One of the central points of Paul’s repeated teaching about us being united as One Body in Christ is about our need to recognize our shared humanity so that we might come together and see one another as gift. We are, each one of us, gifts from God. So when we neglect our relationships with one another, we are really neglecting our relationship with God. When we fail to recognize our shared humanity, we fail to learn from one another as we ought, and fail to be blessed by one another as we were designed.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about our need to come together lately - our need to come together as people of faith, our need to come together as people of this nation, our need to come together as people across the globe. The pain of our national polarization today is the deepest it has been in my lifetime. It is far too easy to see one another as enemies, when we are called to see one another as various parts of one collective Body. That’s one of the reasons Jesus taught that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us - that helps us to overcome our perceived separateness. Loving one another in the here and now, despite our differences, is essential to living and loving in the Way of Jesus.
Michael Gungor was a noted Christian worship leader and recording artist who in recent years has pulled away from the institutionalized church and institutionalized religion in general - but he still loves to explore all things spiritual. Bradley Webber recently sent me a quote from Gungor’s book, This: Becoming Free, where he writes: “Growing up, Jesus was presented to me like some sort of superhero who had gone away but would someday come back and make everything better. Jesus was to be found not in the present grittiness of life, like he said he would be, but instead in the traditions of old men and dusty books. We looked for him in the past and future, when all along he had pointed us to the infinite and eternal present of birds and flowers and neighbors. We keep going back to the places where we thought he was in our belief systems, traditions, and stories of some imagined future, but unless our thoughts, words, and practices ground us in THIS very moment, our religion is nothing but an empty tomb, and ‘he is not here.’”
Jesus is here. He is alive, in all of us collectively... Unless we continue to crucify Him.