Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Forgive and forget.
Growing up in my rural Texas town, conservative and mostly evangelical, I went looking for accepted truisms in the Bible, only to discover that they were never there at all. Gradually, I realized that life could be more complicated than these words allowed, and yet I am still surprised from time to time when I find myself clinging to a pithy proverb with the spiritual ardor that should be reserved for chapters and verses.
This too should pass.
The Lord’s mysterious ways.
I walked down the aisle of my Baptist church when I was nine years old, accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and never looked back. I was active in Girls in action, Bible Bowl, and my best friend’s charismatic church youth group. I attended Baylor, a Christian university. Everywhere I turned, I saw people who looked like me, talked like me, thought like me, and worshiped like me.
You are the company you keep.
Birds of a feather fly together.
I assumed that this kind of gathering was biblical in the normative sense. Doesn’t the Bible exhort us not to forsake the gathering of the saints (Hebrews 10:25), placing a high value on “living with” like-minded people? Living in such a homogenous world seemed like the natural order of things. I could not yet see the dark side: how easily we slide into idolatry of our own thoughts, confusing the familiar with the proper and the usual with the right.
Today my thinking is more complicated. Now that my oldest is a teenager, I see the benefit of encouraging her to gather with friends who share our values or faith. There are no guarantees when it comes to parenting, but the company children keep, especially at such a crucial age, indelibly shapes who they become. However, in his large public college, I already see the underbelly of the herd. The very normal human impulse to be with like-minded friends also tends to mean self-classification along social, racial, class, and cultural lines. Of course there are exceptions, but self-segregation is the norm in American schools.
This childish tendency becomes a bigger problem if we do not “leave the ways of childhood behind us” as adults (1 Cor. 13:11) – if we default to superficial homogeneity instead of reconciliation in Christ (Eph. 2:11–22) or, worse, confusing sinful self-classification with the will of God.
The temptation to make this mistake is strong. At every turn, signs of polarization appear: red versus blue, urban versus rural, secular versus religious, us versus them. Algorithms serve the news we to want hear, practically assuring us of our own correctness. Everything becomes political, and the boundaries between us have widened into chasms, so much that “Most Democrats and Republicans live in levels of partisan segregation that exceed what racial segregation scholars consider highly segregated. » Even men and women drift further away. At all scales, from our nation to our neighborhoods to our churches to our houses…we sort it ourselves.
Birds of a feather fly together is often true in practice. We may also find it comforting, reassurance that all is well in the life we have built alongside like-minded friends. But as Christians, such an influx should prick the conscience. On what basis are our commonalities rooted?
A few weeks ago, my pastor caught me off guard by revealing one of those places where I thought the Bible said something it didn’t say. We so easily misread Philippians 2, he says, where Paul enjoins Christians to have “the same ideas, the same love” as Christ (v. 2) and “to have the same mentality as Jesus Christ” (v. 5).
When most of us think of the word sharing the same ideascontinued my pastor, we hope to find like-minded people with We. But that’s not what Paul wrote. He has called us to conform our minds to be like those of Christ.
The first centers our lives and relationships on ourselves, our preconceptions and our personal biases. The latter centers us on Jesus. The first is an actualized idolatry: not the golden cow but our own face hoisted on the altar. The latter is our “true and proper worship” (Rom. 12:1).
Make no mistake: building community around us is not the calling of our Savior. Christianity is a monotheistic religion, but we were never meant to be a monolithic community. As Allen Hilton points out in A united housethe early Church transcended class, ethnic and religious divides: In Romans 16, “Paul painted a strange and wonderful family portrait, with aristocrats and artisans, traders and slaves, men and women, Greeks and barbarians, worshiping together. »
In this way, Christians were unique in the Roman Empire. The early Church drew people from diverse groups to gather in one another’s homes, marveling at what God was doing among them as they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to each other (Acts 2:42). -47). It is all too common today to find Christians who have lost this distinction. Our congregations become flocks of like-minded people in the worst sense of the word: we are united less by a common love than by a common enemy.
We might want to blame this dysfunction on political or religious leaders or on society in the abstract. But as Michael Wear writes in The spirit of our policythe mood of our times is a reflection of our own heart: “Many of our deepest political problems reflect the way our political institutions treat and respond to habits of the heart that are fundamentally rooted at the level of the individual. »
We may be confident that our hands are not soiled by dirty politics, but how often in our ordinary lives do we choose hostility over hospitality or contempt over curiosity? Feeling good and powerful is deliciously intoxicating, as I know from experience. These are ripe fruits from the wrong tree, and we feasted until we were sick.
If there’s one thing Americans agree on as the 2024 elections approach, it’s shared feeling of terror. Few Americans want a revenge between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, but this fear is not just about the unpleasant political theater that will last for months. It’s also about deeper anxieties: how to prevent already fragile relationships from becoming political fodder? How to resist shoot to make everything political? Are we passing on to our children the the ingredients of a civil war?
As followers of Jesus, we have an answer to this question, if only we could remember it. Remember: The word means “to bring to mind”, but it also means “to put back together”; it is an antonym of dismember. The Church must live according to both meanings of the word.
We must remember the eternal God in whom we live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), seeking more like-mindedness with Him each day. And we must recognize the extent to which we, as individual American Christians, have contributed to the dismemberment of our society, succumbing to the temptations that Jesus faced in the desert as we pursue our desire to be relevant, spectacular and powerful whatever the cost.
As we repent of our part in the destruction, we must take up our part in repair, using “the old rubble of past lives to rebuild…(becoming) known as those who can repair anything, restore the old ruins, rebuild and renovate. , make the community livable again” (Isaiah 58:12, MSG).
Trying to change a country’s trajectory can seem as futile as trying to redirect an asteroid. But we can certainly correct our own lives. When we are like-minded with Christ, we will adopt the nature of a servant. We will humble ourselves. We will not be motivated by selfish ambition or vain vanity. We will look to the interests of others, seeking “peace and prosperity” from cities to which we may well feel exiled (Phil. 2; Jer. 29:7).
Our Lord who “rejoices to see the work begin” (Zech. 4:10, NLT) does not despise our small beginnings. Nor should we. The season of Lent is upon us, and in a world that sometimes feels like it is turning to ashes in our hands, perhaps it is time to repent.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas-based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, AtlanticAnd Texas Monthly Magazine. Find it at carriemckean.com.
