Can you imagine what this would be like: You go home after a long day at work. You are tired. You eat. You watch a little television — something truly mindless — and it lulls you asleep. Several hours go by, and then you wake up in the middle of the night. It’s dark. Somehow the television is off. You must have turned it off. You must have been watching it. You can’t remember what happened, but you know you’re in your den. You know it’s your television, and you know it is somewhere in the middle of the night, and you need to go brush your teeth and get into bed so you can sleep for whatever remains of the night.You walk into the bathroom, pull out the toothbrush and toothpaste, and then you look in the mirror. That is when you see them. Those ears, those ears on the side of your head. They are not yours. How did somebody else’s ears get to be on your head? Aghast, and horror stricken, you blurt out, “I don’t want them!” You reject them, but nobody asked you what you want. You want them off, and you want your own ears back again, but nobody is there waiting to take care of you. You reach up to grab them, as if you could rip them away from your body, those foreign members that are not really parts of your body, but you can’t. They are attached. You cannot feel them. You cannot accept them, but they won’t budge. They are not you, but they are you at the same time.Here is something else.Bermuda is like a lifeboat and we are all in this boat together. We belong to one another. However, Bermuda is also like a small town in which people enter into life at some level or another, some social station, and there is nothing anybody can do to change that. Some were born in this small town, but others come for a time along the way. Some will be privileged and have options, but others will be scrambling just to eat and have a place to sleep. Some will be accepted and others will be rejected, or if not rejected outright, they will be held at a semi-polite distance. Some will get a great education, and others will disdain education altogether. It is not just that this happens TO people; these are the places in which they find themselves, and they inhabit their places.Regardless, we belong to one another in this small-town lifeboat, and the church is supposed to be like that too. That is, the members of the church belong to one another. The way the New Testament talks about it, there is no restriction with regards to access to God, favour from God, or opportunity for meaningful life, and all Christians are members of the body of Christ. There is nothing that makes one person better than another, nor anything that makes one member not really a member, not really needed. In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, no male nor female, and no slave or free person. Although not all are identical, and although not all have the same calling in life, all are equally acceptable to God, loved by God, and all are equally of the household of God.I love what the church is supposed to be. No newcomers in a small town who can never escape that status. No Bermudian and guest worker. Nobody just passing through and regarded as second class. Nobody just a transient hireling. Nobody a “land owner” of the church. The church belongs to the Lord, and all those who belong to Him are members, nourished by their relationship with Him and their knowledge of God. The members look at each other and know one another. They are part of one another. Each one is acceptable to the other because each one is completely acceptable to God. There is difference, but the differences are a celebration of God’s creative variety, and there is freedom to be real, knowing that there is no condemnation.I love what Christians are supposed to be. A Christian is a child of God and a citizen of another place; so, Christians do not get sidetracked trying to build empires and fiefdoms in which material possessions and positions of power make it seem as if the Christian can attend to his or her own security. A Christian exceeds a this-life-only perspective. A Christian is an expendable servant — a heroic person who sacrifices him or herself for the eternal purposes that brought Christ to Earth in the first place. Jesus is the lamb substituted for Isaac on the mountain with Abraham; He was the lamb of the Passover, with his blood smeared across the doorposts so that the angel of death would pass over and not take the firstborn of Israel. Christ is the propitiation for our sins so that God could be just and the justifier, passing over our sins. All of that was set from eternity past, and Christ was commissioned by His Father to bring it about in time. He was the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 in the fulfillment of His commission, and the Christian is grafted into that same commission. When a Christian is at his or her highest point, that person is living above the mundane aspirations of this world (as if this life is the only one that matters, as if having things is the measure of success, as if knowing how to get things done in this world is the same as knowing how God does things in this world). A Christian sees God at work and, like Jesus, he gets into step with what God is already in the process of doing. A Christian nurtures an intimate relationship with God and engages in a conversational process with God among vast numbers of people who have no clue about the actual existence of God, let alone what God is like. A Christian lays it down in order to be the only “Jesus” someone else in this world might get to see, and that requires sacrifice.Going to church is like looking in the mirror and knowing that all those parts belong to you.