paradoxum

I don’t like writing about death. I like it even less when I write about the death of something I love. I believe it was Mark Twain who said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Unfortunately I can say the same thing as it has become more and more evident to me that I am ANYTHING but dead to my self. My self is very much alive. My “wish dreams” still play in my head and heart with the energy and passion of a teenager at an all night party! Sigh, I’m tired just thinking about it!

What is a “wish dream”? I have an answer to that question, but if I tell you my answer, you will no longer have ears to hear me. So, let’s answer that question by telling stories and asking questions.

First, let’s think about what we picture as the “ideal Christian community.” I have pictured it many times. I have even tasted of what I’ve pictured, if only briefly. I tasted it as a student in my youth group. I tasted it in a Sunday school class (shout out to my Agape friends!). I taste it now with the “Butter Boys”, none of whom are technologically advanced enough to ever find this post on the Internet (save little Billy). In many of these cases, the “fellowship” / “community” I experienced lived up to my ideal. In most cases, however, Christian community fails to live up to “the ideal”.

What about you? Have you ever experienced “real” Christian fellowship and community? What did it look like? What did it feel like? Did it last?

Chances are you, like me, have been more disappointed and disillusioned with your experience of “Christian community.” Chances are, it somehow has failed to live up to your ideal. Chances are, you’ve been left…to some degree…disillusioned with the Christian community you find in your church. I know I have been very disillusioned at times. I’ve been so disillusioned that I’ve often left, while at other times I’ve stayed long enough to see the community fall apart.

This all raises one critical question: Is Christian community an ideal to be realized?

I think this question is the crux of the matter. My experience in church (small & large) is that we answer that question “yes”…Christian community is an ideal we desperately want to realize. People are dying for connection, for fellowship, for real Christian community. We want that “fellowship of hearts”, that closeness and caring that we imagine would be found in genuine Christian community.

One of the major headaches of Church leadership is “how do we nurture and facilitate community in our church?” In reality, what they are asking is how do we create Christian fellowship / community? They create small groups, life groups, men’s groups, Women In the Church, and a host of other events where they seek to create Christian community or fellowship.

It is a fatal error. What is fatal about it? The fatal error is the assumption that Christian community is an ideal to be realized rather than a reality that already exists.

We create something, but seldom do we create Christian fellowship / community. Usually we create a psychological reality that makes us feel good, but in the end, can’t hold together because what we have created is not Christian fellowship. Christian fellowship is NOT an ideal to be realized. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his incredible work Life Together said it best:

“Christian community is NOT an ideal which we must realize;
It is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”

When we are trying to create what ONLY God can create, we enter the realm of “striving” and human works. Our ideal becomes an idol. We create in our mind and ideal picture of what Christian community should or must be and we hold to that ideal with ferocious tenacity. When the Christian community fails to achieve our ideal, we become complainers, and eventually, we become something worse…we become “accusers of the bretheren.” We accuse others for not living up to our ideal (usually the leadership). We accuse ourselves for being stupid enough to open ourselves up again to the possibility of finding the ideal. We accuse God for not allowing us to have “real” Christian community. In the end, we are left singing with Bono wondering why can’t we ever find what we are looking for!

What we are looking for…is our “wish dream”. What is a wish dream? Let the person with ears to hear understand that a “wish dream” is a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be. Truth be told, we have “wish dreams” not only for church but also for our marriage, our children, our friends, our job…and on and on it goes. Our ideals become our idols.

I’ve had my “wish dream” smashed a thousand times. Sometimes God destroys our “wish dream” by giving it to us. I’ve had a “wish dream” of what Christian community should be and I’ve been uncompromising in my pursuit of it. It has cost me much. Finally, though, I found it. I found it in a coffee shop, sitting by myself with my computer. You see, I spent the better part of a year going to a coffee shop every Sunday morning where I would get my coffee, sit at the same table, put in my headphones and listen to music, and write or read…all alone.

I guess that’s the irony of my “wish dream” about Christian community…it could only be fulfilled in solitude. If “two or three” were gathered in his name then each person brought his or her own “wish dream” which ultimately threatened mine and thus the whole enterprise became a “will to power”. The seeds of destruction were sown from the start. The only way I could have Jesus in my midst was to not have anyone else around.

I’m afraid this is not just true for me. It is true for all of us. You see, we do the same thing in marriage and friendship. We have a “wish dream” of what our marriage or friendship should be and when it fails to live up to the “ideal” we walk away. Our spouse, our children, our job, our friends can never live up to our “wish dream”. In the end, we either give up our dream, or lose our relationships.
Giving up our dreams feels like giving up on life. Yet, many of us do it when faced with the choice of divorce or surrender of the dream. We surrender the dream and live with our partners in a dead relationship. Others of us choose to leave and seek to “find ourselves”. The unfortunate thing is that we probably will find ourselves, and so the process never ends.

There is only one answer to this dilemma: Jesus must kill your “wish dream”. He has killed mine. He has been relentless in thwarting me. He has killed my “wish dream” about my job, my marriage, my children, and finally, His church. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still seek to revive my dead dreams…but sitting on the dust heap of my life, I’ve finally begun to learn to stop dreaming. As my long dead friend whom I’ve never met once said, “God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.” Jesus must kill our dreams. He must take what is most precious, and crucify it.

He did as much to his own community. His 12 disciples had an incredible vision of what their community would be and do. They saw themselves sitting on the right and left hand of Jesus ruling and reigning in the Kingdom of God. What happened to the disciples “wish dream”? It ended with one of them committing suicide, & one of them denying that he even knew Jesus! In the end, all of them left Jesus to die alone. The community of Jesus into which they head each injected their “wish dream” ended as a colossal failure. Only AFTER it had died…after it had literally been crucified…did Jesus resurrect it and build HIS DREAM.

Our unity is not built upon my dream or your dream. Our “fellowship”, our “community” is not an ideal…it is a reality won for us by the Lord Jesus Christ. We are ONE because we are “in Christ”. In fact, the phrase “in Christ” is one of St. Paul’s favorite phrases. He uses it more than any other N.T. writer. Our unity is not based on our mutual friendship or common interest…our unity is a divine reality because we have been united IN CHRIST. We have been baptized together into his death, burial and resurrection (Romans 6). We have been baptized into his body (Gal. 3:27; 1 Cor. 12:27). Just as your body is ONE so we are ONE in forming the body of Jesus. Our unity is a reality, not an ideal!
Because we are ONE in Jesus Christ we are invited to receive what Jesus has won for us: community / fellowship. We receive Christian community as thankful recipients not demanding idealist.

Listen to my old friend whom I never met (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) talk about our attitude towards Christian community:

“If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

Christ offers us Christian community by standing not only between God and us but by standing between us and all people and things. Our unity is ONLY in and through Him…nothing else. He stands between every person and me so that we no longer relate one-to-one where the strong impose their will on the weak. Rather, all of our relationships flow to Christ and through Christ. John Eldredge has a prayer in which he says “I now bring the cross of Christ between me and all people…” In this prayer he is getting at the idea Bonhoeffer illuminates when he says, “Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves…this means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love.”

When we believe the truth…the truth that our Christian community is a reality in Jesus Christ…our vision of one another is transformed. No longer do I see you for whom I want you to be but rather, I see you for whom you really are IN CHRIST. I see “the true image of the other person which he has received form Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodies and would stamp upon all men.”

When we believe the truth…the truth that our Christian community is a reality in Jesus Christ…our speech to and about one another is transformed. I realize that the most direct way to my brother or sister is through Jesus Christ the one in whom our unity is found. I will “speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ.” Prayer takes on new meaning. My desire for you is taken to Christ where he can transform either my desire (Eros not Agape) and / or your heart. Further, the event that was at one time the occasion for the dissolution of our “life together” – namely the sin of a brother / sister or the hurt caused by a brother / sister – now becomes an occasion for greater love and mutual encouragement.

“Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother…? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together – the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

In Christian community we meet one another as brothers and sisters who bring to one another the GOOD NEWS that in and through Jesus Christ we have been reconciled to God and one another.

“When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of
Christian fellowship.”

Amen.