A famine of fellowship
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
Jeremiah 17:7-8
I read this beautiful image in my Bible reading this morning, and prayed it would be true of both me and my church family. Clearly the allusion is to Psalm 1, of the man who remains rooted and fruitful through meditation on the word of God; and perhaps to Amos 8, and the coming famine of that word. And so here is a picture of hope - in the midst of Jeremiah's prophecy on the coming judgement and destruction of Israel, the Lord may continue to bless those who have deeply rooted themselves in Scripture, such that even without it, or without the blessings that come through covenant obedience, they remain firm, unflappable, and fruitful.
It's fair to say that any famine of God's word in our churches today would have to be self-inflicted. (Sadly, this is too often the case.) The Bible is available in over 1500 languages in a myriad of translations (at least in English), of the making of many Christian books there is no end, and the internet is awash with sermons, podcasts, blogs, Bible reading notes, apps... There is a feast of the word of God (perhaps even too much, if such a thing were possible - I may come back to that), which makes its neglect all the more tragic and culpable.
However, right now Christians are facing another famine. In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic - when in the UK we are not currently permitted to gather in groups of more than 2, or even leave our houses except for absolute necessities - we are experiencing a famine of fellowship.
Spiritual fellowship
We should note that this is something rather different than a mere craving for human contact. Or at least, it should be. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man more used to isolation than most, wrote a book about the topic of Christian fellowship called Life Together. It has its quirks - among them his absolute insistence that the only singing that is acceptable in Christian gatherings is metrical Psalms, sung not only in unison but in the same octave - but the first chapter in particular is wise and insightful and would be utterly revolutionary for our understanding of church if we allow it to sink in.
Bonhoeffer's big point in this chapter is that there is a profound difference between human (what he sometimes calls "carnal") love and spiritual love. Human love greatly desires human community. It seeks others so that it might get satisfaction and pleasure from them. It might even sacrifice something for another person, as long as there is something in it for itself. But it will swiftly break down when there is nothing to be gained:
Human love is by its very nature desire - desire for human community. So long as it can satisfy this desire in some way, it will not give it up... But where it no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short - namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and calumny.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p24.
By contrast, spiritual love desires Christ above all things. It will pursue human community not to demand things from others, but to serve them by bringing Jesus to them by his word. It binds itself to other people, not to create structures of dependence or to fulfil its own desires, but to help others be formed in the likeness of Jesus. Bonhoeffer says that we have therefore no "immediate" fellowship with other Christians - we relate to them not directly, governed by our own desires, but through Jesus; and our love for them is shaped by how Jesus wants us to relate to them:
Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires - all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ... Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p25.
This means that at various points I might decide to pursue fellowship with someone who I don't really like for the sake of Jesus; I might decide to loosen the ties of fellowship with someone I really like because it would be better for them to spend time with someone else who needs them more; I might decide to break fellowship altogether with someone who is living in unrepentant sin.
The point is that true Christian fellowship is not just "doing nice things together with other Christians." If we want to pursue that, we will very quickly reach the limits of human love for others and begin only spending time with the particular members of our church with whom we "click", with whom we share a particular point of view or a particular set of interests, and we will do all that for our own benefit rather than theirs. True Christian fellowship is based on our real mutual common interest - Jesus himself - and pursues the furtherance of that interest in the other person - praying for and speaking the word to that person so that they might become more like Jesus.
Physical fellowship
But whether we deeply appropriate Bonhoeffer's teaching or not, the point is that this life together must be physically together. As Bonhoeffer notes, commenting on Paul's desire to see Timothy face to face (2 Tim 1:4): "The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer." Imprisoned by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer felt the pain of this more keenly than most of us ever will. If you'd offered him a Zoom meeting with his church, or told Paul he could Skype Timothy from Rome, they might well have taken the offer - but something would still be lacking.
That something is the unarguable fact of our bodily existence. Nancy Pearcey's book Love Thy Body pushes back against the split between "physical" and "spiritual" that so many of us have unconsciously and instinctively swallowed. I'll write more on that in a future post. But the main point she makes is that the idea that we are made up of a "body" and a "soul" - such that if you got rid of my body I would still be "me", and that therefore the body is a sort-of optional add-on - owe more to Plato and Kant than the Bible. The Scriptural view of humanity is unremittingly physical and embodied - from the goodness of creation in Eden through the bodily resurrection of Christ to the physical reality of the new creation. We are our bodies.
And if that is fundamentally true of both our original design and our future hope, then we cannot be satisfied with disembodied life in the interim. We are rightly thankful for the technology that enables us to hear the word of God at all, and rightly aware of the opportunities that a greater online presence brings - a greater reach to people who wouldn't normally physically come to church, for example - but a virtual "gathering" does not express the same reality that physical gathering does.
The physical local church gathering is an earthly expression of the physical heavenly gathering - a foretaste of the new Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:18-24). A physical gathering enables me to serve others in ways beyond the preaching of a sermon - a kind word, a friendly smile, the pouring of a cup of coffee, shuffling down a pew to make room for someone, taking someone aside to chat and pray. A physical gathering forces me to be face-to-face with those I am called to love in the ways Bonhoeffer suggested - those I like as well as those I don't like. It forces moments of awkward silence between people who have nothing in common, until one of them shyly starts talking about Jesus, the one thing they do have in common, and the Spirit begins his shaping work through the conversation. Physical gathering helpfully limits us too. There are a million people I could love - and yet, right now, I can talk to maybe two or three of these people, in this room, in the next 15 minutes. That gives scope to my actions and liberates me to actually get on with the work that's in front of me rather than agonising about the work I could be doing. That causes me to prayerfully rest in the sovereignty of God concerning the things I can't do.
Online "gatherings", though, have none of this. They are disembodied and therefore feel paralysingly limitless (we could do everything! We could reach everywhere! So what on earth should we do?!). They bring me into contact with only those people I want to be in contact with - or who want to be in contact with me. I can serve in one sense - I can bring the word to people - and that is the most crucial sense of all, and a tremendous blessing. But only about 5 people in an online church service are active, and the rest passive. And no-one watching in has any sense of a gathered community; no-one can see the way Christians love one another, and therefore their vision of the love of God is impaired (see 1 John 4:12).
I have no solution for this other than to lament, and to wait for the lockdown to be lifted. I look forward to the great reunion of that first Sunday together - it will feel like a true foretaste of the new creation. But in the current famine, let's continue to pray that the vision of Jeremiah 17 would be true for one another - that we would not be fearful or anxious, but that our leaves would remain green, and we would not cease to bear fruit.