DO UNTO ONE ANOTHER

“If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have given you an example, that you also should do unto one another as I have done unto you.

John 13:14, 15

There was a time when I loved being part of a church.  It was a place of warmth and comfort, a place where people knew one another well and spent time with each other, not only on Sundays but during the week at school functions, picnics, and my favorite, pot luck dinners.  I volunteered as a youth counselor at MYF and led a folksingers group, Colossians 3:16.  We became a part of one another’s lives and we watched out and cared for one another.  It was a natural growth of community and I still keep in touch with some of these folks, even after 40 years have passed.  They, in many ways, are family to me.

Time moved on and so did I.  Changes began to happen in the world, in the church, and in me.  My church experience became one of conflict instead of comfort. One by one the churches I got involved in got bigger, needed buildings and got more corporately organized.  Eventually the internal battles and politics became something I did not see as what a church should be, so I left and carried on my own relationship with God.  After many years I ended up following my desire to be a writer and found myself in a seminary.  Church once again entered my consciousness.  But something very strange had happened in time and space.  When I tried to renew my association with church, I found it to be a very different place than I had experienced.  The world had entered a Post Modern phase and the church followed in its footprints.  Everything had changed.  I felt like Rip Van Winkle, who had fallen asleep for many years and woke up in a very different world.

Besides the big changes of de-goding God, denying the Bible, and de-deifying Jesus, there was a huge change in the way people were with one another.  The do unto one another as I have done for you pattern that Jesus demonstrated was all but gone.  There were committees, ministries, and hired employees set in place, each one carrying out their assigned function like a well oiled machine.   I remember going to lead a workshop at a church and there was to be a lite dinner served.  I went in, introduced myself to the folks there and started to help set the tables with them.  Someone quickly came up to me and actually took the plates out of my hands and told me, “This is the job of the hospitality committee.  You are leading the workshop so you can go and prepare”.  I felt sad that some how a barrier had been put up because of what our function for that meeting was.  I also felt sad because as I sat by myself in the room where the workshop was to be I could hear the talking and laughter going on in the room where the dinner was being set up.  I felt like I was missing out on the fun.  I missed my pot luck dinners where everyone just pitched in and joyfully did what needed to be done, enjoying one another’s company while they were working.

The saddest experience came with my mom.  She was legally blind and in her 80’s but very independent.  She wasn’t able to get out and about anymore.  After talking to her one night on the phone and hearing about her dinner of saltine crackers, I called the pastor of her church (my home church) the next day to see if something help could be available.  The minister contacted the head of the Stephen Ministry and she said they could be of some assistance.  A group visited mom, explaining what assistance was available through their ministry if she wanted it.  Mom was embarrassed and insulted and refused help, saying she didn’t need it.  The key to this story is that the people who came were folks my mom had known and worked with for over 40 years, as a Sunday school teacher, a your counselor, a preschool teacher, and a member of the congregation.  They approached her as an object of the ministry, not as a friend or an one another.  They left and told her that they couldn’t help her if she refused and in refusing them she was refusing God.  When I heard about this interaction from my mom I felt in my heart that something is horrible wrong with this picture.  I have gone on to observe that this is not an isolated incident but is where the church is at in many ways.  In professionally organizing things we have forgotten about the humanity of what is being done.  People we are helping become our clients or our job, our example of doing for one another.

The division used to be the world and the church.  But now the church is now divided into different functions, ministries, jobs, and cubby holes that wind up in conflict with one another.  Meanwhile people inside and outside of the church are broken and hurting while the planning and arguing against one another continues.  I am convinced that this is not what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Do unto one another as I have done unto you.”

I propose we lose the titles, the labels, the things that divide us and make us more or less important than one another or more spiritual or holier than one another, and simply be one anothers to one another.  I would also propose that this is how we should be outside of the church as well.