Love reflex

In May 2012 Marina Keegan graduated from Yale University. She wrote an essay for her graduating class entitled “The Opposite of Loneliness.” Part of her essay reads:

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together and are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s 4 am and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group texts. This scares me more than finding the right job or city or spouse. I'm scared of losing the web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. 

I can connect with what Marina writes about. It reflects a lot of my experience as a college student. My college experience was held together in a tightly-knit community at a small Christian college in East Point Georgia called Atlanta Christian College. That small college produced some wonderful relationships that I still cherish. When I graduated and had to leave it was a big deal to leave behind that community. No more late night runs to the Waffle House. No more daily interaction with friends and professors. 

I think there are many of us that have experienced this opposite of loneliness. It is not something that happens just in college. There are a lot of people that grew up in small towns. When you’re a kid in a small town it is easy to find other kids to play with. Community and connection were right outside your front door. You can find community and connection in all kinds of places and ways if you're in a small town or a big city. The human body comes out of the womb hard wired for connection and a longing for community. It is why bowling leagues still exist, people get married and folks troll the internet for cat videos. 

It’s not accidental that the story of God we read about in the Bible is a story of community. It begins with community when we read in Genesis 1:26: 

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . . 

Much has been written about this little passage. One thing this passage tells us is that God exists, not as one God in a temple somewhere standing above everything else, but as one God in three persons, living in community. In other words God himself is part of a community called the trinity. Throughout the Bible God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit consistently redirect the attention to other members of the Trinity. 

Much of the Old Testament points to Jesus. Jesus, in turn promotes and promises the coming of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit turns believers’ hearts back to God. Since God exists in a community it is interesting then that when God first creates humans he quickly realizes that Adam’s isolation is not good. In response to Adam’s isolation God creates Eve and gives Adam and Eve a command to be fruitful and multiply. More and more people populate the earth.

In Genesis 12 God calls Abram to form a special community and eventually that community gives birth to another new community. The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus invites everyone to join this new community. The apostle Paul talks about this new community in the book of Ephesians. In Ephesians chapter two Paul describes this new community that is a combination of groups of people that heretofore have been divided from one another.

 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. - Eph. 2:19-22

The Bible not only starts with community it ends in a community. A community that is centered on God. 

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” - Rev. 7:9-10

From beginning to end the story of God and God’s creation is about community. Yet the way that many of us experience our Christian faith is often as an individual. We often conceive of faith as if there is little or nothing about our being a Christian that is connected to other people or even other Christians. I am fortunate to have been born in America. Yet one of the ideas that I have inherited through the story of my nation is this idea that the individual is the center of society. This idea or national story informs all Americans. What we know in our bones is that the best way to produce people who do well in life is to strengthen individual people. It is no surprise that we tend to be hyper focused on individual rights. 

The way forward, it is assumed in American society, is to make the most of your individual abilities. Freedom is defined by our ability to individuate. This is why during a presidential election year you can just about expect someone to ask, “Are you better off today then you were 4 years ago?” It is a question that is all about the individual person. Americans too often assume that to even consider the needs of others must mean that I have to limit my freedom. 

Living the good life in American society is to live as free as one can. It is to be a free individual. Free from all rules, traditions, religions or governmental authority. Yet freedom for the first Christians meant free to live for God not freedom to be an individual. 

This can create a problem for Americans seeking to follow Jesus. If there was a way to bring the writers of the New Testament into our modern world and churches they would be at a loss to try and understand our focus on individuality instead of life in a community. 

They would not understand that most of us only see each other one or two times a week. They would not understand older women and widows being left alone. They would not understand how it is that a mother with small children often feels overwhelmed. They would not understand that men, at just about every age in American society, feel largely friendless. They would not understand how it is that some of us have great weekend getaways while others of us scrape by financially. They would not understand people having a physical or financial need and keeping it a secret. Our modern day way of doing life would be mind-blowing, confounding and beyond their realm of understanding. 

The first Christians gathered nearly everyday, shared their possessions and bore one another’s burdens. What the Bible teaches us is that when you and I are buried with Christ in baptism we are raised into a new family. A family that is supposed to love and care for one another as dearly as we do for our own families. Those first Christians were certainly not perfect. However,  they were connected in ways that we probably long for and yet also reject by how we live our modern  lives. It is one of the reasons that the writers of the NT use words like brothers and sisters or dear children. The people of God are a large family with God as Father, Jesus our older brother and the Holy Spirit connected to us in deeply personal ways. The church has always been about community. 

One of the places that I found a good vision of the Bible’s idea of community is in a movie called Lars and the Real Girl. The movie was not a box office smash. Yet I would suggest that the movie presents one of the more moving examples of what it means to be a Christian community. In the movie Ryan Gosling plays a guy named Lars Lindstrom. He is a lovable yet mentally disturbed 27 year old man. Lars seems to be suffering from some kind of a dissociative disorder resulting in a breakdown of his identity and perception of reality. 

He lives in a garage behind the house where he grew up as a child which is where his brother Gus and his wife Karin now live. Lars is an isolated person. Folks have attempted to connect with him yet he rejects all their attempts. His brother and his wife constantly invite Lars to dinner and he refuses. About the only place that Lars goes is to church and work. At work there is a porn obsessed worker that tells Lars that he can buy an anatomically correct life sized doll. 

Lars orders a doll, dresses her up and then takes his brother Gus up on his many invites to dinner. He asks his brother if he can bring a guest. Gus gets excited that Lars has made a connection with someone. When dinner rolls around Lars appears with his life sized doll that he has named Bianca. Lars behaves as if his doll is real. In fact Lars explains at dinner that he met Bianca that they met on the internet, she is a missionary on sabbatical and she does not speak English. Lars even asks if Bianca can stay in the house and not in the garage with him due to Bianca’s religious convictions. 

Gus is speechless. Has his brother gone insane? Lars treats Bianca like a real girl. He takes Bianca to the doctor for a check up, shopping, on a date and eventually he wants to take her to church on Sunday. By this time the small town that Lars lives in is in a tizzy. Folks all over town have an opinion about Lars and Bianca. When Lars wants to take Bianca to church a meeting of church members is held. There is a debate. Yet in the end the church people and the whole town simply start treating Bianca as if she were real. By treating Bianca as real it moves people out of their comfort zones and the church along with the community becomes a more loving place. 

Lars is a story about one man’s journey in finding himself and it is also about the church working as a loving community of hospitality and acceptance. It is the church that plays a pivotal role in Lar’s healing. The church offers Lars and Bianca a loving community that becomes the path for Lars to find himself and reclaim his real life. 

Inside the human heart is a default reflex towards segregation and finding those who qualify as different than us disgusting. Human history demonstrates that. Yet the church is to be a community formed around a new reflex, one of love. If Jesus is doing anything through his words and actions he is rearranging our instinct to choose judgment over love. In Jesus’ mind judgment should be a chore and love a reflex. Paul put it this way: 

 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. - 1 Cor. 13:13 

And that is how the world will know that we are his disciples.