Community: Blinded by love

Here is part of an interview with Shane Claiborne on community. We are looking at concepts of community here at Bethel Church over the next month. He psoes a fascinating challenge that a myopic love for our family or our nation (perhaps our church, city, friends, job as well) could cause us to lose sight of our God given call. The rest of the interview is here.

Let's talk about "doing life together." We have a nuclear vision of Christian community, where the church is divided up into families, and the families come together now and then but otherwise live their lives apart, sealed off behind the four walls of their separate homes. Does this make it more difficult to recover something resembling the community of the early church?

Without a doubt there's some deep wisdom in the scripture that says that we're not to conform to the patterns of the world but be transformed by renewing our minds. We're to have a new way of thinking about things, including family. Jesus really challenges the notions and even the idol that we have made of the nuclear family, when he says, "Unless you hate your own father and mother, you're not ready to be my disciple." I know that Jesus is not shunning a love for our family. He loved his mother, and as he was dying on the cross he encouraged John to take care of her. But he's pushing the boundaries of where our love stops.

A lot of times a love for our own family or our own nation creates a shortsightedness. This is my people and my family. But Jesus says, actually, you're born again. That means that if someone is in prison, it's like your own kids are in prison. If someone's suffering injustice, it's like you're suffering. I really love the line, "A love for our own people is not a bad thing, but our love doesn't stop at any border."

We are born again into a terribly dysfunctional family. If we're going to take our rebirth seriously, it should keep us up at night. It should allow us to be disturbed by the pain and the suffering that is happening around the world and even right next to us.