New Waters S4 | Episode 3
Embodied Worship
Highly personalized,
privatized,
internal,
non-material,
emotional,
understood by
and authorized by
the individual .
As the tides of our culture shift and become increasingly personalized and technologically advanced it is more important than ever for the Church to live out its calling; to be an embodied people that lives out the mysteries of the Gospel together. This is what it means to say yes to Jesus and follow Him.
Join Vijay and Dom as they talk about the current spiritual climate in Canada, Modern Gnosticism, the beauty of walking with a community of people over a long period of time and the wonder of the rooted and ancient Church.
Listen and read along below or join the conversation wherever you listen to podcasts.
+ Show Notes
+ Transcript
VIJAY: Hey, Welcome to Season Four of the New Waters podcast, episode three. And this season we're talking about the Church in a Sea of Change. And so happy to be with my friend Dom here.
DOM: Yes sir. Yes, sir.
VIJAY: Dom Russo. My name is Vijay Krishnan. We are both pastors in the church. So we're loving spending time talking about this stuff. Things we've talked about for many years together.
But as we're going to get into today, some stuff that feels kind of pressing, urgent right now.
DOM: And for many people, they don't think about the Church at all. And we understand that.
VIJAY: Yeah. So we're going to mess with you here. I thought we could start with just a story that you had mentioned to me, that I thought is a great jumping off point for this conversation.
DOM: Yeah, I think it might help our listeners kind of situate themselves as well. We hear the word Church in so many different contexts. It kind of rolls off our tongue, whether negative experience or even positive. And just a few weeks ago I was just in the context of a conference and I was on a panel just talking about some of these issues. And someone kept using the phrase, Hey, you know what? God is with you? And, you know, just remember you are the Church, and I am the Church. And there was this sense in me, that was like, that's not really true. Biblically, the sense that I was trying to be like, oh my goodness, do I say anything? I'm going to get kicked out of this. But I'm like, this is such a big problem, because I think a lot of people, even unintentionally, are trying to be excited about inspiring people. But the theology behind that, it can create a lot of problems that we're probably going to dive into in a little while, right? That none of us alone is the church, right? One is, we have a global sense of what the Church is, and two there's that we're an extension of the Church or we're part of this body, which is the Church. Yeah. And it's so much more important to see yourself that way because it helps you understand that you belong to something that's much bigger than just your feelings, your private connection, or a God in you, in your heart, with your Bible. You know that that's not enough, right?
VIJAY: Yeah. So we're going to get into this a bit in a bit more depth as to why we might think that way or what's the challenge with that. And I think if you're listening and you're your pastor in a Church and there are times, lots of times, in any leadership role, but certainly in the Church as well where you're like, oh, why am I doing what I'm doing? What's the point of this? You feel discouraged or tired. So hoping that this is an encouragement to you - what is it that you've given your life to.
DOM: You're not alone too, you know we're working this stuff out all the time.
VIJAY: Or if you're thinking about, you know, starting a Church, or being called into pastoral ministry, okay, what am I saying yes to? Why would I give my life to this? Or if you're just someone is like, you know, I don't know if the Church is for me, like just as an individual follower of Jesus and you're trying to navigate some of the hurt, perhaps you've had from the church or just disillusionment or unmet expectations or whatever that is. You can't just go, well, I can be the Church on my own or I can just sort of curate a space or a community that can be the Church.
DOM: I think too, Vijay, wouldn't you say that there's a whole other group of listeners who, because of COVID, have kind of found themselves creating new habits and new patterns that have kind of slowly disconnected from the life of the church without realizing it? You know, it wasn't like a bad thing happened and it wasn't even like their theology was all off.
VIJAY: It just happened.
DOM: And now we're left with, wait a second, what just happened? And why is this going to be problematic if we don't correct it somehow or pay attention to it?
VIJAY: It makes me think there's a number of things that are contributing to this, some of which are recent, some of which are ancient. Recent, say recent “technology”
DOM: The Internet
VIJAY: And you know, this is not an anti-technology thing at all, but I've heard, like well-known pastors, and past church leadership podcasts who will say things like, hey, the future of the church is digital. And as they amplified it, they said listen, you know, pastors are the ones who really like full rooms. That's more for our ego. But hey, what if instead, when there used to be a thousand people in the room, there's now 300 in the room, but you're reaching a thousand online. I'm like on one level I’m like oh yeah, that’s intuitive. But there's so many problems with that. One is the idea that “reaching people,” as in they saw a sermon, or your online service - ss what the church is, or somehow an online service is Church. And or that you're discipling them somehow, that when you saw the service or heard the sermon, that was discipleship, evangelism, whatever. And it's like, no. And I remember for our church, we just sort of got to this point. We stopped the online service, and we haven't started it.
DOM: That's big, bro. I don't know.
VIJAY: I felt great, actually. Well, it's just kind of complex. I knew why we'd started, during COVID. I just wasn't sure why we were continuing it. And I was just personally feeling like, I don't know how to disciple people. “Views” isn't following Jesus, or experiencing the transformed Christ life in community. So what is this even?
DOM: Well, I have a mentor of mine that once said, I was telling you, that if you're listening to somebody preaching and at any point, you can pause it when you want, you're not experiencing what the gospel is about. You know, it's a sense when God is convicting you, and you need to listen and you need to confess something to someone and you need to say, wow, Jesus is doing something new, and you're like, pause, I need a coffee, pause, I'm going to watch the game, pause, Netflix is on, right? Something is lost there, and I think for many of us, we even forget that that's actually what's happening to us. Yeah, it's one of the crises of the technology issue.
VIJAY: You know, the pandemic did this weird number on where we were forced to withdraw into “individual.” And then what we as churches did was, we amped up the amount of digital content that we will give you, in an attempt to, of course say, hey, we're not alone, we're going to shepherd each other through this crisis and whatever. But basically what that turned us into in some ways, is content providers. Nobody was trying to do something evil or bust the church, it just happened. But we have to acknowledge that moved us even further away from what it really means to be the Church, which makes a statement like, Hey, you're the Church, I’m the Church, sound intelligible - sound credible - sound good.
DOM: Yeah. You can be encouraged by something that's wrong. So I think we want to just remind everyone that, you know, we're all for encouragement, we're all for inspiring people. But in the process, we need to hold on to some of the essential things that make the Church a particular kind of body, you know, which we don't get to decide. You know, we didn't invent this. That's important, right? Yeah. We actually submit to something that is much more rooted and ancient. And, you know, I'll often say to people that Christianity didn't begin when you became a Christian, and it didn't begin, and it won’t die out when I stop being Christian, or leave the Church.
DOM: You were talking Vijay about maybe the more modern challenges, but there’s also other challenges right?
VIJAY: Yeah, there is one that I feel like in some sense is as old as the Earth. We've used this word Gnosticism.
DOM: In a previous episode.
VIJAY: So can you just explain that a little bit and why Gnosticism is actually part of this whole confusion around the Church and Christian spirituality?
DOM: Yeah, I think for the listeners it might help to just remember that Gnostic is kind of a term that's used almost like a catch all term, and it's a phrase that's trying to pinpoint a movement of religious and spiritual belief in the ancient world when the Church was starting, the New Testament church was starting, and even before that it was there, that had to do with spirituality, primarily as this hyper personalized, private experience. And the Gnostics had a certain way that they viewed the world. And some of them were fascinated with Christianity. They kind of loved Jesus and they loved some of the ideas in the Bible, especially if there were ideas that had to do with having a disembodied spiritual experience.
VIJAY: Spiritual as opposed to physical.
DOM: Right. Because for the Gnostics - It's often used, the phrase, that they're dualistic in their thinking. Meaning like spiritual things are really, really great, but physical things, the body matter, anything that's been created….
VIJAY: It's a Plato idea in some ways.
DOM: Little bit. The Gnostics will push Plato a bit more because some of the early Christians will find some good language in Plato that will help them explain that there's a world beyond this world, right? That's like, okay, we believe that too, right? So it's not just platonic. Yeah. And in the first century there was a neo-platonic movement. So it's Plato amplified, it changes a bit. So the Gnostics are this brewing group of people that are working out hard questions. And most of all, not only is there an accent, like an accentuation of hyper spirituality, devoid of the material matter, but also that that's where salvation is found? Salvation is found in disconnecting from the material, and just seeking spiritual experiences. And that there's a secret knowledge that resides in people and salvation is the spark that helps you realize that you can be almost in touch with God, like God, one with the universe, if you just kind of detach from your body somehow. And real salvation is those people who are able to do that. Yeah. And you think about how crazy that is that in the Christian story, God does the opposite.
VIJAY: Okay. But pause there for a second, because you might say, I’m not Gnostic, I’m Italian…
DOM: Like it's not a phrase we hear often, right?
VIJAY: But if I take what you just said and I said, oh, so you're talking about a way of understanding spirituality that is highly personalized - privatized - internal - individual - non-material…
DOM: Even highly emotional.
VIJAY: That I can curate and have for myself, apart from the world around me, and whatever. And understood by, and authorized by myself.
DOM: That’s kind of a modern way
VIJAY: Modern version of it. But it's like wow, that's so present.
DOM: It’s simplifying Gnosticism, because Gnosticism is much more complicated…
VIJAY: I just dumbed it down for my approach. But that's what, as I describe it like well, that's really present today.
DOM: 100%. We wouldn't call it Gnosticism, we just call it like many churches.
VIJAY: And it makes me think it's actually, we're like, oh, well, you know, is that just a comment on sort of the post structural world or whatever? It's as old as the Earth. I actually think that the primary temptation in the garden was somehow Gnostic in some way because, you know, the tempter comes to Adam and Eve and says, hey, God's holding out on you.
DOM: Special knowledge.
VIJAY: There's special knowledge that you could have if you take it for yourselves. Your eyes will be open, illumination knowledge was the promise of salvation, like that is ultimate reality.
DOM: Only some people can have it.
VIJAY: And certain.
DOM: Like a select few that can have it.
VIJAY: God knows, but he kept it from you, as opposed to what God was inviting them to, which was to trust him. Yeah. A love relationship - of trust. Yeah, right. And then what happens? Relationship is fractured.
DOM: And so I would add to, and as we wrestle with the ancient tension of this, you know, as we're dealing with the present question, is I think that the Gnostics in the first century and in that early development of the Church, didn't have the Internet. So the Internet is almost like a perfect storm with these Gnostic ideas already present. That kind of speeds up our desire.
VIJAY: Because there are certain things in the first century you just could not get by yourself.
DOM: No, you were a part of a big family. There was a network of communal…
VIJAY: Even sex. The pornography problem is a technology Gnosticism problem. Like when you say there's no God, and you remove this idea of transcendence, the orgasm becomes the new 30 seconds of heaven on earth.
DOM: Bodies are bad, so we could use them.
VIJAY: We can use them how we want. And I'm able to have this personally.
DOM: And there's no consequences, you know, because the bodies just could be thrown away. The real me is the spirit, and the real me is a soul. And you hear this kind of language in Church, like one day when we die, we're just going to go up in the sky as a soul.
VIJAY: Even the idea of heaven is this sort of spirit…body disappearance.
DOM: Very dangerous, very dangerous.
VIJAY: But I think even our understanding of our Christian faith now has been shaped a lot by this hyper-individualism, certainly in the Western world. Even some of the amazing work that Bill Bright and Billy Graham…
DOM: We’re like, who are these people?
VIJAY: It was like, hey you can decide to follow Jesus, and you're in a stadium with thousands of people you don't know, and you come to the front and tell somebody that you made this decision and somehow they connect you with it. Yeah, even the songs we sang at baptism were like, I have decided to follow Jesus. You know, “though none go with me - still I will follow”.
DOM: It's really individualized.
VIJAY: I'm going individual, whatever. And not realizing the Apostle Paul says, you're baptized into a body. Actually, baptism is leaving behind this individual separation from God and a community and being baptized into the life of the Trinity, and the body, and the new family.
DOM: I think this is such an important way that we also have let this hyper-disembodied, private spirituality, become the lens we used to read the Bible. And I hear most around this thing that I call the myth of two or three. The myth of two or three comes from a biblical passage in the Gospel of Matthew, where you often hear people use this phrase, hey, where two or three are gathered together, Jesus is with us. And it becomes almost the lowest common denominator for defining the church. It's almost like I don't need a lot of people. We don't need structures, we don't need a budget. We don't have anything that is highly organized. Two or three people are there. Jesus is there. That must equal the Church. The only problem is that's not what the passage says at all. The passage is clearly a passage about what it means when sin or disobedience has to be dealt with in an accountable manner. And the passage is about when a person is not understanding how serious their sin is. Two or three people should gather around them. To almost give them a picture, almost a trinitarian picture of like, We love you so much, but if you don't get serious about the sin, it's not only going to kill you, but it's going to kill all of us as well. And then it says that if that person does not understand how serious that is, then you need to take them to the Church. Church leadership then steps in.
VIJAY: It’s this increasing, positive peer pressure.
DOM: Yeah, right. And it's almost like those two or three people are an extension of the church, but they are not the Church. Yeah. And every time I'm in ministry and either teaching or preaching, I always think, how did this happen on our watch?
VIJAY: Because it sits in the broader context of understanding of our faith as personally. So even this idea of baptism, when Paul says you're baptized, you're baptized into a body. Let's get to the linchpin of this whole thing. Dom and I are not making this argument because we need people to come to church, and it has nothing to.
DOM: …do with attendance..maybe you've Vijay…
VIJAY: Ok, haha, whatever. The center of this thing is, the fact that God's, what C.S. Lewis called the greatest miracle of all time, the Divine.
DOM: He calls it the great invasion.
VIJAY: Yes. But the massive turning point in history, from which there is no going back, and now there's no understanding of God outside of this. It's the incarnation.
DOM: 100%
VIJAY: That God becomes flesh, that prior to Jesus…
DOM: ...takes on flesh
VIJAY: Takes on flesh. Thank you, Mr. PhD correcting my language.
DOM: It's an important language, I don't want to get you all “heresy” on us. Okay, well, stop this. Right.
VIJAY: You'll save me…
DOM: This takes on flesh.
VIJAY: But we were just talking about how up to this point God is Spirit. Yeah, Not flesh. Yeah, but takes on flesh.
DOM: The son will this something that
VIJAY: Dramatic, that God accommodates himself
DOM: And limits himself, now.
VIJAY: Yes. The greatest picture of God accommodating himself to us as humans, in a sense, in a language we could understand.
DOM: And also with a particular visibility that we would need. They’ll say in the Scriptures, “we touched him.”
VIJAY: Yes, that which we touched with our hands, saw with our eyes.
DOM: After the resurrection. Jesus is going to make them breakfast. Yes, isn’t that profound. He’s like you got to have something to eat. Just as almost a punch in the face to all Gnostic ideas, that the body is not important. No, no, no. All this is important. Yeah. You have to rest. You have to sleep. Your body is such an essential part of how your spirituality works.
VIJAY: And because up to that point, they had a cloud of fire, they had prophets, and now Jesus comes and says, No, I am in the flesh and then he starts the Church, which is His body. Flesh and blood. So that is the dramatic turning point in the history of God and spirituality with his people. Is God, in a bod[y], flesh…
DOM: 100%
VIJAY: And then starts the Church, which is His body. Like I think we go, oh, yeah, the body….It's like, no, no, His actual body, flesh and blood… extension.
DOM: Extension, Like, seeing his hands and feet.
VIJAY: Hands and feet. And not each one of us is the body. Together we are the body. It's like, you know that the person is saying, oh, you are the body. It's like a thumb standing in the mirror going, I am the body. I can do everything. Say no, you can't, you're just a thumb.
DOM: Where are the other fingers?
VIJAY: Right. It’s like there's something that is really unintelligible as Christian faith.
DOM: And the Bible should be unintelligible if we don't get this.
VIJAY: Yes, so let's, what do you mean by that?
DOM: I think the Bible needs to be re-visioned as the writings of the Church, for the Church. Now, I don't mean that people who are not Christians, we can help them see the beauty of how the gospel reaches where they're at. Right. But in a sense, most of the New Testament is the Scriptures being read out loud to people who’ve gathered as those who love Jesus as Lord and are worshiping him in community. Right? So they're together, and now they're hearing the good news of Jesus together and they're singing and they're practicing these important, you know, you can call them rituals or things that Jesus has instituted. We call them sacramental practices. Right? And I often say in our context that there are two things that Christians should never do for themselves. They just can't do it for themselves. They don't baptize themselves and they don't serve themselves communion. And we wrestle with this, right, because we are like, how do we carefully practice the sacramental mysteries, of how God's grace is really present to us, and we're strengthened by what happens, sacraments actually tell the gospel all the time. That's why they're so powerful. Right? And for a lot of people, it's so sad to say, like, I know people who are Christians are like, I don't think I need to be baptized. I've often said this at our church, you know, during COVID period, it was very difficult. We weren't sure, one, how to preach through screens, but then how do we even offer the body in the blood of Jesus. And I often said this to people. I said, did you miss that? Did you miss being reminded of what Jesus did for us and the image of Jesus washing his disciples feet, and taking the body and the blood and what that means for us. And many people just did not. They didn't miss it at all. I'm thinking, can you imagine the first century? Like if Christians would have thought one day this wouldn't even be important? This meal will be like something we just try whenever we want to. They'd be like, oh, so you guys are not Christians? Like, what else would they say? Or baptism doesn't matter…what? So I think we need to kind of reframe these things in a new way.
VIJAY: This isn't just about those sacraments in and of themselves, because you use this word, like sacrament means mystery. The church itself is a mystery. And in fact, the Apostle Paul mentions this sometimes as he's grasping at physical analogies and images to try to say. Guys, I don't know how to say this, there's a mystery in this.
DOM: Yeah, we're like a body. We're like a marriage. We're like, he's just looking for words, right?
VIJAY: And so in Ephesians, right, beautiful chapter, the opening of Ephesians, where Paul's explaining this incredible, to the praise of His glorious grace that He made known before the foundation of the world, this mystery that is now…oh, what's the mystery? Jesus died on the cross for your sins. If you believe it, you're going to go to heaven one day and have a personal spiritual experience? No! You know what he says about the mysteries of the gospel, that God was forming a people together. The mystery of the gospel, correct me if I'm wrong…
DOM: Is made visible…
VIJAY: Is made visible, in a body. How did we miss this?
DOM: In a body, that the world will be confused, that it can hold together. That’s important. Not just a body of people that like each other. It’s a body that for hundreds of years you see, it can never be together. And Jesus is like watch this…
VIJAY: Not divided by money within families, not defined by ethnicity, not defined.
DOM: In all those, the economic storms.
VIJAY: If you read the letters of some of the Roman emperors or whatever. They were confounded by this community of the church, you know, they're like.
DOM: They’re like, you guys shouldn't be getting along. Yes. And we should say, we know! We agree. So then what has happened?
VIJAY: Well, this speaks to another element, I think, when you talk about even how could we be getting along? There's so much of the New Testament. You talk about the Bible for the church, right? Yeah. There's so many in the New Testament letters that are that are primarily addressing relationship problems and relational issues because the good news of the gospel was primarily relational good news, not just intimacy with God, but like forgiveness, grace, compassion, mercy, service..
DOM: Confession. Confess yourselves to one another.
VIJAY: Generosity, confession, healing - all of these things both in the good side of things, like everything you get to experience, and some of the challenging things of the sin it reveals to you, you don't see any of that. I thought it was a pretty good guy, until I got married. And then I'm like, I could have either my wife not going to turn me into a selfish person or this is now a mirror playing back to me who I am. Well, this happens in community, which is actually why we run from community. In the church, when you’re doing life together, you cannot avoid the sin that comes up. And that’s when the Gospel becomes real.
DOM: It becomes incredibly visible. And I often tell people in our church this phrase, you know, we love the Bible, we teach the Bible. We believe it's so important. It's kind of the fabric of you know, how we understand our faith. But nobody in the Bible did Bible studies. Like, until we understand this. Like we have such a fascination because of the printing press, because we have Bibles everywhere. I think that there's so many of us that have been so blessed by the gift of the Scriptures, in a language we understand, the resources of Greek and Hebrew, all that, all that stuff is really, really good stuff. But I don't think anybody thought that the blessing of those things would make us move further and further away from an essential idea that the Bible is always read in community with other Christians being worked out. The hermeneutic or the interpretation of it is happening with other Christians. And in the first century, you couldn't read the Bible, and it was read to you out loud. Yeah. And so I think we have to find a way to almost protect people, in whatever settings we're in to say, we know you love, you're in a Bible study. But if you're in a Bible study, that's not making you be rooted in some church community, we don't know what Bible you're reading.
VIJAY: When you read Scripture faithfully, it always pushes you back into community.
DOM: And we're not saying you should stay in a toxic community, or in a painful place, we're not saying to not be responsible. Find that, find a place where you can grow and learn. And that doesn't mean I just like the pastor's preaching. Yeah, that's garbage. It's more like, this is a place where I can grow and give back, and I will let God use these people to form me, more and more in the way of Jesus.
VIJAY: So I was listening to a podcast that was talking about some of the failures of leadership in public sphere and in the Church. One of the guys who's on there, a sociologist, is not a person of faith. He was just observing. He said, Why is this happening continually, in the church, in the political realm, in corporate life, and everywhere, right? He said. Because communities used to be places that when you opt in to community, and he said the military, for whatever you think of that, is the best example of it. Because when you come into the military, your self and identity is broken down and you are reformed as a new person, now completely connected to every other person. Yeah. My son and I were watching that 1918 movie, right? Okay. Was it 1918? It was in with the guy, WWI.
DOM: 1917
VIJAY: 1917 - Thank you. Yes. And you're watching this guy go through incredible lengths, risking his life, over and over, or even whole groups of people to save one person. Why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense. Utilitarianism would tell you, you got your nine out of ten because you're going to lose four more if you try to go get that one. Why are they doing iit? Because their identity as a self was broken down and they were rebuilt and reformed as a unit, as a community. And he said, we expected that, rightly so from our political spheres, our churches, that when someone said, oh, I'm going to run for office, that that person's individuality will be broken down, and they would rebuild as someone who was formed in a community, that represented that community, that then was going to go to bat for that community, and care for the people. We expected that for our churches, that when pastors say yes to becoming a pastor, they're losing their self-identity, being rebuilt as part of a body, he said. But now those things, those committees aren't that way anymore. They're platforms where individuals go to build their personal
DOM: Their network
VIJAY: Yes. And so now they're doing egregious things that we never thought they would do. But that's because we've all bought into the system. It's not just the pastor's fault. It is also the community that says, we want you. We elevate individuals, and say we'll build the platform, will reinforce it for you, we'll give likes, we'll share whatever. And then, but that individual's not been formed. So I'm thinking, okay….
DOM: Yeah, you have to submit yourself to.
VIJAY: I am not being formed within the community if I don't have friendships that are dynamic, enriching, challenging. If I'm not letting Jesus reveal the brokenness in me, through my community, and they're being formed alongside them, what am I doing?
DOM: Yeah, I think there's this fear, that if we're vulnerable that way as leaders, then our community might not let us be the leaders. You kind of have to realize that I think the future of what it means to be a leader is to say, I still have a particular gift of leadership, a particular calling, a preaching or teaching here, but I'm like, you and I need to submit to the structures of accountability that are here. There are leaders here that will keep me accountable. That doesn't mean everybody gets to tell you what to do, but there's a structure of that. And and as you were sharing about this beautiful rewiring of my place, you know, within this bigger family, like the military one you were saying, I think about what we were sharing earlier about how the earliest Christians start to use new language to help each other learn this lesson, because they're like learning from scratch, right? So whoever's listening to this, like you feel like this is going to be hard to do. Just remember, we're not the first ones to do this. The earliest Christians are thinking about, how do we go from being, I'm a Greek, I'm Jewish, I'm Roman, I'm none of those things. I'm Egyptian, I'm African. Saying that's beautiful. The diversity is beautiful, but those are secondary to like we are one in Christ, right? They'll use the language of calling each other brothers and sisters. It's like this profound shift, right? It's not even their names matter or they're there because their names were linked to their identity. Sometimes, you know, whether it's a Greek name or Jewish name, it's like now they were brothers and sisters. And this way that they started to refer to themselves this way caused so many problems in the first century, because we have writings of emperors or governors or people who were watching this new religious movement emerge and like, we don't know much about them. And maybe some of that some of the listeners will know this. But one of the earliest titles used by the Romans to define who the Christians were, is to call them atheists. Number one, they had no temple, and their God was not like in a visible statue, because it was embodied in the community that they were. That was where God was present. They had these mysterious practices that some people weren't allowed into right away. So for the Romans, Christianity is fits a category which is mystery religions. The religions that are maybe helpful at some point, but they're very much mysterious, what they do. And the Romans have a lot of these mystery religions. They drink like the blood of someone. We're not sure, like how they do this right, and then they greet each other with kisses and they love each other and they're brothers and sisters. So one of the the refraining critics of this group, which we call Christians, was they have these incestuous relationship feasts, feasts, incest is happening, cannibalism is happening. There are atheists, for sure. So the Romans are going to be like, we got to shut this down. Like this is dangerous for us, right? But they commit to saying no, there's something so important about us rewiring our relationship to one another. That Vijay, you are my brother.
VIJAY: We're not going to drop the language of brother and sister.
DOM: We can't drop this language. We might have to be wise about how we use it or where we use it, but we will not drop the language that we are now, Jesus as our big brother. Yeah, and he's changed everything. Yeah, he's our savior. But in a family, the family language, he's the first fruits of what we get to become.
VIJAY: So let's talk about this because, in Eden, right, there is God creating this beautiful world, human beings and then a marriage relationship is put at the center of this, the biological family. Be fruitful and multiply. Jesus now comes and theologians will talk about Jesus being like the second Adam, or the recapitulation of the human race. Recreation. So now Jesus in the flesh is now the new human. Well, what would…But he's single.
DOM: No, no, there’s a multiplication that’s going to look different than just a marriage.
VIJAY: Right, and so what’s the commission, or the multiplication, that was not “be fruitful and multiply” applied to a husband and wife, this is now Jesus. And there’s many moments where the whole brother, sister language, and the God, your father in heaven, is Jesus redefining their existence built around not the family patriarch, and the extended family, but of God, the father, my father, he talks about. And you, my brothers and sisters, and he prays for the disciples. That is my brother. And who's my brother? Oh, all these people. We don't realize how radical that was. I mean, you weren't anything, if you weren't part of a family, if you weren't married as a man of his age. That was strange, right? That meant no family thought you were good enough for their daughter, or stable enough for their daughter. So Jesus is redefining this whole thing. So now our existence is primarily defined as brothers and sisters from very different backgrounds or whatever. That's the new understanding of humanity. Our marriages, whether we're married or a single, is secondary. Our sexuality is secondary to all of those things. And you can even see this in some of the New Testament writings.
DOM: I think it's so life-giving for people. And I think the pressures that so many young people feel about, I need to be married, I need to have kids, I'm single, I don't belong here. No, your singleness is a gift. And that's why even in the early church, you have the celebration of celibacy as a unique calling. And when people say to me, you know, that's too hard, you know, I'm not sure I even belong here because I don't have kids. And the church is about family. I'm like, If you don't belong here, Jesus wouldn't have belonged here either. He had no kids. He was single.
VIJAY: This is part of the problem, I think, why some people would opt out of a church, is because in a way, the church has held up heterosexual marriage with kids as ultimate reality, and everything else is sort of just second, you know, and imaginary.
DOM: We pulled that off. We're just not having any of that.
VIJAY: If you don't have kids, you're single or whatever. It's like, Wait, Jesus shows up as a single person and builds a family. Yeah, We have to understand, family first, in the body of Christ. And I would say practically Dom, this is where I would make the argument to someone who goes, well, I don't really need a church. I'll tell you this. I am not the same person I once was, because of the body of Christ. I have been shaped and formed so much by the people in my life. And yes, by my wife and my children. But my wife and I would both say that we are not the same people, because of the Church. Our marriage is not where it would be without the church in terms of having to raise. And the diversity of all of that community brings. Because where else in every other sphere of life, every other community you're in, it's like you either get graded, you know, Are you good enough for this? You made the sports team or you didn't.
DOM: Or, you matter when you produce.
VIJAY: Got a performance review, and you were good or not. Or you look a certain way. Whereas the Church is the one community, where and from the beginning, all the bets were off. It is the spirit that unites us. We're united in baptism. We share one loaf in communion, we share a life together around Christ. This becomes now the primary place where you become who you were meant to be. So this whole self-actualization thing that we have going on and we. Yeah, go, it's in the church, like you're going to get that in community. All of the outer relational forces around you, to help you become who you believe you're meant to be.
DOM: Yeah. And in our prayer again, for people, that this might sound easy on a podcast, but it's hard to do. It's hard to really almost shift the tide of our culture where everything is moving towards a highly personalized technological suit yourself model to something embodied, incarnational, and that there is no other way to really say yes to Jesus.
VIJAY: I think my encouragement to, let's say, pastors who are listening or contemplating pastors, I think it is one, like this is a beautiful moment to recapture the nobility of walking with a community of people over a long period of time, your self being formed by them, and you being a part of their formation together. I think it's so beautiful. And just as you said, an encouragement to those, it is hard. Don't give up. If the place you've been in was toxic, or just fell apart, or you've been in this season where you have been on your own. Our prayer and just by God's grace you will find a community where you can begin to experience this for the first time, or again.
DOM: Yeah, it's beautiful. I think that's a wrap, bro.
VIJAY: Cue the music.