by Jake Umbriaco
I remember an experience when I was 19 – I was speaking in a group of fellow college students about faith. Afterwards an older student leader came up to me and told me that I was a gifted communicator and needed to be the primary person speaking to the group. By 21 – I was an ordained minister.
Ironically – my disassociation with community began there. Being the person standing up in front tasked with carrying burdens and teaching others became profoundly isolating. Whether it was the expectation that some-how I had insight and experience to offer that was distinct from my peers or my own increasing instinct that I actually needed to be spiritually distinct and wasn’t. For the next 17 years – I carried on with the work. Growing up with people – watching relationships form, but always at arms-length both praying for community to form and resenting my lack of access to it. I thought that like Moses, my role was to lead people to a place that I would never inhabit.
City Church is the first church I’ve attended since I became a Christian without any expectation of a formal leadership role. It’s an odd experience to be in my 40’s learning what it is to simply be among the gathered. Not as one who dutifully shakes hands and welcomes people… just someone who’s hand might be shook.
During COVID our family mostly attended service online. I joined a focus group in the Fall of ’20 as a way to try to find some connection. In January of ’21 I became ill with COVID. I remember being on a Zoom call and telling a group of men, most of whom I’d never met in person that my oldest son and I were sick. Instantly – these guys reached out to me and provided meals for our family. Some even came in person and stood across my lawn to greet me. Such a simple thing…. bringing someone a meal, bringing presence. Relieving the burden of another. For me – it was the first experience of inclusion and belonging I’d felt in a long time. Instead of being someone who had gifts for others to consume…. I was someone people brought gifts to… and not out of a sense of compelled reciprocity… I was simply someone in need that others responded to.
In the context of the worshiping community, reunion is such an interesting choice of word. There’s an explicit framing of context…. You are in union…. Out of union, and then re-united. There’s a scene in the Book of Beginnings where God asks Adam and Eve a profound question: “Who told you you were naked?” I’ve spent the better part of two decades believing myself to be naked, and hiding in public.
The experience of feeling flawed and outcast, unworthy of community is at the same time isolating and radically common. There’s actually tremendous union in the individualized experience of it. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t identify with some sense of that in their lives. There is a great oneness and community of all who suffer perceiving themselves to be alone and the radically profound impact of simply saying “I feel alone” out loud, in front of others – which is the moment when isolation opens the door to community, a reunion.
I’m still in contemplation about my reunion with the gathered church. I’m in therapy and appreciative of that work. It’s a long process.
In my own experience – reunion is about perspective. I feel naked. Exposed. Ashamed. Yet God continues to pose a question to my heart – Who told you you are naked?
The author of Hebrews says in Chapter 12:22-24:
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gatherings, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
It’s a good word to my soul. That I exist in and into Mount Zion, with innumerable angels, the People of God, and the Author whose powerful Word speaks a better word than my internalized sense of merited condemnation.
Psalm 133 opens with: Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. For me the work in this Lenten season is to dwell in the unshakable reality of my union with Christ and to press forward with the affirmation of my place in the Kingdom that is conditioned on Christ alone so that I can experience what he himself has offered and blessed as a sacred gift: Reunion.