Four Levels of Relationships

As Jesus shared the Last Supper with his disciples, he prayed that everyone who believes in him would be “brought to complete unity,” as the NIV translates it.  A better rendering of the Greek might be “so that they might be completed or perfected as one.”  However you word it, Jesus wants his followers to be united.  In fact, our faith and discipleship will be lacking until we reach that point of unity.  Of course, our unity is based on the saving work of Christ, and not upon our own feeble human efforts to try to get along with each other.  And yet, the Church is (and always has been) a collection of people who bicker, disagree, and sometimes even attack each other.  The perfect unity that Christ wants for us is far from complete.

I’ve recently read an article that describes four levels of relationship that people can have with each other.

1. REJECTION is the denial of any relationship at all.  We believe that the differences between us are so great that we have nothing to do with each other.  The barriers that separate us make it impossible for us to find anything in common with each other.

2. TOLERANCE means that we’re willing to put up with each other.  We’ll make space for others to “do their thing,” but that’s about it.  We won’t harm each other, but we won’t help each other either.  It’s the kind of relationship where you hold the other person at arm’s length and never really trust them or feel comfortable around them.

3. ACCEPTANCE is a big step toward the kind of relationship Christ wants among his disciples.  It means that we recognize one another and acknowledge each other’s value as a child of God.  We are willing to listen and learn from each other.  But it is still not the relationship that Christ truly desires; acceptance does not complete our oneness.

4. NURTURE goes beyond accepting and receiving from the other person.  In this final level of relationship, we actively seek out the other person.  A nurturing spirit drives us to cross the lines that lead others to rejection or mere tolerance, in order to share, serve, and sacrifice.  When we nurture another person, we defend them against attacks and abuse that others may direct at them, especially when the attackers are people who look and believe like us.

I invite you to reflect on the relationships in your life.  In particular, think about how you relate with others who are also followers of Christ, or who claim to be followers of Christ.  How do you relate to them?

• Do you reject them, and deny that you share a faith with them?
• Do you tolerate them, and put up with differences that trouble you?
• Do you accept them, and recognize that they are also part of God’s family and plan for the world?
  Do you nurture them, and seek to open your life to them in service and love?

Being a Faithful Member

If you are a member of Old Union Church, you took a vow to be “a faithful member of this congregation, giving of yourself in every way.”  The Presbyterian Church’s constitution explains that this vow includes “taking part in the common life and worship of a congregation.”  Are you living up to your promise?

First, are you taking part in worship at Old Union?  Like just about every other church, we’re happy if half of our members join us on Sunday morning.  Of course, other commitments and issues occasionally keep us from worship.  But where else would it be acceptable for only half the people to fulfill their promise?  Would your bank be content if only half their customers made their agreed-upon mortgage payments?  For some bizarre reason, we take our commitment to financial institutions more seriously than the ones we’ve made to the Lord of the cosmos who died for our salvation.

“Taking part in worship” means more than merely showing up physically.  It means that you come to church on Sunday prepared to get down to business.  Even before the service begins, you focus your heart and spirit upon the task ahead of you.  During worship you actively seek to be aware of the Spirit’s presence among us.  As we read and reflect upon Scripture, you open yourself to the ways that God wants to touch and change your life.  Through our hymns, prayers, and offerings, you present your entire being to the God we love.

Second, are you taking part in the life of Old Union Church?  Worship is the first and most important part of our church’s life, but it is only the starting point.  There is so much that happens, or could happen, in our church outside of the Sunday 11:00 hour.  If you are only coming to church for worship, then either someone else is carrying the responsibility for our church’s life that God has in mind for you, or our congregation is not doing everything that God wants us to do.

God’s desire for our role in his plans for our church is constantly changing.  Over time, the most faithful thing for you to do may mean stepping back from a responsibility you’ve had and making room for another person to fill that niche.  God’s will is dynamic and constantly changing.  However, when you move out of one role, it is so that you can move into a new one.  If you say that you’ve “taken your turn” doing something at the church, it means that now it’s your turn to do something else.

We live in a society that encourages us to think of ourselves as consumers.  It’s up to someone else to make things happen for us, so that we can sit back and enjoy it.  Whether it’s sports, movies, or even keeping the roads clear, we expect there to be someone to handle it…someone other than us.  The church is different.  God loves us enough that he wants each of us to take part in the wonderful things that he is doing.  If you’re not sure how God wants you to fit in, just tell him that you want to.  It won’t take long for him to show you.

Are You a Chicken or a Pig?

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful farm tended by the Brown family.  Farmer Brown was a hard-working, friendly sort of fellow with a close and loving family.  The animals of the farm loved them all, but they were especially devoted to his youngest daughter Susie.  Every morning she as she made her rounds from pen to pen to feed them, she greeted each animal with a cheery hello and a friendly pat.  No matter how cold and rainy and miserable the night had been, the animals knew that their mornings would start off bright and cheery because of her.

One morning, however, Susie did not come to the barn to feed the animals.  Her older brother Joe, who came to feed them instead, was friendly and kind.  But everyone missed Susie and wondered where she was.  Eventually the dog scampered down from the house with the news.  “Susie is very ill,” he reported.  “Mrs. Brown took her to the hospital in the middle of the night and is still there with her.  The whole family is very worried.”  The mood in the barnyard shifted in an instant as curiosity became concern.  Even though it was a bright sunny day, a heavy dark cloud of apprehension hung over them all.

The next morning, when Joe came once again to feed the animals, everyone saw the distress in his eyes.  It was apparent that he hadn’t slept all night.  A few minutes later, the dog arrived with more sad news.  “Susie is has gotten worse.  The doctors say that she will not get better without a special kind of medicine, but Farmer Brown does not have enough money to pay for it.”  As the news sunk in, the cow suddenly spoke up.  “I have an idea!” she exclaimed.  “Let’s put on a fund-raising dinner to pay for Susie’s medicine so she can get better!”

The barnyard suddenly filled with excitement as all the animals discussed the cow’s idea.  They were eager to be able to help the little girl that the loved so much.  After much discussion, the chicken got everyone’s attention.  “All the humans love a big meal at the start of the day, just like we love the food that Susie brings us in the morning.  I propose that we have a ham and egg breakfast.  I will happily supply the eggs.  Who will provide the ham?”

All eyes turned to the pig, who slowly and thoughtfully stood up in his pen and looked at the chicken.  “If you give eggs for the dinner,” he said, “you can go on as you always have,” he said.  “But my help means that I have to commit my very life.  But because I love Susie, I will do it.”  The barnyard fell silent as everyone realized the sacrifice the pig was willing to make.

Are you a chicken or a pig?  When you express your devotion and love to God, are you able to go on with life as usual?  Or does your commitment to him change everything about who you are?

The Meaning of Blessing

One of my pet peeves is the way many Christians use the word “blessing.”  It’s common to hear someone say "I've been blessed," "It was such a blessing" and so on.  It’s become a religious way of saying "I was lucky," or "Boy, I'm glad that I have that.”

To receive a blessing is to have someone bestow favor upon you.  The Old Testament patriarchs like Isaac and Jacob bestowed blessings upon their children before they died.  The blessing may include material possessions like land or cattle.  But more importantly, the blessing was a bestowal of goodness upon the person.  They were endowed with something special that would affect their character and identity.  Being "blessed" doesn't mean simply receiving something good, or even having things work out well for you.  It's even more than acknowledging that God is the one who is responsible for something good in your life.  Being blessed means that you are different person.  You have been changed in a powerful and positive way.  In Matthew 5, Jesus began his famous “Sermon on the Mount” with the beatitudes: a series of descriptions of how we are blessed in various circumstances.  The beatitudes are not about wonderful things coming your way.  They are about how the things that come your way will change you in amazing ways that draw you closer to our Lord.

A lesser-known passage that helps us understand what it means to be blessed is Psalm 67:

“May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us,

that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.”

The psalmist seeks God’s blessing for himself and his community, but he does so for a very specific purpose.  It’s not about himself and how he will benefit from God’s blessing.  He wants to be blessed so that everyone will come to know God, and that God’s plan will prevail over the world.

To sum all this up, being blessed means that God transforms us in order for others to blessed and transformed themselves.  We may be tempted to cling to God’s blessings and keep them for ourselves, rather than recognizing that the way they change us can be a way for others to be changed as well.  If we hold onto the blessing for ourselves, we block God’s pipeline of grace and joy for the world.

It’s for us as individuals, but it’s also true for us as a church.  The Lord has blessed Old Union in many fantastic ways.  But the blessings are not meant for us alone.  First, they are not simply heavenly goodies that we can enjoy like trick-or-treaters on November 1.  The blessings that God has bestowed upon our congregation are meant to change who we are.  Pray over this question: “How has God transformed Old Union through the blessings he has given to it?”  Second, our church has not been blessed for its own sake.  We have been blessed so that those around us, especially those in our community, can discover God’s blessing for them through us.  Pray over this second question: “How can Old Union’s blessings bring others closer to God?”

Pittsburgh and the Presbyterian Church

It’s fitting that the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly will be meeting in Pittsburgh, beginning on Saturday.  It’s fitting, not just because Pittsburgh, per capita, has more Presbyterians than any other city, and not just because it will be the first time that the national decision-making body will meet in the ‘Burgh since 1959.  In many ways, the character and composition of Pittsburgh and the PC(USA) are similar.  Here are three.

First, Pittsburgh is more like a compact collection of towns than a single city.  Because of the rivers and the hilly terrain, and because of immigration and settlement patterns, the city is made up of many neighborhoods, each with a very distinct personality.  Shadyside and East Liberty may be right beside each other, but they are about as different as night and day.  A few years ago my stepdaughter lived in Bloomfield, which is nice.  But if she lived about a half block in one direction, she would have been in Garfield.  And that would have kept us up at night.

In the same way, our denomination is becoming more like a collection of neighborhoods than a unified church.  It’s not enough to say that you’re a Presbyterian to have a sense of kindred spirit with each other.  We reserve judgment until we know which “neighborhood” you’re from.  Where do you stand on ordination issues?  What’s your perspective on the authority of Scripture?  Are you more concerned about social justice or morality?  In my opinion, recent changes in our denomination have made it easier for us to identify with our neighborhoods.  The new Form of Government allows each presbytery and session to establish its own manual of operations.  So things that are “normal” in one part of the church are unheard-of somewhere else.  Just like, in Pittsburgh, Homewood is completely different from Fox Chapel.  Second, our standards of ordination are now determined more fully by the local ordaining body (session or presbytery) than by national standards.  The potential now exists that someone who is an elder or minister in one Presbyterian “neighborhood” won’t be recognized as such in another one.

Second, the adage “You can’t get there from here” applies to the roads of Pittsburgh.  There’s no neat checkerboard of streets and avenues, like you’ll find in cities built on pancake-flat terrain.  The roads in Pittsburgh follow meandering streams, skirt steep slopes, and accommodate every other geographic challenge that they find.  To make matters worse, the locals have their own names for these highways, which you’ll never find on a map or a road-sign.  If you want to travel from downtown to Monroeville, “everyone knows” that you take the Parkway East.  Everyone, that is, except for the highway signage people, who call it I-376 East.  You won’t find the Tenth Street Bridge between the Ninth Street and the Sixteenth Street Bridges; that’s where the Veteran’s Bridge is (also known as I-579).  Confused?  Don’t worry; you will be.

Once again, Pittsburgh and the PC(USA) have a lot in common.  Sure, we have a labyrinth of confusing bureaucracy, just like any other large organization.  It can be infuriating, as groups seem to work at cross-purposes, oblivious of what others are doing.  But the issue runs more deeply than that.  Some of us have such deeply entrenched convictions that “you can’t get there from here,” if you don’t have the same beliefs.  We’ve lost the ability to see eye-to-eye with each other.  Roads that should connect us only seem to drive us further apart.

But there’s a third way that Pittsburgh and the Presbyterian Church are similar.  For all of their differences, Pittsburghers share a common identity.  We’re proud of who we are, and there are many things that rally us together.  We commiserate over the potholes that spring up faster than PennDOT and the city can fill them.  We’ve all enjoyed summer days at Kennywood Park.  And of course, there are the Steelers.  It doesn’t matter if you come from Manchester or Regent Square or Mount Lebanon; chances are there’s at least one Terrible Towel in your house.  Any differences that we have with each other pale in comparison to the way we all feel about “The Mistake on the Lake” (i.e. Cleveland) or Baltimore, the city of purple pigeons.  If you’re from Pittsburgh and don’t have at least a little bit of Black and Gold in your blood, you’re a rare exception.

I’ll leave it for you to decide: is this something that we Presbyterians have as well?  Do we have a common identity, a common devotion, that trumps anything that disconnects us from each other?  We say that we do: that the saving grace of Jesus Christ and our devotion to our Lord is the guiding principle of our lives and of our church.  But is that how we live?  Is that how our commissioners and delegates will deliberate next week?  Will they interact with the love and respect of brothers and sisters in Christ?  Will they recognize and appreciate each other’s desire to further the kingdom of God?  For all of our sakes, I hope so.

Tax Collectors and Zealots

The Presbyterian General Assembly will meet in Pittsburgh during the first week of July.  This will be the first time since 1959 that elders and ministers from across the country will come to our area to make decisions that steer the course of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  If this year’s meeting of “GA” is like most, some of the issues and decisions will spark controversy and strong disagreement.  In fact, decisions from past GA meetings have led some congregations to leave the denomination because in good conscience they could not remain in fellowship with others with whom they disagree so strongly.  Others are seeking ways to reorganize the denomination so congregations can associate with other “like-minded” people, in order to limit their contact with people who believe differently from them.  It’s natural for us to want to be with people who think like us, and to limit or cut off contact with those who don’t.

Matthew’s description of Jesus’ twelve apostles (10:2-4) paints a different picture.  This small band of men who worked and studied closely together included at least two men who normally wouldn’t want anything to do with each other: Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot.  As a tax collector, Matthew worked to support the rule of the Roman Empire over Israel by taking money from his neighbors and giving it to Rome.  As a Zealot, Simon actively resisted Roman rule.  Zealots were the “insurgents” of the time, and eventually started an all-out revolt against Rome.  In Jesus’ time, it would be hard to find two Jews that would disagree more with each other than Matthew and Simon.  People like Simon wouldn’t even consider Matthew to be real Jew because of the way that he helped their nation’s enemy.  He had abandoned their country and had desecrated their faith.

Even though Matthew and Simon disagreed bitterly over a matter close to their hearts, Jesus brought them together.  Because there were only twelve people in the group, they couldn’t avoid each other.  Jesus forced them to find a way to share fellowship and to work together.  That doesn’t mean that Simon stopped being a Zealot (according to Acts 1:13, he was still a Zealot even after the resurrection), and it doesn’t mean that Matthew quit supporting Rome.  But through the powerful presence of Jesus, who had brought them together, they discovered a way to accept and respect each other…even to love each other.  I suspect that it was possible because Matthew and Simon recognized that they commitment to Jesus overshadowed any other commitments or beliefs that they had.  And I’m sure that the presence of Jesus in their lives showed them how to be reconciled to each other.

Things may come out of the GA meeting that deeply disturb you.  There may be decisions in our own congregation that annoy you.  There may be people in our church that you can’t stand because their opinions are so different from yours, or because they have done something that offends you.  At times like these, remember Matthew and Simon: brothers in the faith in spite of their strong disagreement.  If Christ was able to bring them together, he can bring us together as well.

Our Community Is the Mission Field

Anyone engaged in international mission puts a lot of effort into learning the culture of the people that they are going to work with.  As one mission trainee put it, “We need to learn the culture in order to be accepted into the culture so that we can work in the culture.”  The explosion of world-wide Christianity happened only after European and American missionaries stopped insisting that converts must live according to western cultural standards in order to be “real” Christians.  It’s easy to cringe when we think about how they made South Pacific Islanders wear heavy woolen clothing and forbade Africans from drumming and dancing.  They confused the gospel with their culture.  Once they became wise enough to realize that the gospel flourishes in every culture, they got out of the way and allowed it to do so.  Now, mission workers seek to understand the culture that they enter, instead of imposing their culture upon their hosts.

This all makes perfect sense when we’re talking about international outreach, but we Christians fail to recognize its importance when we try to share the gospel in our own communities.  When we invite people to join us in the adventure of faith, we expect them to conform to our standards.  They’re supposed to sing the songs that we sing, dress the way that we dress, and do the things that we do.  When we act this way, we’re no different from European missionaries trying to put hoop skirts on Polynesians.

“Wait a minute!” you may protest.  “The people in our communities live in the same culture that we do.  They’re the same as we are.”  Well…are you sure about that?  Do people listen to the same style of music in their cars and on their iPods that they would find in church?  Do churches have the same “feel” as other public facilities in the area?  Does church have a jargon that would be unfamiliar to a non-Christian?  Is the church clueless when it comes to things that matter to people in its town?

Unfortunately, many of us Christians don’t even know the answer to these questions because we live in a self-imposed Christian bubble.  A few years ago, when our church had an “Invite-a-Friend” Sunday, one of our members told me that he didn’t know who to invite because he didn’t know anyone who wasn’t already going to church.  This gentleman is typical of many of us.  The more involved we become in the church, the fewer ties we have to the un-churched community.  And of course, there are elements of the culture around us that we Christians find unsavory: rough language, overuse of alcohol, and questionable fashion choices.  So, we avoid people and places where we find them.  We’re just like missionaries who were appalled at grass skirts and wild dancing.

It’s time for us to view our communities as a mission field with a different culture.  The time is long gone when churches were the center of the community and the focus of its social life.   Like mission workers going to a foreign country, we need to learn about a different language and different lifestyle patterns.  Then, we can help people discover the gospel’s presence in their own way.

The other night I went to a concert at a club in an old church building.  The place was packed (on a Thursday night!) with people who PAID to get in.  The enthusiasm in the place was exhilarating.  But as I enjoyed the music and the crowd, I couldn’t help but to notice the architectural residue from the buildings past use.  This was a place where people used to gather to worship our living God.  Apparently, over time the church became irrelevant to the community it was in, and eventually sold the building and went out of existence.  What would have happened if the congregation would have studied the culture of its community and took the risk of changing its ways so that the same passion that I saw that night would have been directed to Jesus Christ?