A Word from Pastor Lisa: On Group Projects
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”
— 1 Corinthians 12:27
In school, I despised group projects. As a type-A personality, I always felt the pressure to take charge, and often, to do all of the work. I saw a meme the other day that read: “When I die, I want all of the people who did group projects with me to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.”
As we struggle with fear, anxiety, and division in our country, I saw a Tweet from Kate Bowler, author of Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I Loved. Kate is a 40-year-old scholar in the prosperity gospel, and four years ago, she was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. She knows a lot about fear, and one thing she’s learned from fear is this: “I am a group project.” By that she means, she cannot get through this on her own. Every time she attempts to do life by herself, things get worse. She has to “accept the indignity of interdependence because reality can only be shouldered together.”
In 1 Corinthians among other places, the apostle Paul reminds us we are part of the Body of Christ and individually members of it. We belong to each other. Following Jesus is a group project. We must accept the “indignity of interdependence” because we’re not getting through our current reality on our own. To make matters worse, we might need to rely on the help of others whom we dislike, whom we’d prefer to ignore, or who view our country very differently.
As much as I’d love to be a lone ranger, I can’t make it through this pandemic without all of you. We can’t dismantle racial injustice, poverty, and oppression as solo actors. And we can’t address the entrenched political divisions in our country, which also mar the church, as individuals. We need each other. If Christianity is a group project, we are struggling right now to do life together. Our wounds and divisions are very real, and we can’t dismiss or ignore them.
There are a lot of simple solutions and platitudes circulating on social media right now. Many of those come from Christians in places of power and privilege. My hope is that we will approach the group project of our faith from a place of humility, with attention to those on the margins. Here are a few suggestions for next steps:
Be still and breathe. Pray. Meditate. Remain in the moment. Listen for God’s Spirit. When the eyes of your heart are open, reach out to someone different from you. Listen to their stories. Give thanks that like you, they are children of God.
Conspire for a transformed world. The word “conspire” means “breathe together.” We have to breathe together if we’re going to make it through these troubling times. We have to look at our country with Gospel-shaped lenses, being honest about all of the ways we’ve fallen short. We have not been our best selves, and we need to repent. Then we also need to conspire together in creative ways to dismantle unjust structures and rebuild beloved communities. How? By doing the next loving thing, one small step at a time.
Hold onto hope. We need the “hope that does not disappoint us” that Paul describes in Romans 5. No matter what happens with the election or the pandemic, the road before us is impossibly difficult. We need the hope of Jesus, which is not a shallow hope, but a hope that endured even death on a cross and was born again into new, resurrected life. That’s the kind of hope that won’t disappoint us. During this turbulence, we must hold onto that hope together.
“What life have you if you have not life together?” T.S. Eliot asks in the poem Choruses from the Rock. “There is no life that is not in community, and no community not lived in praise to God.”