I must confess that I'm feeling rather pensive today...

I had the opportunity to attend a rally yesterday afternoon at Batesville First United Methodist Church.  It was a “challenge” rally to hopefully inspire clergy and laity to begin to examine how to reignite the fire in our lives, churches and communities.  Being a United Methodist gathering, there was a rather large emphasis on connectional relationship.  (“One church with 1100 locations,” as our resident Bishop, James E.Swanson puts it.)  As I heard Andy Ray, Blair Jernigan, Cheryl Denley and John Garrot share wonderful words of encouragement about the exciting possible future, and the potent promise of God in the UMC’s current context, I began to think…

What is meaningful relationship with our congregations and our communities? 

True and sincere connection of soul to soul is a seeming impossibility because there is always some barrier between me and my neighbors.  I can never know their hearts completely.  I can only share in their joys or pains to the extent that they will allow me access to them, and they in mine for the same reasons.  I can’t achieve a pure connection even in my most intimate of relationships… those with my wife and children.  However frank and open, however sincere and purposeful I try to be I cannot penetrate the walls between myself and others to the point of vanishing into one another. 

So how do we who were designed for connection and relationship deal with a reality that stares back at us saying that true and honest connection on that level is unattainable?  What if the answer is in seeking the only relationship that can reach that level?  A relationship with God in Christ.  Christ became the mediator, I think, not only between humans and God, but between humans and humans.  He stands in between a people who are disconnected and becomes a conduit through which we connect in more powerful and meaningful ways.  Seeing through His eyes opens our own to the truth of our neighbors’ beauty and importance.  Reaching with His hands, we are able to be agents of healing and comfort.  Speaking with His voice, we are able to tell the truth of God’s enormous and unconditional love.  Hearing with His ears, we hear the cries of pain and the shouts of jubilation singing from the very souls of those around us.   Conversely, others seeking relationship with the same Christ experience the same things through Him from us.  Beyond that, He even stands between us and those who can’t believe, or won’t admit that He is there… facilitating those relationships as well, if we are willing.

Andy closed the rally with a call to prayer, saying (in essence), “We can’t do any of this if we don’t begin with prayer.”  Connection with one another begins with prayer.  This is why our prayers of intersession are so vitally important.  It may also be why Jesus, even as He advised us to “pray in our closet” so that we didn’t confuse good prayer technique and false piety with honest conversation with the Maker; also encouraged and lead corporate prayer.  Sincere prayer, offered in the name of Christ, may be the purest form of fellowship available to us.  Christ stands between us, and we can only reach one another through Him. 

If we want to ignite a fire… if we want to start a relationship… if we want to build the kingdom… if we want to grow the Church, then we have to start by strengthening our own relationship with the mediator.  We need to live and be in that relationship, and let Jesus lead us to the rest.