want there to be such a separation. We think there must be. But there isn’t. Love wins only when it is obedient; love is love only when it is united to the person who is love.

So as we enter this season of boundaries, as we might think of it—this season of growth and knowledge and human freedom, which things are all the product of discipline and hard work—we do well to remember to pray, in true Rogation style, for the recognition and awareness of such boundaries, as our collect of the day has it: “O Lord, from whom all good things do come, grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same.” Amen.