Coexist
Today at our staff Advent retreat one of my coworkers expressed disdain for the popular “coexist” bumper stickers. His sentiment is that what is needed to bring about any real peace among people is community, not coexistence. We need people who can practice gentleness, not civility. While I realize that to express my agreement with my coworker in such a public place as the blogosphere may not be the most popular move on my part, I feel he may have a point.
It seems to me that real peace between people means moving to a level that is higher than coexistence. Having just returned from Israel, it is easy to see that coexistence can only get one so far. The city of Jerusalem is one where Jews, Muslims and Christians coexist, but in most ways want nothing to do with one another. This type of living does not breed community, it does not promote trust, and it is a far cry from the things that could bring peace. As we drove down one of the main roads of the city where one side of the street was Muslim and the other Jewish, I couldn’t help but think of my own country where there have been so many racial tensions between the black and white communities and where presently the same thing is repeating itself with the influx of new immigrants from spanish speaking countries. How long did entire cities in the United States choose to simply coexist, with whites living in one part of the city and blacks in another? We are still suffering as a nation from the effects of segregation.
We need not look much further than to the brokenness of Christianity to see the weakness of simply trying to coexist. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem continues to fill me with awe over the events that took place within it’s walls. It is the site where God reconciled the world. It is also a place of scandal. Our own celebration of the Eucharist there as recent pilgrims was very moving, but I was also aware of the fact that it was rushed due to the fact that the Roman Catholics only had access of Calvary for a short period of time before the Armenian Orthodox would have their turn, and then the Greek Orthodox. My sadness is not over the fact that we are sharing the church, but that I know if one group were to take even a few seconds beyond what has been agreed there would likely be a fight, perhaps even a physical one, between Christians. Christians of various types coexist in this church where Christ suffered, died and rose from the dead, but they do not yet form the community he longed to bring into existence. This is a scandal we ought to take seriously.
The solution to disunity among peoples is not simply to agree to disagree or to pretend that our differences can be overlooked. Real solutions always come with sacrifice and with struggle. May we choose to build communities that are based on an active choice to be honest, to be gentle, and to be people who strive to share in the lives of one another. We cannot afford to simple agree to coexist.
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