Open Subject

'compartmentalisation' and 'marginalisation'

Luke Chapter 2 verse 7 : 'She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger because there was no room for him in the inn.'

This is a well-known verse and wish to use it as a vehicle to explore two ideas or concepts that are present in our society, namely 'compartmentalisation' and 'marginalisation'.

Compartmentalisation

We have become adept at putting our lives into compartments and these compartments need not be consistent. Thus we can divide our lives into segments (for example, family life, employment, church life, other leisure activities) and our actions in these different segments need not necessarily be consistent. In the past such inconsistency would have been seen as a problem. Consistency was itself a virtue. This may no longer be the case. One of the legacies of post-modernism is that the virtues of consistency and rationality are under serious challenge. Students brought up in a world which is sceptical of 'truth' claims may hold views that are logically inconsistent without perceiving any difficulty. What matters is whether or not the views 'feel good' not whether they are rationally consistent. To quote one example, Don Carson in his book A Call to Spiritual Reformation (p.14) cites a study from the Princeton Religion Research Center which identified a 'marked decline in professing American Christians who think that there is an essential connection between Christianity and morality.' The suggestion that Christianity can be divorced from morality in this way will strike many older Christians as astonishing - but the influence of the claim may become stronger as post-modern thought exerts a stronger hold over the minds of young people.

Yet when we turn to the Bible we find no such compartmentalisation. We face an all-knowing, all-seeing God. We cannot ring-fence our lives and say that some part of it is off-limits to God. Romans 2 v 16 tells us that God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ. There is no point in trying to hide our secrets from God.

Nevertheless we can be tempted to persist with our attempts at compartmentalisation. We can do so in at least three different ways. I will do no more than mention the first two and will develop the third.

we can seek to compartmentalise the Bible. Thus we find that some people take the view that they accept the teachings of Jesus but not the teaching of Paul. This consumerist approach which gives the reader superiority over the text (in the sense that the reader becomes the judge of what is and what is not authoritative) cannot be reconciled with the claim that the Bible is the word of God - it is the text which is authoritative and not the reader.
we can seek to compartmentalise our lives - this is the point made in the introduction - but being a Christian affects all our aspects of our lives. I once had a friend who could not see what impact being a Christian had on his life at work - one response might be to read the book of Ephesians - painting with a broad brush, we can see that the opening part of the book deals with our relationship with God and our reconciliation with God through the work of Jesus on the cross - the latter part of the book deals with various relationships (husband and wife, parent and child and employer and employee) - the point is not to separate the two issues but to show that they are vitally connected - the point is that, once our relationship with God has been made good, this has a vital impact on our relationships with others - to give one example husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her - an understanding of how much Jesus loved the church is therefore a vital step in understanding the extent to which a husband is to love his wife.
most seriously of all we can try to compartmentalise Jesus himself. Is your conception of Jesus one of a baby lying in a manger? How does this relate to the Jesus who grew up, the Jesus who died, the Jesus who rose again and the Jesus who will come back again to judge and to rule? Many people in our society are prepared to accept Jesus as the baby in the manger. It is an image that they can control. Babies usually make us feel sentimental and we have the feeling that we are in control. The picture of Jesus on the cross is a more difficult one. But it is the same Jesus. You cannot compartmentalise his birth and separate it from his death. See verse 11 - he is a Saviour and as a Saviour he came to die. It is vital for us and our neighbours to understand that Jesus came to earth as a baby with the purpose of dying on the cross for our sins - we cannot accept his birth and reject his death.

Marginalisation

There was no room for Jesus in the inn. Life was full and people were busy. It was census time. People were on the move. Parents were busy looking after their children and tending to their needs. Hotels (inns) were full and their employees were doubtless busy. Jesus was pushed to the margins by a world that was too busy to find room for him. It was not that people were doing things that were particularly evil: they were simply getting on with their own lives but in their lives they had little room for God. In this respect it resembles life in the modern world. Christmas is a very busy time of year but it is a busyness that finds little room for God: it is buying presents, buying food, attending school plays, attending parties and putting up with the family.

As we read the New Testament we find that throughout his life people seemed to find little room for Jesus. Luke 9 v 58 tells us that 'foxes have holes and birds of the air have their nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay down his head.' Luke 23 v 50 tells us that in his death he was placed in a borrowed tomb. There was no room for him in his birth, life or death. Then we turn to Revelation 3 v 20 and we find the following: 'Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me.' We have a picture of Jesus knocking on the door of the life of a Christian (remember here that Rev 3 was written to a church not to a group of non-believers) but there is no room for him.

The point is an obvious one for us today. Are our lives so crowded that there is simply no room in them for Jesus? The cause of the 'crowding' in our lives may be different (it may be work, family, hobbies etc) but there is little doubt that life in the modern world is increasingly busy and hectic. We seem to be trapped in our busyness. The point is well-illustrated by John Grisham's little book 'Skipping Christmas'. In it he tells a story of a couple who decide that they are going to opt out of Christmas and go off on a cruise. But they find that the stresses of trying to back out of Christmas are as great as the pressures involved in participating in it. Thus they must explain to their neighbours why it is that their house will be the only in the street without Christmas decorations, why it is that they are not giving money to Christmas charities etc. So they are trapped by their busyness whether they choose to participate in Christmas or seek to escape from it. Whichever way we turn we seem to be busy. I have no solution to the problem of busyness but it does seem to be a long-standing problem and not one confined to the modern age. The lesson we have to learn is an obvious but difficult one, namely that we must find time in our lives for Jesus: time to read the Bible, to pray and to meet with other Christians. Don't let this Christmas be so crowded that you leave out the Christ whose birth we celebrate.

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