When someone is running a fever, it might seem wise to plunge the patient into an ice bath. It isn’t, for two reasons: first, that therapy causes shivering which, in turn, tends to raise our core temperature, and second, fever is just a symptom.
While symptoms of a disease are what make us uncomfortable, they are mostly identifiers, and not the disease itself. In fact, a symptom may be shared by dozens of different diseases. That’s partly what makes practicing medicine such a challenge!
It’s also what makes the present turmoil in our nation so maddening. We try to think of ways to prevent people from pulling down statues and looting innocent shop owners’ stores, all the while missing the underlying cause, the disease.
The disease itself is alienation. People don’t burn down things that belong to them, and they don’t destroy things they built or with which they identify and in which they take pride. They wage war against an enemy, real or imagined, even if it is out of envy or spite.
That is, people don’t turn on their own tribe, but other tribes. And we seem to be morphing into a tribal culture, sliced and diced along racial, gender, socio-economic, and even generational lines. There is no more “We the people. . .” There is only “my people” against “your people.”
The power of the gospel undermines the tribalism which divides us, calling us back to the reality that God, from one man, “made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places they should live. God did this so that men would seek him. . .” Acts 17:26, 27a
Tribalism illustrates how each and every tribe is equally lost and equally needs the God who made them. And when we see the universal depravity of all tribes, including our own, the proper response is turning to the God who made each of us and can reconcile all of us.
Paul’s history lesson should cue us that the evil around us consists of complex, varying sets of symptoms of one disease, our alienation from one another and from God.
And because we don’t seek Him as we should, He has come seeking us in the Person of His Son, the Great Shepherd. He calls us from our tribes to form one flock (John 10:16). Are you in? Here you will find the cure for alienation, and not be deceived by its symptoms.
“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Colossians 1:19, 20