Today I’m following up from our All Ages Worship Gathering we had for Palm Sunday with a couple of additional encouragements for my church as we enter Holy Week.

Why Is it Called “Holy Week”?

For most of us, “holy” isn’t a word we think about or use too often. We may imagine it has something to do with being very serious or pious about our faith. Some of us may associate it with an impossible moral standard or set of practices. In reality, the word holy simply means to be “set apart” or that something is “other.” There is something about its nature or character that is simply different from everything else in existence.

So why do we call this week “holy”? What is “set apart” about it?

There’s nothing special about the days in themselves, but what happened on these days that makes them holy.

So what did happen?

Traditionally, there is something that happens each day leading up to Easter, and there are scriptures that are usually read on those days to help us enter the story again.

Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11): Yesterday, we entered into the story of Jesus’ entrance into the city as the children marched around the room, and we all waved palm branches to celebrate Jesus coming into Jerusalem.

Holy Monday (John 12:1-11): While Jesus is eating a meal, his friend Mary weeps and anoints his feet in preparation for his death and burial.

Holy Tuesday (John 12:20-36): Jesus reflects on his impending death, letting his disciples know he will not be with them much longer.

Holy Wednesday (John 13:21-32): Jesus tells his disciples that one of them will betray him by handing him over to his enemies.

Holy Thursday (John 13:1-17; 31b-35): Jesus serves his disciples at their last meal together by washing their feet.

Good Friday (18:1-19:42): Jesus is arrested, put on trial, beaten, crucified, and dies. This is known as Jesus’ “Passion”.

Holy Saturday (John 19:38-42): Jesus is buried and lies dead in a tomb.

So what makes all of this tragedy and death so holy? There doesn’t seem to be anything “set apart” about it. Jesus was betrayed by a friend and ended up dying. This happens to people all the time in one way or another, doesn’t it? We have conflicts, we deal with loss and betrayal, and every human eventually dies one way or another. What makes this so different?

We must remember that Jesus is human, but also God. God, who created everything in the world, including you and me, loves this world even though it has become corrupted and broken. God, just like any loving parent would long to care for, or a skilled craftsman would desire to heal his creation. So God entered creation to restore it.

God in Jesus suffered horribly this week on purpose so that we could be restored. As 1 Peter 2:24 puts it, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds, you have been healed.”

God chose self-sacrificing love to restore and heal the world. It is the self-sacrificing, self-giving nature of God’s love during this week that makes it holy.

So to be “set apart” isn’t about being better than everyone else and keeping to ourselves; holiness is self-sacrificing love for a broken and hurting world. To be holy is to show perfect love as God does in Jesus.

This means through every bit of suffering and sorrow, every betrayal and false accusation, every whip lash and nail hole in his body, we are seeing what real love is like. That is what makes this week “Holy”.

I’d love to encourage you to follow along with the scripture passages for each day of this week. Take time to consider what Jesus was experiencing at that moment of the story, and ask for the Holy Spirit to help you follow Jesus’ example of self-giving love.

May we enter into the story together this Holy Week.

Thank you for reading. This section of my Substack picks up on themes from sermons in my local church. In my main Substack space, I write about the places where Church, Worship, Theology, and Culture meet. If that’s interesting to you, I’d love to invite you to subscribe!

This is a space for me to either explain more than I have time to do on a Sunday morning or expound more on a specific aspect of the message that isn’t entirely relevant to my main point. I’m writing this mainly for those in my congregation who find these extra resources helpful, so thank you to those from my church for being here!

Waiting is hard. I just ordered something last night on Amazon that will get here this morning! No wonder we have a hard time waiting when we can get things that quickly!

The Advent season teaches us all about waiting, especially with its principal character: John the Baptist. John knew how to wait. He was the last in a long line of “waiters”, looking for God to come into their circumstances and help them.

This month at our church, we are “Waiting With John” to see what lessons the last prophet has to teach us.

Yesterday, during our All-Ages worship gathering, we began our Advent waiting by considering Jesus’ words: “If a homeowner knew exactly when a burglar was coming, he would keep watch and not permit his house to be broken into” (Matthew 24:43).

We helped our children (and the grown-ups) understand that one of the first lessons we learn in the waiting is how to pay attention.

We live very fast-paced lives, and the opportunity to slow down and wait provides us with the ability to pay attention to what is going on inside of us, what we notice God doing, and who we are being invited to extend compassion towards.

This kind of paying attention to Jesus helps us remain faithful to him in the waiting. It is especially hard to wait when it feels like we have been waiting long enough for God to provide, heal, restore, renew, or awaken whatever it is we have been praying for. But the lesson of waiting helps us remain faithful by keeping us attentive to Jesus.

As we continue on in this series, we will look at two stories from the life of John the Baptist before our fourth week takes us to the birth of Jesus ahead of our Christmas Candlelight Service. So if you’re joining us or following online, here’s a brief overview of what’s coming.

Week 1 - Waiting teaches us to Pay Attention

I find I am a more faithful waiter when I pay attention to what or who I am waiting for. Waiting for God to draw near is no different. Will I be faithful in the waiting season? Only if I learn to pay attention to what He is doing. As the song goes, “Even when I don’t see it he’s working…”

Week 2 - Waiting teaches us Repentance

Often in the waiting, things come up: my entitlement because I don’t feel like I should be made to wait this long, my impatience, my arrogance, my self-sufficiency as I try and shortcut the waiting. All of these become opportunities to repent while I wait for God to answer in ways more perfect than I could imagine.

Week 3 - Waiting teaches us to Expect the Unexpected

It is easy when I do not see an answer to what I need to begin to doubt God’s work. It is easy to become offended when God answers others, but not me. It is important in the waiting to become attuned to seeing “seeing in the dark.” Letting our spiritual eyes adjust to the unique and unexpected ways that God is moving and answering our prayers.

Week 4 - Waiting teaches us that God Always Draws Near

What we must never fail to remember is that waiting is never a hopeless exercise. God always draws near. Not in our timing, but in God's. And when God shows up, everything happens, not just what I want or need. It is always so much bigger than what I’ve been waiting for.

As we enter into this Advent Season, I’m praying (for you and for me) that as we wait together in anticipation of God’s coming, we will be changed to be more like the One we are waiting for.

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This is a space for me to either explain more than I have time to do on a Sunday morning or expound more on a specific aspect of the message that isn’t entirely relevant to my main point. I’m writing this mainly for those in my congregation who find these extra resources helpful, so thank you to those from my church for being here!

“It doesn’t make sense,” was the report of a young woman in our pre-service prayer on Sunday morning.

As we gathered to pray, we discussed how the Father takes care of our needs: the sermon topic for that morning.

In response, this woman shared an experience she and her husband had on a recent trip to a relatively poor nation.

They came upon a street cart vendor who sold a handful of $4 meals to tourists each day. The cart owner explained that when his son was born, he needed a significant surgery costing thousands of US Dollars.

Somehow, in that time, he was able to sell a few extra meals each day and received money from friends who didn’t have much themselves. Miraculously, he paid for his son’s surgery and carries around with him the letter confirming payment to this day.

Then he said to them, “God provided.”

“It doesn’t make sense to us,” the woman explained.

I found this statement illuminating because it shines a light on a fundamental issue American Christians face about money: God’s provision does not make sense to us.

Yesterday’s text for my sermon, Luke 12:22-34, reads in part:

And don’t be concerned about what to eat and what to drink. Don’t worry about such things. These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers all over the world, but your Father already knows your needs. v. 29-30

Yet, in a culture where, even in the church, personal economic responsibility is lauded as the highest and most important of the virtues, it becomes hard to imagine a scenario where one receives what they need from an outside source that they did not work for.

A Divine Right to Money…and Control

American evangelicalism and its earlier Protestant predecessors came to these shores, predominantly from England and Germany, with a theology that assumed financial prosperity and entrepreneurship went hand in hand with God’s favor.

Eugene McCarraher, professor of Humanities at Villanova, observes that part of what the Protestant Reformation did was rework the “sacred” around material and market metrics. Writes McCarraher, “[they] espoused a systematic theology of the divine right of capitalist property.”1

In many ways, he argues, money and material possessions have become the sacred symbols of a new religion that uses Christian language filled with health and wealth language.2

We can see one of the most extreme versions of this logic applied to the so-called “Prosperity Gospel,” in which we are told to just give God more (i.e., to that specific preacher or ministry) and God will bless us with financial blessings. In fact, when we think about how we use the word “blessing” in our vernacular, it is most often, if not always, associated with some kind of material abundance.

In addition to McCarraher’s observations about money becoming a new religion, we also live in a world influenced by what is called Neo-Liberalism. Thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises shaped an imagination for an economic system where no ethic or religious virtue would interfere with what they thought to be a perfectly objective system.

The hope was to create an economic system that “naturally” sorted out the best from the worst. “Winners” would rise to the top and “losers” would be crushed, unable to keep up. This is so much of why we feel we are doing something wrong when we do not have as much money as others, or cannot afford that trip, or don’t have a larger investment portfolio. “Winning” in a purely fiducial sense has been turned into a moral virtue, and, in the church, a sign of Christian maturity.

So when someone says the Father providing does not make sense, I get it.

Since we have been raised in a society that tells us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make that money, if we can’t, we believe it is God’s will that we suffer.

Now I’m not advocating for laziness. That’s an unfortunate criticism that often comes back at people who make the kind of observations I mention above. God gave us work, and it is good. It gives us purpose. But it does not define us or give us a sense of security, which is what Neo-Liberalism and the “Protestant work ethic” attempt to do.

We have been raised being told we can make ourselves into whatever we want. We’ve been handed a thin illusion of control over what is actually a quite uncontrollable world.

A Cheerful Giver

We are almost insulted that we might need God’s help. That we might not actually be in control.

We cannot fathom someone making less than $20 a day, having everything they need provided for them. It smacks of laziness, “Can’t they do anything else?” We often wonder curiously. How on earth could they afford a surgery like this while living on so little?

Because of the illusion that we are the ones who are supposed to provide and make a way for ourselves in the world, it is so hard to accept that our Heavenly Father is a cheerful giver.

The Father has given us life. Our very existence is only happening because of the Father, yet we are still in disbelief that God is so pleased to provide everything we need.

I challenged our congregation yesterday to enter into Jesus’ practice of Generosity and Sacrificial Giving. I am convinced that as long as we hold onto what our culture says is most valuable, we will never be able to see how valuable we are to the Father.

It will never make sense to us that “it gives our Father great happiness to give [us] the Kingdom” unless we learn to let go of what we think makes sense.

This is a space for me to either explain more than I have time to do on a Sunday morning or expound more on a specific aspect of the message that isn’t entirely relevant to my main point. I’m writing this mainly for those in my congregation who find these extra resources helpful, so thank you to those from my church for being here!

Yesterday I preached about the call in Romans 12 to “be transformed by the renewing of our minds.” We took a literal approach to this command from Paul by examining how neuroscience, specifically our attachment styles, helps us understand how we need to renew our minds so as not to be tripped up in our pursuit of Christian community.

As I mentioned yesterday, I learned a great deal on this subject from a recently released book by Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw called Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection. Geoff writes on Substack at .

I’ve offered it as recommended reading to our church for our current series, “Together: God’s Vision for a Shared Life,” so in light of talking extensively about what I learned from the book yesterday, I wanted to offer a short review to encourage people in our church and my regular readers to pick up the book for themselves.

Made For Joy

As the Holsclaws explain, the incredible advances in the field of neuroscience have helped us understand how crucial joy is for our growth and development as human beings. From the earliest age, we find joy in the people, usually our parents, who are closest to us. This joy leads to secure intimacy and independence.

“Joy,” they write,

“is a relational emotion. It’s different from happiness. You can be happy all by yourself, based on circumstances. But joy needs another person - even if it is only the memory of another person. Joy is relational experience of sharing gladness to be with another person. When you are with someone who wants to be with you, it brings you joy.” (p. 20)

This idea that all of our brain development is so intricately connected to joy is revealed even more in the final part of the book, starting in chapter 10 as they depict the experiment of babies responses based on their mothers expressions (p. 126) and I could not help but immediately hear the words of Hebrews “For the joy set before Him he endured the cross…” (Hebrews 12:2).

Of course, what do I find immediately after this reference but an explanation of Jesus as the one who demonstrates what secure attachment with the Father looks like. Followed by the good news that Jesus, being in very nature God, becomes our source of secure attachment!

As we’ve been leaning heavily on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking about how the church community represents Christ to each other, this was such a profound insight to understand how the Christian community can extend joyful connection to help us grow in intimacy and independence.

Intimacy and Independence

When joyful connection is provided by our caregivers, we grow in both intimacy and independence. But the reality of sin in the world means that our bodies are marred by the effects of sin, and this includes the way we attach with each other.

We learn as infants to prioritize intimacy or independence which leads to various attachment strategies they describe as “survival skills” for living in different kinds of environments, or landscapes.

I found the metaphors of the four attachment styles so helpful for those who are not well-versed in the clinical terminology of attachment theory:

The Jungle (Anxious Attachment): High intimacy, low independence

The Desert (Avoidant Attachment): Low intimacy, high independence

The Warzone (Disorganized Attachment): Low intimacy, low independence

The Pasture (Secure Attachment): High intimacy, high independence

The goal of our life in Christian community and attaching to God becomes moving from the jungle, desert, or warzone, into a community where we joyfully help each other move towards life with the Good Shepherd in the pasture.

The second half of the Holsclaws book provides practical steps for moving into that life. I found the entire book incredibly insightful, accessible, and useful for both pastors and congregants.

What a powerful witness for the gospel we can be if we cultivate joyful communities of intimacy and independence!

I highly recommend picking up a copy today.

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This is a space for me to either explain more than I have time to do on a Sunday morning or expound more on a specific aspect of the message that isn’t entirely relevant to my main point. I’m writing this mainly for those in my congregation who find these extra resources helpful, so thank you to those from my church for being here!

If you are reading this and you’re a regular subscriber, welcome as well. I hope this is helpful to you as well. (Warning, this first one is way longer than my normal Substack essays 😬. Sorry, I just didn’t want to split it up!)

“2:18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion for him who corresponds to him.” 2:19 The LORD God formed out of the ground every living animal of the field and every bird of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 2:20 So the man named all the animals, the birds of the air, and the living creatures of the field, but for Adam no companion who corresponded to him was found. 2:21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was asleep, he took part of the man’s side and closed up the place with flesh. 2:22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the part he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 2:23 Then the man said,

“This one at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

this one will be called ‘woman,’

for she was taken out of man.”

2:24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become a new family. 2:25 The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed”

Introduction: Hot Coals and Tin Foil Dinners

My dad was a pastor for many years and was a particularly gifted teacher. He never missed an opportunity to see an object lesson in our surroundings to teach me about life following Jesus. One object lesson in particular has always stuck with me.

When I was a teenager, my parents were on this kick of making tinfoil dinners over a hot bed of coals. Hunks of potato, carrots, meat, cauliflower, and broccoli all made an appearance in those bland, steamy foil-wrapped meals.

One of those summer nights, after I had done what I could with my dinner, my dad took a long stick and stuck it into the coals. Slowly, he prodded a glowing lump away from the rest of the coals until it was completely isolated.

“See how the coals that are altogether keep burning hot?” He asked me. “Now look at this coal by itself over here, how quickly it goes out.”

We watched for not even a minute as the pulsing orange colors were slowly eclipsed by black until nothing remained but char.

“Christians,” my dad said, “Burn for Jesus when they stay together.” He pointed to the coals still glowing brilliantly in the fire pit.

“But when we get isolated,” he continued, “we can’t burn for Him anymore.”

This lesson has now been with me for about 25 years and has only become more relevant with each passing year. Even as a pastor, I believe it can be incredibly challenging not to isolate myself in the midst of ministry.

If being like Jesus means to become authentically human, then we cannot be fully human unless we share life together in the particular kinds of way that Jesus commands.

To say we need each other to follow Jesus is one thing. It requires us to acknowledge that if we’re going to “achieve” something, we probably need accountability or a support group. Sure, fine, we need that for anything in life that we wish to achieve, I guess.

But the second part of that claim is far more significant. Not only do we need to share life together in order to be human, but its corollary tells us that we are not fully human if we are isolated, and in particular, if we are isolated from the kind of community that helps us burn for Jesus.

A Loneliness Epidemic

This claim about isolation and our humanness takes on a different urgency when we consider the warnings that have become more and more prevalent in the last decade.

A 2018 Ipsos survey found that 54% of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well.

Earlier this year, Harvard’s Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership reported on findings of a study that found those saying they had no close friends had quadrupled since 1990.

Perhaps the most alarming news in this trend came when the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis in the United States. Some of the health impacts described in that report include increased mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, increased risk of heart disease, stroke, and dementia, premature death, poorer academic performance, and reduced productivity.

This culture of isolation seems to be egged on more and more by technology as we can now work remotely, order remotely, be entertained remotely, and do everything else remotely from the comfort of our homes. This convenience means it is so much easier, after a long day or a hard week, to go nowhere and see no one, completely disconnecting from the world.

West Milford, where our church building is located, is known as a place where people move to find space to spread out. Yet I continue to hear stories of people who feel isolated as a result of being too far removed from people.

The Church, the people who believe that God has founded a new family in Jesus, don’t seem to have much of a solution for this. According to Barna Group’s research, those who attend church are as likely to experience loneliness as those who do not.

The number of recent high-profile scandals involving pastors has not helped anyone consider the Church as a space in which we might find a solution for the loneliness epidemic. Even if people were not part of one of those large churches where the leader fell from grace, there are countless stories that you and others have experienced where things just didn’t work out for some reason. There was hope that this was finally the church community that would heal the aching isolation, only to be hurt yet again.

As a pastor, I grieve over all of these stories. I am saddened to hear of people desperately fighting against isolation, only to leave our community or another because of an unresolved disagreement. I hate hearing of the duplicitous church leaders that have not made their church communities a refuge for the weary and lonely like Jesus demonstrated when he said “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). And I am weary of the pull of the broader cultures individualistic allure that leads us to think we can support ourselves and even do “religion” on our own.

Is there any hope for our increasingly disconnected world? Or is all of this just inevitable? Is there a solution to the constant church conflict and church change that wounds so many of us and keeps us from being fully known? Is this even worth searching for, or is it overly idealistic? And even if I wanted to share life with other Christians, where would I even start in our day and age?

Perhaps the bigger question, for those of us who want to follow Jesus, is whether or not it is possible to become a mature follower of Christ outside of shared life together?

To put it in my dad’s words, can we burn for Jesus without being tightly gathered with other coals in the fire?

Over the next 7 weeks in our church, we will be exploring many of these questions and hopefully discovering some of what God’s vision for a shared life might be. I’m hoping to share some extended notes here with some things I didn’t have time to get into on Sunday morning.

I’m primarily doing this for people in my church as a supplement, but I hope it is helpful for others as well.

I believe the Church, at its best, is called not to be perfect, but to be a powerful witness to how life together can help us meet the problems of our world. Not just by meeting the needs of a loneliness epidemic, but by shaping us into people that are like Jesus: fully human and alive in all that God created us to be.

To help get us there, we need to name and understand some of the problems we face in a shared life together.

I propose three challenges (there are probably more) that contribute to this:

1. Cultural Challenges to Belonging - The Problem of Radical Individualism

2. Psychological Challenges to Belonging - The Problem of Past Pain

3. Linguistic Challenges to Belonging - The Problem of “Religion”

These three themes will continue to emerge through the rest of this series. For now, however, I will introduce each of them briefly before finally reflecting on God’s profound observation that “it is not good for humans to be alone,” as a way to help shape our imagination for what belonging could look like in the Church.

Cultural Challenges - The Problem of Radical Individualism

Shortly after the founding of the United States, the French government became curious about this bold new experiment called “Democracy” taking shape in the Americas. They sent Alexis DeTocqueville to explore and learn what it was like for everyday people who were experiencing this brave new reality.

What DeTocqueville found was rather curious and puzzling to him. He wrote,

“The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”1

There are striking similarities between the world that DeTocqueville described and the world in which we live today. We live apart from each other “as a stranger to the fate of all the rest…close to them but he sees them not…touches them, but feels them not…he exists in himself and for himself alone.”

America, the grand Democratic experiment, has been from the beginning also a culture that would continue to isolate individuals as we each pursued our own personal happiness.

It was the logical outflow of the broader cultural realities set in motion since the beginning of the Enlightenment. Humans were becoming increasingly individualistic in their thinking. We had left behind primarily agrarian societies in Europe that required thinking as a whole community to complete the work of tilling, planting, and harvesting.

We developed the ability to exist somewhat autonomously from each other. At least in our day-to-day lives. One could work a job in a city or town and pay for their food in the market and for a place to live. In the Industrial Revolution, factories became places where individuals became interchangeable and were further removed from any sense of community based on ties to specific land.

These increasingly individualized ways of thinking eventually transposed themselves onto how one thought about the self in relation to God and others.

Western society used to think of itself as part of a cosmos, which God had intricately made and ordered with purpose. Our connection to each other in broader society mattered, and we did not make decisions as individuals but as groups of people. Further, God was understood to be immediately present and accessible because the world and our community were charged, as it were, with the wonder of God’s handiwork. When Christians gathered in Church, they understood their time together as the joining of a sacred body together with Christ, who is its head.2

But that began to change during the Enlightenment.

One thinker who profoundly affected the way we think about ourselves and being a part of a community was Immanuel Kant. Kant believed individuals had the capability to be rational, autonomous selves, and as a result possessed the ability to decide morality for themselves on their own terms.

As a result of this, individualism increasingly took center stage in the culture of Europe and eventually North America, including within the Church. Instead of asking questions such as who we are to God or even who God is to us, Christians increasingly ask who God is to me.

This caused a profound shift in the way Christians began to operate, and eventually, as some Christian sects sought to freely practice their own forms of worship, Christians in the United States would even more so embody the ethos of finding God for “myself”.

We have become a culture that has so much freedom to be independent of each other that we no longer depend on each other. When anyone becomes desperately in need of any material or social assistance, they have no one else to turn to except the State. The State then needs to take on more and more responsibilities that used to be carried by extended families, local towns, and especially church communities.3

It isn’t that there is no possibility for relationships, but rather, while there are people all around us, we have become far too caught up in “our own thing” and now lack the imagination, the ability, or even sometimes the willingness, to break out of the individualistic lifestyle to which we have been raised.

We have begun to see relationships as inconveniences or commodities that we choose and discard as it suits us. As one survey found, many young people my age are encouraged to cut off their parents because “I just don’t need that negativity in my life right now.”4

Our whole social and spiritual existence has become a much more individual, personal, and private pursuit that, as DeTocqueville pointed out, we exist in ourselves and for ourselves alone.

Psychological Challenges - The Problem of Past Pain

Individualism in and of itself, however, is not the only problem we face.

Not only is society shaping us, but our individual upbringings have also wired our brains in such a way as to reinforce those cultural beliefs. These “wirings” of the brain present psychological or neurological challenges for us.

If you think about your own life experience for a moment, you are probably aware of past circumstances that have profoundly shaped how you make decisions about relationships and interactions with people in the present.

The decisions we make to engage or leave relationships and communities, the challenges we have allowing others to help us, and our inability to trust others, all stem from patterns that have been hardwired into our brains from our earliest development. We have been trained to believe certain things about what people will and will not do.

Our brains have developed ways of surviving these patterns, and they continue to operate well into adulthood. This means that even when things are going well, our brains might occasionally sound a false alarm!

The field of neuroscience has, in recent decades, opened up a breadth of understanding to help explain what causes this to occur. Two concepts in this field, Implicit and Explicit Knowledge, and Attachment Theory, are particularly relevant to the problem of pain that detracts from Christian community.

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge

There are two hemispheres in the brain, each with important functions.

The right side of the brain manages our strongest relational connections, our experiences of emotional connection, as well as our character formation. The left side of the brain is our analytical and conscious understanding center for facts, figures, and details.5

The reason this is all important is that when you and I have an experience with someone, all of the senses in your body send signals to the brain stem.

The brain stem begins to process all the information you are receiving through the right side of the brain first. It goes up to the front of the right side of the brain and then goes to the front of the left side of the brain, making its way to the back of the left side.

This means when you have already experienced a moment with someone, your right brain is already beginning to act based on prior experiences implicitly, before your left brain has had any time to cognitively process whether your reaction is rational or not.

The right, feeling side, of our brains can sometimes take over. Depending on how your brain has developed, well-worn paths of pain that have been wired into the brain fire up and sometimes cause new painful moments, which end up confirming previous experiences.

The implications of this are that our explicit knowledge of the left side of the brain that says “community is good for me,” can’t seem to catch up with the implicit knowledge of the right side of the brain that says “community has been bad for me.”

Attachment Theory

Related to Implicit and Explicit Knowledge is a concept known as Attachment Theory.

The simple explanation of attachment theory says that human beings are created for belonging and attachment.

Attachment starts literally within hours, if not minutes, after someone is born.

Based on how caregivers in one’s life respond and interact throughout infancy and childhood years, the brain begins to be wired accordingly.

This means that some have had their brains developed and wired in ways that actually cause them to act and believe that they are better off on their own.

While others have had their brains develop in ways that cause them to be overdependent on other people. This, unfortunately, tends to drive people away from them, making this person just as isolated as those who want to be on their own from the start.

This happens because brains develop what are essentially protection mechanisms. To help us cope, these mechanisms teach us to survive a lack of secure attachments and painful experiences by developing strategies and strengths that overcome these obstacles.

But those strengths of childhood become weaknesses in adulthood, as we try to learn how to develop close community and belonging - especially if we want to follow Jesus.

These different styles of attachment, along with understanding how Implicit and Explicit knowledge work, help us understand why, even if things are going well for a person in a church community, things suddenly go bad.

Someone has an experience that triggers one of those well-worn paths; they go into autopilot based on past experiences, and begin to distance themselves from the community. We say things like “maybe this isn’t the church I thought it was,” and we begin to look elsewhere and start the whole vicious cycle over again.

Like well-worn paths in our brains, we can’t seem to get out of the habits that cause us to press “eject” when any kind of Christian community sets off our warning systems.

Unless we find another way, we will be unable to cope with the problems of past pain.

Language Challenges - The Problem of ‘Religion’

Now to our third problem. In some ways, it is closely related to the first problem, but deserves some specific attention. This problem has to do with the word and category we call “Religion.”

When it comes to the challenges of isolation and sharing life together, the word “religion” itself creates trouble.

“Religion” typically refers to a set of beliefs and experiences that an individual chooses to adhere to or not. It is something we think of as distinctly not public, not socio-economic, and CERTAINLY not political. “Religion” tends to imply private and personal decisions. It has a sense of being separate from our day-to-day life.

The language around “what religion are you?” or “are you religious?” or “my faith got me through” creates a category that we hold alongside “What are your hobbies or interests?” As if religion is something we choose from a buffet, along with other items that are subject to our individual preferences.

While I’m not trying to downplay how God is involved in people’s lives personally to help them endure difficult situations and seasons, I do want to point out that these terms are used in an unhelpful and individualistic way.

To start, let me explain that the word “religion” did not exist in the ancient world. There wasn’t a person’s public work life, political life, economic life, and then also their “religious” life. To see any of these spheres as separated categories would have appeared to be quite odd for ancient people, including for the people who lived in the time of the Bible and wrote it.6

“Religion” is a modern idea created during the 16th and 17th centuries of the Enlightenment in order to describe what appeared to be sacred acts and phenomena in other cultures outside the European world. The word “Religion,” in English and other European languages, was then used to translate various words in the bible and other ancient texts.

When this concept of “Religion” became more common, it began to shape the way we thought about our relationship with the Divine. In Europe and then in North America, people began to think about Christianity as one having a separate private religious life or experience, and that certain things we do are “religious” and other things are “secular”.

This version of private religion has led to a belief that we have to have a private experience of God, and out of that, we can construct a version of religion that is authentic to our experience. This is much of the claim in evangelical and charismatic Christianity. We must have an experience or a moment of inner confirmation of conversion. If I’m not having that feeling or experience, I should perhaps question my salvation. This is unhelpful for so many reasons.

In a distinctly post-Christian culture, if we do not have an inner experience, then we pull back because we fear being hypocritical or inauthentic. Therefore, it begins to lead to the logic that if we feel like it, we go to church, to a life group, or serve in some way. If we don’t feel like it, we don’t guilt-trip ourselves because our inner experience is what tells us what our private religious experience should be like.

The theologian George Lindbeck describes the problem in this way:

“The structures of modernity press individuals to meet God first in the depths of their souls and then, perhaps, if they find something personally congenial, to become part of a tradition or join a church. Their actual behavior may not conform to this model, but it is the way they experience themselves. Thus, the traditions of religious thought and practice into which Westerners are most likely to be socialized conceal from them the social origins of their conviction that religion is a highly private and individual matter.”7

This private, personal “religion” makes it very hard to commit ourselves to community because, in order to truly belong to community and share life together, we have to orient our understanding of following Jesus around something outside of ourselves, apart from our inner experience. We are not able to adhere to the rules of the group; rather, we just find another group that is more in line with our inner experience, all the while completely unaware that we are not looking for a more authentic religious experience; we are simply keeping a kind of private faith separate from other people.

Often, this leads theologians and pastors to adjust the way they talk about Christianity to make it adhere to this experiential framework. We talk about “how to live your best life,” “how to find fullness in Christ.” Completely reasonable categories to find biblical support for, but it is assumed within a private a la carte spirituality, which cannot ever be authentically Christian because of the lack of the deeply communal nature of following Jesus.

These pastors, according to Lindbeck, never move us to where we need to go:

“Nevertheless, the exigencies of communicating their messages in a privatistic cultural and social milieu lead them to commend public and communal traditions as optional aids in individual self-realization rather than as bearers of normative realities to be interiorized.”8

They’ve created many models and frameworks to help people overcome their lack of authentic experience, and many of these have proved quite popular at times. Yet they always seem to come and go in fads because they are not sustainable as long as the language of “religion” is dominant.

What I want to say is that if we continue to talk about “religion” or “faith,” we will be talking about something private, which views communal life together as optional at best and completely unnecessary at worst. Or even, detrimental to being able to find my way with Jesus “authentically”.

Like the coals in the fire, we NEED each other in order to follow Jesus. It is impossible to follow Jesus while trying to keep a private religion. And so we need to think in new terms with new language. Or perhaps, old language understood anew.

It Is Not Good For Man To Be Alone

These three challenges that I’ve sketched here are surely not the whole picture. We could also include the isolation and division caused by cultural, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and gender differences - we will get to these next time.

But these three do help us begin to see how our society pushes us away from a communal mindset, why we think so individually about following Jesus, and why it is impossible to do so outside without a shared life.

The reason why it is impossible to be a Christian without sharing life in a Christian community is not “because those are the rules.” Rather, it has everything to do with what we believe about Christian community. And, even more, what we believe about humanity.

Genesis 1 tells us all humans are made in the image of God. The theological term for this is imago Dei. To be the imago Dei means we reflect and represent the nature of God, including God’s very triune, communal nature.

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, share community perfectly within Godself. This is a profound and utterly incomprehensible reality, but it is important for grasping what it means to be made in God’s image: Fellowship and community are essential elements of God’s nature. This means we cannot model the image of God fully on our own; rather, we NEED belonging in order to image God well.

In short, being made in God’s image means we were created for belonging.

Trying to follow God and live in the will of God on our own goes completely against the very fiber of our being.

As theologian Colin Gutton puts it, “to be in relationship with God and others is an essential feature of the imago dei.”9 God is God in a way that is three persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) in relationship to each other. Likewise, we would not be human without the network of relationships that define our being.

Stanley Grenz describes being the imago dei, not as being individual possessors of it, but rather as beings who image God relationally with others and God.

In our text from Genesis 2, God makes this point explicitly. All throughout Genesis 1, God creates, and it was “good.” He created humans, and it was “very good.”

Now the Genesis 2 creation account picks up, and we suddenly hear God say that this social situation was not good!

There were so many comments that God could have made: “Ok, remember to brush your teeth.” “Remember to always pay attention to me.” “Remember to be kind to each other.” “Make sure you eat a balanced diet.”

But instead God says, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

God wanted us to see from the beginning that we have been created for belonging. It’s in our very bones.

This leads to three brief observations from the text itself that help us understand the extent and shape of the belonging that we were originally created for.

1. We were made for collaborative relationships

In verse 2:20, we see that God’s solution to isolation was “to make a helper suitable for him.” The Hebrew word ezer kenegdo, to describe the “suitable helper,” has sometimes been used to argue for a hierarchy of status where the woman serves the man as his lesser helper or is only useful for raising children.

Yet a very quick and easy survey of the phrase ezer kenegdo throughout the Old Testament shows that it is most often used to describe God as the ezer kenegdo for Israel. No one would assume that God is less than God’s people. No, in reality, what Genesis is demonstrating here is what Derek Kidner observes, that we are “social being[s] made for fellowship, not power. So the woman is presented wholly as his partner and counterpart; nothing is yet said of her as childbearer. She is valued for herself alone.10

We are invited into these kinds of relationships where we share together in the work of the world around us, where we are not dominated or ruled over, but work together toward common goals in the world. This kind of shared work helps us see a little bit of what the Church is supposed to be like. Our leaders are not meant to lord their position or authority over the community, but serve as the least (Matthew 20:25-28).

2. Humans belong to one family

When Even finally arrives on the scene, it causes Adam to proclaim in verses 23-24 that “this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” The word “One flesh” is not intercourse between sexual opposites, but of the same blood, or “kinship bond.”

Essentially, Adam is saying, this is my “flesh and blood relative.” Another like me is here, another human. We have become far too comfortable with the habit of isolating those we believe to be different or “other” instead of recognizing that we are part of one human family. We are increasingly ok with cutting each other off, as the young person described doing to his mother.

When we do create relationships, they are filled with cliques and exceptions instead of an embrace of all those who bear the imago dei. Any kind of belonging that can survive the divisions of our time will be built, in part, on our ability to see even the most distant other as our flesh and blood relative.

3. Belonging is built on trust and vulnerability

Finally, this kind of belonging requires us to develop trust and vulnerability. Verse 25 comments that Adam and Eve were naked but felt no shame. To be “naked” literally means to “have no barrier.” “No shame” tells us that there was nothing to hide or be embarrassed by, socially or otherwise.

Allen Ross says, “The nakedness of the pair suggests more than their physical condition; it stresses the fact that they were completely at ease with each other. There was no fear of exploitation, no potential for evil. Nakedness was a sign of their purity and integrity”11

This lack of exploitation or taking advantage of one another means there was an inherent trust and vulnerability in this first human relationship. What’s more, it tells us that one of the crucial keys to true belonging resides in our ability to develop trust and remain vulnerable with others.

Especially when considering how our brains learn patterns of mistrust to protect ourselves, this pattern is particularly hard to unwind. But when we do so, a deep sense of being known for who we really are is available to us. There is an ease to sharing life together where one does not feel they are constantly performing for the other. It is a rich and life-giving place from which to live life.

Conclusion - The Need for A Second Adam

This all sounds wonderful, but we are still isolated – Adam messed up – he sinned, now humanity is broken.

We kill each other, we don’t trust each other, we exploit each other, we oppress each other, this group fights against that group, vulnerability is never offered, we see people as “other” instead of belonging to God’s created family. We’re isolated by our independence, our neurological wiring, and our private religion.

The good news is that while the First Adam may have brought all this brokenness into the world, the second Adam, Jesus, redeemed and restored the possibility of sharing life together in this way. Jesus has made it possible to belong to God and to each other in the way we were created for.

Jesus is ushering in a new creation that cannot be corrupted, and the Church is the witness to this new creation. A new way of belonging together!

So as we turn towards further weeks in this series, while we name the problems, we also remember that Jesus can be Lord over our belonging. Jesus can reframe our language, heal our neurological wiring, and bring us out of isolation back towards the burning coals we have drifted away from.