Disciples are handmade…not mass produced. That’s what strikes me about the movement that Jesus started over 2,000 years ago. It’s all about relationships. Jesus came from relationship (the triune God) to bring authentic relationship to earth. He calls it the Kingdom of God and it’s all about relationships. Adam and Eve started in an authentic relationship, but fell into shame when they distrusted God and hid themselves from him and each other. This distrust has infected every generation since. Each person is a victim of the war between trust and shame within. We want to trust someone…but we hide ourselves in shame. We create all sorts of personaes and scenarios to keep others from seeing our true selves. The only escape from this war is found in the Kingdom. Jesus comes from a pure, self giving, totally loving family and offers to include us in this same love.
A friend was telling me that the Northwest is different than most areas of the country in that people here are two or more generations removed from the gospel. That is, most people don’t come from a family tree of believers. Not only have they not experienced the love of God, they haven’t experienced human love…at least at the level that can be experienced in the Kingdom.
This isn’t unique to the Northwest…it’s happening more and more in the Midwest as well. Years ago I read an opinion piece in Time Magazine by a writer originally from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She grew up in a family with no love. She wasn’t abused by her parents, but was not shown love beyond the most basic provisions to sustain her physical life. As a young girl she would walk to school and most days would stop in at the neighbors, an elderly couple who became adopted grandparents. She wrote that she would sit for a while at their table and watch them as they had their morning coffee. She noticed how the woman would put her hand on the shoulder of the man as she poured his coffee, and how he would smile and thank her. And…she said that these small gestures saved her. They helped her to believe that love was possible.
This last week, my heart broke upon reading of a 10-year old Illinois girl who committed suicide because of bullying (this according to her family). Ten-freaking-years-old.
Now I understand, at some level, the insidiousness and pervasiveness of mental illness that would lead one to suicide. I do not know this little girl's family, and certainly don't want to wrongly implicate them in this. But would it be safe to say that this little girl was not experiencing genuine love on any level? To the point where she could no longer continue to live?
When I was in elementary school, I remember watching a short video in Sunday school (at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Atlantic, Iowa, if I'm not mistaken) about a young boy who was bullied at school terribly. It was not even so much that he was bullied; when kids were not teasing him he was invisible. His situation at home was no better. His parents had not a single kind word to him, and only barked at and berated him (when, again, he was not invisible to them). The final scene is of the boy getting off the bus after school and simply falling down in the snow. Dead. A victim of unlove. (Tuck, do you remember this at all?)
Oh, my God...
The witness of the church is love--pointing to the love of God in Christ and by the Holy Spirit, by which we are arrested in our unlove (toward God and each other), and brought into God's love. We exercise this in the church--not in some conceptual, far-off-in-the-cosmos belief system, but in the tangible, messy reality of the local community of faith. The church's role is that of proclamation and praxis--love spoken and love enacted. Ecclesiology exercised through proclamation of the Word, administration of the sacraments, and discipline. All of it pointing to Jesus Christ, who is love made manifest. In Christ we are truly loved. In Christ we learn to love truly.
Our role is to seek out writers from Cedar Rapids, 10-year girls from downstate Illinois, and people in our neighborhoods dying in the darkness of unlove and show to them what love really looks like. That is the call of the church: Find, love, lead to Christ that they too may find, love, and lead others to Christ. The beginning and the end, the way and the means, the aim and the fulfillment is Jesus Christ.
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