“And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32, KJV).
Nothing Bundt Cake.
Junior’s cheesecake.
Tiramisu.
If you are ever serving any of those, please invite me. I will come hungry and fully prepared for a fellowship meal.
I also love Peanut M&M’s and Raisinets. Clearly, I have a weakness for the sweet stuff.
Apparently, I am not alone.
Researcher Jacob E. Steiner conducted pioneering studies of newborns’ reactions to taste. Give a baby something sweet and the face tends to relax. Sour and bitter tastes produce a very different response: pursed lips, squinting, grimacing, rejection.
No one had to teach them that. No one has to teach us either. From our earliest moments, there seems to be something in us that welcomes the sweet and resists the sour. That explains more than my relationship with cheesecake. It may explain something about our relationships with people. We love sweet people. Sweet friendships. Sweet marriages. Sweet church members. People who understand us, affirm us, remember our birthdays, return our texts, laugh at our jokes, and somehow know what we need without being told.
We move toward what feels good and away from what hurts. We move towards the pleasurable and away from the pain.
The problem is that relationships are not always sweet, especially relationships with other broken people.
I say “other” because we are broken too.
The person staring back at us in the mirror often expects from others what we fail to provide ourselves. We do not like being hurt, but we have all hurt people. We have been disappointed, but we have disappointed others. We have been offended, but if we are honest, we have done some offending of our own. We are not always as sweet as we imagine ourselves to be. Neither are the people around us.
Eventually, someone will say the wrong thing. Forget something important. Misunderstand our motives. Fail to meet an expectation. Get on our nerves. Sometimes they will hurt us deeply. People are not always sweet. Even in church. We often enter sacred spaces with soaring expectations. Surely people who worship together should know how to treat one another. Then we discover something disappointing: people are people everywhere you go. Baptism does not erase personality. Church membership does not eliminate immaturity. Church office does not override internal wiring. Saved people are still growing people.
As long as we are building community with human beings who have the capacity to hurt and disappoint each other, there will be some sourness in the recipe.
And sourness makes vulnerability difficult. Once you have been hurt, protecting yourself feels sensible. Every instinct screams, “Leave those church folks alone!” Keep the walls up. Expect nothing. Trust slowly. Protect your peace. Leave before somebody gets another chance to wound you.
So how do we build community when relationships are risky? Scripture gives us an answer: grace. God’s amazing grace. Paul writes, “Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:32).
Kindness is necessary because somebody will eventually be unkind.
Tenderheartedness matters because somebody will fail. Forgiveness exists because sooner or later somebody will do something that requires forgiving.
Biblical community is not built by finding people who never disappoint us.
It is built by people who have received grace learning how to give it. One of the quickest ways to destroy a relationship is to burden another person with unrealistic expectations.
Why can’t you think like me?
Why didn’t you know what I needed?
Why are you still struggling with that?
Without realizing it, we can demand from imperfect people a perfection we cannot provide ourselves. Disappointment becomes resentment. Resentment becomes distance. Distance becomes disconnection.
Peter writes, “Above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). That does not mean pretending hurt did not happen. Grace does not call wrong right. Forgiveness does not eliminate accountability. There is a difference between sour and poisonous.
Some relationships require boundaries, distance, counseling, accountability, or consequences. Wisdom matters.
But can we be brutally honest? Many of the interactions that hurt us were not poisonous. They are simply human. Many of the wounds we received came as a result of mistakes that you have also made.
Yes, the devil walks around like a roaring lion, and that lion can sometimes be found sitting in the pews. To be sure, some of us have been the victims of devastating spiritual attacks. I wish that never happened to you and I am truly sorry. Most of us, however, have dealt with misunderstandings, irritating habits, personality differences, thoughtless words, bad days, and moments when someone desperately needs the same grace we will eventually need ourselves.
Yes we are naturally attracted to the sweet, but God uses community to teach us what to do with the sour. And dealing with the sour makes us more like Jesus.
You see, Jesus did not wait for us to become sweet before loving us. Scripture says that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). That is Christ’s pattern. That is where the power is.
Christian love is not merely the ability to enjoy people when they are delightful. Almost anybody can do that. Mature love knows how to remain gracious when the flavor changes.
Building true community does not require finding a group of people who never leave a sour taste in our mouths. It requires enough grace to remember that one difficult moment does not tell the whole story of a person.
After all, God has tasted the worst of us and still chosen to call us His own.
The sweet is easy to love.
We must let grace teach us what to do with the sour.
