NeedtoBreathe

One my favorite bands...even better live.

What Community is Not

Community is a buzz word. It stirs up good vibes when you think about it. Maybe memories of the late 90’s show “Friends” come to mind. From my experience in establishing intentional communities over the years I'm convinced that friendship is not strong enough to glue community together.

I find hints of the idealism that “community is where everybody is friends” most the time I poke around peoples views of community. It does seem natural to import our best feelings about what friendship offers onto our expectations of Christian community. Its natural but it’s not appropriate.

Friendship is built on affinity.    I don’t know about you but I like to hang out with people that I have enough things in common with. I enjoy friendship with people who are in similar stages of life that I’m in; its natural. I like to relax with people that read the stuff I read and are entertained by the stuff I'm entertained by. Here is an awkward personal example of how friendship is built on affinity. I hate Ultimate Fighting or Mixed Martial Arts , I loathe it. I have various reasons for my visceral disgust for the sport (maybe that’s a blog for another time). I’ll be honest I have a hard time enjoying someone’s company that that wants to watch and talk about that stuff.  I do think functionally that is how friendship works and that’s O.K.

Community is not about affinity. In the first century a male Jewish worshiper would enter the synagogue and recite these words “I’m glad I’m not a Gentile dog and I’m glad I’m not a woman.” So imagine you are in the early church and Paul says emphatically that under Lordship of Jesus there is no “Jew, Gentile, Male, Female, Slave or Free.” (Galatians 3) This was a shocking cultural rearrangement for everyone. The New Testament community did not have personal preferences and "likes" as their rallying point. The new Kingdom community was a mash up of people who culturally would never hang out with each other. They had very little in common. Their community was not forged and glued together by friendship. Friendship is picky and selective. Friendship is about investing time into people who you have a certain amount of chemistry with.

Community's built on Friendship won't make it.  I see this community vs friendship clash sabotaging people’s ability to commit and be loyal to community all the time. I think the voices in our head say “I need to be with people in my stage of life”, “there’s nobody like me.” So we download these emotional wants into our ideals and expectations when interacting with a living, breathing Christian community. Please don't hear an overstatement, I do think that doing the long hard work of loving in community eventually leads to the formation of friendships. Still, looking at community through the lens of friendship will create serious disillusionment.  It’s these very confused ideals about what community should offer that inevitably creates unnecessary disappointment and departure.  Friendship is not strong enough to hold community together under the weight of diversity and normal relational conflict.

Ultimately, taking our cues from friendship about what community should look like pushes us inward.          
I’ve observed that it makes us a bit narcissistic, becoming hyper sensitive to how our personal needs aren't being met. It then becomes really hard to shake the obsessiveness of feeling“these people don’t understand me.” I watched this gradual ego-oriented construct begins to dominate interactions.  It creates a distancing from people we perceive are not like us and don't understand us. Eventually every nugget of grace given to us from someone in our community seems to fall into an emotional black-hole. This domino effect all begins with importing our ideals and expectations from friendship into the landscape of community.

Am I A Reactionary?

It's hard not to react to stimuli around us. My son was yelling while I was watching a football game the other day and my temptation was to elevate my voice to the level he was yelling at. I needed to match his intensity; at least I’m tempted to believe this. The emotional belief goes: if I don’t match the intensity with equal intensity that I will not be able to stop the intensity.

Being a reactionary has infiltrated, saturated and fused itself to what it looks like to be a Christ follower these days. In my pastoral ministry I encounter many who are driven and charged by taking up a position in response to an issue. Their passion is ignited by anger and fear about something in or outside the church that en-flames them. The church as a whole but more practically on an individual level seems to define itself by what ticks us off or seems to be a present injustice. We've been fooled into believing we have to match the intensity of the voices we disagree with. There has to be a more emotional stable way of defining what we are about.

We are bombarded with quotes, literature, short documentaries, news clips and punchy blogs summarizing for us why an issue needs our emotional energy. Often times the case that is built is assembled on the ground floor of opposing another side. It’s easy to get jazzed up by sizing up how bad the other side is. So we take up an offense in response to something we are deeply concerned about. In responding, we become deluded that we have found the right posture. Finding a healthy emotional position is close to impossible when you are trying with all your might to run in the opposite direction. More often than not the response to an extreme requires a more careful tension in the center that might still resemble some traits of the extreme.

From my perspective here are just a few present reactionary moves:

- I’ve seen this reactionary propensity when it comes to gender equality. There has been serious inequality at the hands of men but the over correction is often destructive.

- I’m also watching this happen when it comes to sexuality. Many are so afraid of homosexuality that they run in the other direction by amping up to combat the culture's acceptance of homosexual marriage. Funny thing, Jesus didn’t say much about it, so I wonder why we're saying so much about it.

- Another is when I run into post-Christians that are so fired up about how power driven the institutional church is that they are adamant about the opposite; no leadership, nothing that smells of organization, no structured teaching, no accountability to a community but they think their stance is seemingly justified because of how evil the opposing side has looked.

- I also encounter people who are so afraid of the effects of postmodernism; truth being experiential, relational theology or emergent thought that in response they hitch their wagon to modernism that bows to logic, defending absolute truth and demonizing anybody that does not use the theological language they use.

- I’ve known many who are so hurt by the picture of an angry God who is intolerant of sin that they run in the other direction to erect a God who tolerates a sloppy moral life as long as we don’t hurt anybody with it.

- I meet people who are so angry with the decay of America that they are laboring to get a government in place that will be Godly and legislate Christian morality.

I have to be honest with you this pendulumnitis is exhausting. This reactionary stream has created so much identity crisis in the church. I dare say it is a major reason why the church is in the state it’s in. When I get a top view of church history and contemporary Christianity I see a pattern of overreactions that require undoing years later. Fundamentalism was a reaction to liberalism; now many of us are trying to detox from the legalism that came as a result of that reaction in the form of Fundamentalism. Then the reaction to fundamentalism within the church was the contemporary church with its topical sermons, well-produced worship music and its offerings of Christian versions of secular stuff. Now many of us are trying to recover theologically, communally and missionally. It must look like schizophrenia from the angel’s perspective. Sure it's a natural human response to rally our energy around what concerns us most, frightens us and angers us. What I’m proposing is not natural it's a new character shaping pursuit that leads to maturity in how we interact with stimuli around us.

Motivation speaks to our self-awareness about why we advocate for a certain issue. Here are some questions I ask myself on a regular basis: "Am I going after this because I’m angry about something else?", "Am I declaring an opinion because I’m afraid to sound like I don’t have an answer?", "Am I for this because I want to identify with a certain camp of people?", "Am I stirred up about this because Jesus is stirred up about this or more because this is a hot issue right now?", "Am I choosing this because I’m bitter about what’s been done?", "Am I reading into the Bible something that I'm passionate about?"

It requires a serious pursuit of self-awareness to acknowledge we are overreacting. It takes even more honesty to see that it has not drawn us closer to Jesus it’s only made us look different than the opposition. That is the greatest indictment; we are more encamped in our issues than we’ve ever been but we are less formed into the character of Jesus Christ than we’ve ever been. We need more people apprenticing at Jesus feet and fewer people standing up for their pet justice or moral issue.

The only way through these smoke and mirrors is to fight to stay anchored and shaped by the revealed story of God in the context of a tethered community. There is a subtle habit to get frustrated with a cultural issue and then go looking in scripture to bolster and confirm our fire. Self-control and self-constraint is required to push further into love for Jesus and further into into community in the face of our issue driven society. So many things that pass my consciousness bait me to move from where I am, calling me out of the simple life. They taunt me saying; “this is serious”, “how dare they”, “that’s the problem" or “this needs to stop”. I'm finding that not exercising an opinion is maturity, not weakness.

Some might say I’m advocating having our head stuck in the clouds; it's anything but that. It is a focused pursuit of living intentionally here and now. It’s searching for self-awareness knowing that our reactionary stands may not have fixed something, we may have actually created a new problem. I’ve observed the unintended consequences of a reactionary life rhythm. The hard reality is that what we pour our energies into will eventually direct who we become. I’d rather orient my life around Jesus and a community of Jesus followers than having to match the intensity of the issues screaming for my attention, money and advocacy.

Lord of the Sabbath

According to Levitical law the Sabbath is one of the key identity markers for the Israelite's that they are “of Yahweh.” The rhythm of the Sabbath in all its forms (every 7th day, every 7th year and every 50 years) was the clearest living liturgy to remind them that God cares for them, provides for them and compels them to live generously (God also instructed them to allow the poor to eat off their land on the 7th day and then for an entire year during the 7th year). God gave the Israelite's the gift of Sabbath to help aid them in keeping track of their place in this world (sorry Michael W. Smith). Sabbath helped the Jews identify whose they were, as well as it was to “bear witness” to the pagan nations. The Sabbath was a living rhythm that communicated the provision of God amongst those who worshiped false gods.

So when Jesus gives himself the title “Lord of the Sabbath” in the end of Mark chapter 2 He is stomping on some toes. At the point that Jesus arrives on the scene there are a combined 60 oral and written laws surrounding how to keep the Sabbath. He challenges the most holy marker that cemented Israel’s association to the true God. When Jesus drops this bomb about the Sabbath being “in him” he is speaking to the core issue of how to identify yourself and how others should identify you.

What does in now look like for “Jesus to be the Lord of the Sabbath?”

We should not read our own evangelical concerns about people skipping church into this passage. Jesus is not speaking to the idea of going to church on a regular basis. This is not in his scope.

Jesus is stepping into the role as King, as Lord, as President and Ruler of the estate. He is communicating that in the arriving Kingdom people will find their peace, their order, their rest and their sense of who’s they are in King Jesus.

Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath is uncharted territory in most evangelical churches. What does it look like for a community of people to be at peace in their daily life because Yahweh provides for them? What does it look like to relax that you’ll have enough if you're generous with what you've worked so hard for? What does it look like to resist toiling with anxiety to better your financial status? What does it look like to have order and margin in the rhythm of your life instead of being ruled by the cultural demands American life thrusts on us? What does it look like to run in the other direction from being a slave to what the Joneses, your coworkers, your Facebook friends and your family think of your achievements and attractiveness?

The great indictment on American evangelical Christians is that we faithfully attend church on Sunday but Jesus has not become Lord of the Sabbath the other 6 days of the week. We do not bear witness to the world that we are at rest in the rat race of life. We do not embody a way that looks unique compared to life outside the Kingdom of God that claws for more, for better, for power or for recognition.

This reminds me of when I was 12, I would go to the mall arcade to play video games for the reward of tickets. I would insert quarter after quarter into slot on the game Asteroids. When those pink tickets rolled out I felt a sense of accomplishment and greed, hording every single one. I then would rush to the counter to turn them in at the redemption counter, only to receive a 25 cent pencil after spending my hard earned allowance of 5 dollars. At the end of the day all my insane gaming got me a pencil that I ended up losing on the bus the next day.

We do this as adults playing the game of financial success, investment,social recognition and racing for political power but we are left with very little to redeem. We try to find our sense of being and identity in these pursuits but Jesus says to us “I am Lord of the Sabbath.”