unity

Asking for a Friend - How can we hold onto our Shared Humanity in a Divided World?

Matthew 18:21-22

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.


I loathe physical therapy. Thanks to having the back of someone 3x my age, I have been quite a few times in the last ten years. Everytime I go, I am paired with a guy about my same age but who is in impeccable physical condition, which already makes me feel worse. Then they put me through a circuit of ridiculous exercises, things with bands, an impossible balancing board, and stretches that make me feel like something could snap at any moment.

Exasperated, after throwing a ball against the wall while balancing on one leg, I asked, ‘What in the world does this have to do with making my back feel better?!’ My therapist said, ‘Your low back is weak. We can strengthen it some, but not much. Instead, if we focus on everything else around your low back, your hips, your core, your flexibility, then the pain will start to go away, but not entirely. You’ll be able to function, just not fully; your discs are too damaged. So focusing solely on your low back will never bring the healing you want. You have to focus on everything else around it.”

Now talking about my woes with physical therapy may seem like a non sequitur to the final question in our series: How do we hold on to our shared humanity in a divided world? But I promise it will come back around. So stay with me.

One thing among many I have loved about this series, Asking for a Friend, is that all of the questions have been timely; relevant not just to our life together, but to much that is happening in the world around us.

Today’s question is one we all want an answer to. The questioner had more context: they said, “as we get more and more divided, it seems like faith communities are pushing further and further to the extremes. In doing so, we lose the ability to see our shared humanity. What do we do? How do we move forward”?

Division and conflict have become a staple of American life. And that’s not just an anecdote, though I am sure you have your own story. According to Pew Research Center, compared to similar nations,we Americans hold much deeper divisions within nearly every facet of society: politics, race, and even agreement on basic facts.

Ironically enough, polarization is now a defining feature of these United States.

Faith communities are no different, especially along partisan lines. These days it’s more likely that the way someone votes determines what church they attend than their theological views. Which means, more churches are becoming homogenous in their political beliefs, more people are leaving churches from political partisanship, and there are fewer and fewer purple congregations. For the most part, churches are not sorting themselves, they are already sorted.

And in just the past two weeks, headlines have piled up calling this moment an inflection point—a crisis. It sure feels like it. Unity? Seeing our shared humanity? It seems nearly impossible—for churches, for the nation, let alone the warring parts of the world. So what do we do? I think we, as a church, go about unity like physical therapy.

It may sound counterintuitive, but if unity is the goal, don’t focus on it. If we insist on “being united”, if we tell ourselves and others, “we are a united congregation,” we won’t be—and everyone will end up disappointed, or worse.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “He who is in love with his vision of community will destroy community. But he who loves the people around him will create community wherever he goes.” The same is true of unity. If we love the idea of unity more than the people in front of us, we’ll never achieve it.

This is exactly what allows a group like Zeitouna to exist. Zeitouna is a group of six Jewish and six Palestinian women who, despite deep divisions, have learned to see each other’s shared humanity. For over twenty years, they have gathered in each others’ homes every other week, sharing dinner, and engaging in intentional Dialogue. They listen not to formulate a response, but to understand the other’s point of view. Their goal is not to come to an agreement. How could they?

Instead, they work on creating shared understanding—by listening, speaking from their own experience, slowing down, and pausing more. They focused on so many other things, not just the issues. And only then were they able to see one another for what they truly are, human. Irene, a Jewish member, said, “My heart has been opened to those who scare me.” Wadad, a Palestinian member, said, “Through Zeitouna I’ve learned to hear the voice of the ‘other’—her pain and her joy—realizing it mirrors my own.” They never chased unity itself. They focused on other things, and unity formed along the way.

Instead of chasing unity, let’s focus on our shared humanity, on forgiveness, and on grace.

Now, in the church we love to say that every person is made in the image of God. And that is true. But if we stop there, we can fool ourselves into thinking that image means we are inherently good, virtuous, capable. Scripture, and our experience, say otherwise. Paul reminds us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The image of God in us is real, but like funhouse mirrors, it is fractured and distorted.

So what do we share, really? We share our limits. We share our failures. We share our tendency to mess things up and let each other down. Our weakness, not our strength, is our common ground. And friends, that might sound like bad news, but it is actually quite the opposite. Because when you stop expecting other people to be more virtuous, more stable, or more capable than you are—you find yourself a little less disappointed. A little more patient. A little more compassionate. It frees us to meet one another not with unrealistic expectations but with grace.

But that also means we will need to forgive, and to do so often. Like Peter, we ask “how often”? More than we want to, more than what seems right, honestly more than we think we can. Because it’s not so much that someone will wrong you 490 times, but that it might take 490 attempts at forgiving one offense before we’ve really done it.

All of that is hard. Which means, if we are going to see our shared humanity, forgive one another, and live as a functioning community, it will only be out of gratitude for the grace of Jesus, who has already done all of that for you and always will. When we dwell on the grace poured into our lives, it spills over—flowing from our hearts out into the world, giving others the mercy and love Jesus has already given us.

Just like physical therapy, if unity is the goal, focusing on it will only lead to more pain, disappointment, and ultimately division. Because we will, and likely already have, let each other down.

But I am asking you to stay. Stay even when there’s disagreement, stay when feelings are hurt, stay when it feels easier to walk away. Because if we leave every time, we miss what Jesus is capable of through forgiveness and grace.

So let’s focus on those things now: on shared humanity, on forgiveness, on the grace already given to us. And then by the mercy of God and the work of the Spirit, unity will begin to take shape. It may not be perfect. The pain may not entirely go away.

But we will be able to function.

We will be able to live together as God’s people.

And we will have hope for the unity that is to come to all people, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

"Divided Tongues...Whatever They Are" – Acts 2:1-21

Occasionally I have prayed that the Biblical story of the giving of the tongues at Pentecost would take place in my own life – typically when I have been sitting at a desk with a language exam in front of me. I would pray and pray that the Holy Spirit would descend from heaven and fill me with the ability to translate a paragraph or conjugate the list of verbs. Often at such times I would feel the presence of the Spirit, but far from enabling me to speak a new language, it always bore the same annoying message: “You should have studied more!”

In my life I have studied five foreign languages: Spanish, French, Chinese, Ancient Greek, and Biblical Hebrew. Lest you think I’m saying that in order to impress you, let me clarify. I’m not saying I know five languages; and I certainly don’t remember enough of even one of them to consider myself bi-lingual.

Some of my best friends are bi-lingual. One spring break in college I accompanied four such friends on a trip to Mexico. Not the resort areas of Mexico, but a trek through the heart of Mexico – staying with local people, exploring off the beaten path. I was the only one who didn’t speak fluent Spanish. There is nothing quite as unnerving as being in a large group and being the only one who doesn’t understand what is being said. It was humbling and disconcerting. Whether it was just the five of us, or when we were with a group of locals, every time the group laughed I automatically assumed they were laughing at me.

We’ve probably all felt this way at one time or another. When we don’t understand what is going on or what is being said, we feel powerless. When we feel powerless we become defensive and stand-offish; everyone becomes a threat. And when we view and treat others as a threat, we give others cause to say things about us in that language we don’t understand. It is a vicious cycle built upon the irrational fear of the other: the other person, the other idea, the other perspective.

It is this context of fear and the inability to comprehend that the story of the apostles at Pentecost begins. In the last few days they have witnessed the betrayal and execution of their teacher. The betrayer, once their brother, died a brutal death. Their teacher, once dead, was alive, but had once again left them. They had little understanding of what was happening to them. They were terrified of the violent world outside their door. So, the apostles stayed huddled together in the relative safety of their home.

Into this scene, a loud noise, like the sound of a rushing wind, filled the house. Divided tongues (I don’t know what divided tongues are, but the writer says it was something like a flame) came to rest on them and they began to speak other languages. They began to speak in a way that made sense to the people outside their doors.

This story plays off of a similar story from the Old Testament about people speaking other languages – the Tower of Babel. In that story, the people of the earth used their one common language to conspire to build a monument to their own greatness and ascend to a level where they would become their own Gods. As punishment, God tore down the tower, scattered the people, and made them speak in various languages.

The Pentecost story picks up where Babel left off. The people are scattered across every nation under heaven; each nation and culture speaking their own language. God sends the Holy Spirit to enable the disciples to speak to and listen to people from every race, religion, and nationality. There is no call for a common language, but rather a call for common understanding:

The Holy Spirit fills the disciples with the common understanding that God’s promises are inclusive. This common understanding is so crystal clear that even Peter gets it (this is the same Peter who elsewhere in the gospels is always the one who says and does things that prove he hasn't quite grasped what Jesus is trying to teach him). Endowed with this new common understanding, Peter finally understands the message the prophet Joel brought from God centuries before when he said, “I will pour out my Spirit on all people..sons and daughters…young men…old men…even slaves…everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Each of us, at one time or another, realizes we are afraid of the world outside of the walls we have built around our lives. We don’t understand the languages being spoken around us. We don’t understand the younger generations; we don’t understand the older generations; we no longer understand our generation.

Into such scenes, we pray for a loud noise, like the sound of a rushing wind, to fill our homes and our church. We pray for divided tongues (whatever they are) to come and rest on us – to give us the ability to speak to and comprehend the languages, customs and ideas of people who are different from us. We pray that the Spirit would enable us, as disciples of Jesus, to speak in a way that makes sense to the people outside our doors.

Into our homes and into our church we pray for a new experience of Pentecost.
We desire an experience of the Holy Spirit that will remind us that we are God’s beloved creation and as such we are so much greater than our insecurities, fear, and pain. We desire an experience of the Holy Spirit that will send us out as God’s beautiful hands and feet in the world – revealing joy where there was pain, and hope where there was loss.

This is a curious and tumultuous time in the life of the worldwide church. There are voices on either side of church walls instigating hatred and fear towards the other. There is great apathy on the part of Christians who mistakenly think their faith is simply a ticket to heaven, as opposed to a way of life.

The solutions to the problems facing the church will not be solved by advocating intolerance, arrogance, isolation and disillusion. Rather, we cling onto hope in the face of despair; peace in the presence of hatred; and unity in spite of our division.

The Holy Spirit is the mighty wind that will blows the church into new and unexpected places of ministry. No one here knows where the Spirit will take us. Being a disciple of Jesus in this windstorm will bring the church, and you along with it, to unexpected places, and unexpected grace. It may only be in retrospect, and with inspired interpretation, that one day we can look back and recognize the Spirit’s driving wind rather than simply a frighteningly chaotic storm.

May the noise of the Spirit instruct you in the ways of peace. May the wind of the Spirit propel you along pathways filled with new people speaking unfamiliar languages. May the fire of the Spirit burn away your fears and insecurities and free you to live as the beautiful creature God made you to be. Amen.