Pastor Note #131: A Pastoral Response to Someone Struggling in these Divisive Times

Feeling connected and part of a community of believers has become increasingly hard for me, too, over the last several years.  So, I can understand how you feel.  There is a kind of spiritual homelessness that has set in for many of us.  We can feel such a desire to isolate and retreat from community to avoid getting caught up in all the political ugliness and mean-spiritedness that has come to mark so many church communities these days.  I think one first step might be to think on a somewhat smaller scale.  Christian community really happens best in small group or individual relationships.

This can still go wrong if we allow something other than a simple love for Jesus to become the basis for the relationships.  I think this is where a lot of churches have lost their way in recent years.  They have allowed the basis of their fellowship to shift from that of simple intimacy with Jesus to political policy and ideology.  Those things do not create a nurturing community that helps us grow in Christlikeness.  A group that bases its identity in political policy and ideology will just create a kind of echo chamber in which our worst personal preferences and prejudices are encouraged.

What that means, though, is that I will need to rid myself of the belief that what I need most is to find a group of people who agree with me on everything.  And that’s where this all gets kind of tricky because of course truth does matter.  While we don’t need to agree on everything, we do need to agree on a few things.  For Christian community to be Christian community, we have to agree on who Jesus is.  I don’t mean all sorts of detailed doctrinal stuff.

Over the last 1,700 years or so, the Church has found the Nicene Creed [i]to serve that purpose pretty well.  But even that can be a little too complicated for folks.  So, a simple belief that Jesus is the eternal Son of God and that the only place to really come to know him is the Bible—that should serve as a good start.

But ultimately, I’ve found that the doctrinal stuff is not the hardest part.  Where Christian community most often goes awry is over the matter of love and humility.  Without love and humility, there will never be Christian community.

Love has to be unconditional.  That’s how God loves us.  When Jesus tells us that he requires us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48), he tells us in effect that he expects us to love others the way God loves us.  That kind of love is corrosive to barriers.  It wears them away.  I have no illusions that this is easy.  I was deeply, even traumatically wounded by some church people some while back.  I still struggle to have an attitude of love and forgiveness toward them.  For me in this case, I think that love is in my determination to continue to try to do it, even though I frequently fall back into bitterness and resentment.

Christ-like love means that I am expected by Jesus to love people who I believe are deeply wrong about some very important things.  I don’t want to do that, but being a disciple of Jesus sometimes means doing things that I don’t want to do.  I sometimes need to sit with Jesus in Gethsemane for a while when I’m struggling to obey when I really don’t want to.

Now, of course, we can’t maintain a relationship with someone else all by ourselves.  Everyone involved has to do their part.  If the other person/people don’t want to love unconditionally also, then maybe the relationship or community can’t happen.  But if the relationship or community fails, I don’t want it to be because I didn’t do my part by loving unconditionally.

Humility, as I mentioned, is the other essential for nurturing healthy Christian community.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about what the Bible says about humility.  It seems to me that there are several ways in which humility helps make community possible.

First, humility reminds me that I might not be right about everything.  That doesn’t mean that I’m wrong about what I think.  Humility only means that I need to try to keep open to the possibility that I might be.  That keeps me teachable.  No one can be a disciple of Jesus without being teachable.  So, without humility, there is no discipleship.  That kind of humility is also what makes it possible for me to actually listen to someone I disagree with.  If two people who deeply disagree with each other are willing at least to listen to each other and try to understand why the other people believe what they believe, then the possibility of relationship is still open.

Second, humility helps me keep myself in perspective.  It helps to keep me from thinking of myself (and by extension “my tribe”) as more important than whoever I’m relating to (Philippians 2:3).  No matter how sinful this other person may be in my eyes, I too am a sinner whose sin has sent Jesus to the cross.  No matter how important I may think I am, this other person no less than me bears the image of Almighty God in his or her very being.  In light of this, I owe this other person respect and dignity regardless of how much I may disagree with him or her.

Finally, and I think maybe most important for our times, Christ-like humility means that I relinquish any need or desire to dominate other people.  It is, it seems to me, on this point that many people who claim the name of Christ have abandoned their discipleship.  There is among many such a lust for domination, a burning desire to impose their will on others.  If someone sees every interaction with others as a contest in which the goal is to win, to “own” the other person, to force them to admit that you are right and they are wrong, then no real relationship can be possible.  That also makes Christian witness and Christian community impossible.

This is what Jesus (and Paul and James and Peter) is talking about when he calls us to “meekness.” (Matthew 5:5; Matthew 11:29; Galatians 5:23; Ephesians 4:1-3; Colossians 3:12; James 1:21; 3:13; 1 Peter 3:15)  “Meekness” really isn’t a very good translation for the word the New Testament writers use, but then there really isn’t a very good English word for it.  We think of “meekness” as being a willingness to be dominated by others, and, of course, the word can mean that.  But when the New Testament writers speak of “meekness,” they don’t mean a willingness to be dominated.  For them, Christian “meekness” means giving up the desire to dominate others.  No real relationship can happen when one or both parties are striving to dominate the other.  This as much as anything else is what has brought such divisiveness and nastiness to American life in our day.  But if the followers of Jesus will adopt this kind of humility, maybe we can be part of the healing of our national life.

I don’t think I’ve actually offered you any remedy for your sense of isolation and spiritual homelessness.  As I said at the beginning, I also struggle with those feelings.  But I hope maybe I’ve given you a bit of a vision for an alternative to the meanness and divisiveness our American society and our supposed Christian communities have descended into.  I’ll pray for you, and I hope you’ll pray for me, as we both look for better ways and better days ahead.

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[i] The Full Text of the Nicene Creed – Bibles.net

photos by GAC