Community and the E-Tank

Yesterday, Dad preached on Philippians 2:1-4. His point was that in Christ God has given us all that we need to live Christlike lives - lives that reveal and glorify God the Father. Good stuff. One of his helpful analogies was the E-Tank (the emotional tank that we need filled before we can act out love). Now, that sounds a little like pseudo-psycho, feel good, self-help, love-me junk. But, I think his point was exactly the opposite, picking up on Paul's point. He was saying that we don't need to focus on self when God has taken care of us so extravagantly in Christ. Our E-Tanks are so full of Christ's love if we decide to live by faith that we can act out love even when we feel distant from God. Mother Theresa is the great 20th century example. She loved and loved and loved even though she lived the last 50 years of her life without any feelings of closeness with Christ. She lived by faith, choosing daily to believe in the goodness and beauty of God. 

Too often our participation in community with one another and with Christ depends on our feelings of comfort. That is exactly backwards. The life lived by faith trusts with or without feelings, and faith can even redirect or overcome our sense of comfort. An example of this regarding community in the Church is worship and prayer. We tend to like songs and prayers that give us comfort or make us feel good. But our comfort is never God's concern. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has a lot to say about community, and I'll come back to him in future posts, but his discussion on the Psalms has helped to challenge my own thinking on and experience of worship and prayer: "it does not matter whether the Psalms [or the prayer or worship song] express exactly what we feel in our heart at the moment we pray. Perhaps it is precisely the case that we must pray against our own heart in order to pray rightly. It is not just that for which we ourselves want to pray, but that for which God wants us to pray. ... It is a great grace that God tells us how we can speak with, and have community with, God." And our community with God is the basis for our community with one another. So, when we sing or pray Scripture (or Scripturally-based songs and prayers), they allow us to fellowship with God and with one another. This is true whether or not I feel authentic when I sing or pray along. In other words, I'm telling myself to get over myself. Of course there are songs and prayers that come from places other than Scripture or from the Holy Spirit, but if my goal in approaching worship is to seek community with Christ and His Body, then I can respond to even those cases with grace and humility rather than with criticism and disengagement.

- Josh