Another Month

Wow!

The best laid plans of mice and men really do often go awry. I had all the intentions of reorienting my schedule so i could blog earlier in the week, but we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Intentions are not enough. We have to be deliberate. Active. And to avoid being a joke or afterthought, we have to follow through. So. Once again, i apologize, and once again, with all the good intentions i can muster, i am going to make Monday morning my new blog time.

With that out of the way, let's get down to business. We have reached the final letter in our journey through becoming authentic Christians. I named the series C.H.U.R.C.H.: which means to be Christlike, become Hospitable, we are Unleashed for ministry, we must Reach out to those outside the walls of the church, we should Consume Christ, and now we have reached the end of our journey, where every long, eventful adventure should end: Home.

Home. What does a home have to do with becoming authentic Christ followers? Everything. In our Scripture focus: 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about how the "Body of Christ" is really a series of body parts, each member connected to the other. We can't have a healthy body without a hand or eyes or ears or nose or even big toes. We need each body part to be healthy, effecient, and faithful to what God calls us to be. And if any part is sick, well that disease and dis ease enters the corporate body and affects us all, if we do not address it quickly and correctly.

But all too often when the body is sick, at least the Body of Christ, we want to ignore what is causing the illness. We want to deny its existence. And what happens when a virus enters the body and is left unattended? It will destroy the host. Perhaps a better analogy is the insidious disease of cancer. Caught early, it can be, in most cases, cured. But if left unattended, if left to run rampant through the body, then the cancer begins spread and eat the healthy host and eventually the host will succomb to the disease. Faith communities or church families are no different. If we do not address what illness has affected the host; the disease will destroy it.

If we are to be the body of Christ, we have to offer space for dis ease to be worked through and issues handled, in a Jesus manner. We must have godly relationships with one another. We must be, with glad hears, connected to each other. Admitting our dependence on the other in our church family. We cannot be a church, a true, authentic church, if we sit back and gossip, allow cliques, ignore power plays, or worse yet, enable the destructive "I" to enter into the conversation.

I dont want to suggest that God doesn't want each of us, in our own unique way, to be who He created us to be. That's not what i mean. What i mean when i suggest that "I" can be destructive is this: when we say, "I will not let that happen." We are really saying that our thoughts, our opinions, our wants and desires trump anything else in the church. It might not be our intentions, but remember what the road to hell is paved with.

We have to find ourselves subjecting and surrendering our will to that, first and foremost, of God's. It is God's will we seek. Not mine. Or yours. But it is God's. And then we seek the common voice of the church community. God will speak through a common belief, a common goal, a common mind. It is in the community we receive our revelations and answers. Not as some isolated voice. And then if we question the validity of the communal response, we test the idea, answer, revelation with Scripture. What does God's Word say? If what we have been given is validated in Scripture, then we know it is of God and we can have peace by moving forward. If it is not, or if Scripture confronts and refutes the revelation, well that lets us know that what we have discovered is not of God. But it must always happen in the community, in the corporate body.

We were created to live in community with our sisters and brothers. Moses and the Ten Commandments point towards that truth. The exiled Jews in Babylon lived it. Jesus illustrated it with the Twelve. And now, in 1 Corinthians, Paul reaffirms the role of community in the journey of Christians. We were created to live together. Peacefully. Simply. Together. Amen.