Not always the obvious. Lenten reflection.

Your brokenness
as mine
is not always
the obvious...
the things
on the surface,
easily seen...
the stuff we like
to point out and
stare at.

Your sin
as mine
is often deep within
unspoken,
cloaked in secrecy,
not so readily
defined.

Your fear and pain
as mine
is rarely what we
talk about
really
talk about
with honesty.

Even though...
we pretend to
be experts about
each other,
especially inside
the church.

We judge each other.

Perhaps this is why
many people
have no desire to
be part of the church.

At this point and time
in our journey...
I don't think we can
get around the truth...
the church
is broken.

Our insistence that we
should all think
and
believe alike
ignores the fundamental
truth of what God
has done for
you and me.

Dear Brother Bonhoeffer
says it best:

"Our community consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. That not only is true at the beginning, as if in the course of time something else were to be added to our community, but also remains so for all the future and into all eternity. I have community with others and will continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and deeper our community becomes, the more everything else between us will recede, and the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is alive between us.....

Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community that were denied them elsewhere. Such people are bringing confused and tainted desires into the Christian community.

Precisely at this point Christian community is most often threatened, the danger of internal poisoning, the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful image of pious community, the danger of blending the devout heart's natural desire for community with the spiritual reality of Christian community." (Life Together p.34)