WHEN ONE MEMBER SUFFERS

Break a toe and see how democratic your body is about it.

You don't take a vote. The knee doesn't argue that it's fine, actually. The shoulder doesn't suggest waiting a few days to see whether the toe sorts itself out. Everything simply reorganizes. Your gait changes. Your whole day bends around one small bone you had never once thought about.

That's anatomy.

Paul says the church works the same way. If one member suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26). Notice he doesn't say we ought to suffer together. He says we do. It is a description before it is ever a command.

This raises an uncomfortable question. Do we feel the persecuted church, or are they part of the body of Christ from which our nerves have been severed?

Christianity is a religion declining in popularity in America. Yet, on Sunday morning we put a sign out by the road. We sing with the windows open. Nobody stands in the parking lot writing down license plates. We publish sermons on the internet under our real names. We tell a coworker where we spent our weekend. What is the worst that happens? Someone thinks we're weird. Perhaps they avoid us.  

Somewhere this morning, a believer made a different calculation than any we made. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa — Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali — Christians have buried family members and walked away from burned houses. In China and India, believers gather under surveillance, pressure, and restriction. In Somalia and Afghanistan, following Christ in the open is a question of survival.

Some of them live like the Old Testament prophet Daniel - captive minority inside a hostile empire, useful to the government right up until the day the government decides otherwise.

When that ancient government's law forbade him from prayer, he went home, opened the window toward Jerusalem, and prayed as he had always prayed. Three times a day. The open window is the whole point. He wasn't hiding, and he wasn't performing. He simply kept doing in public what he had always done before the face of God.

That is the posture of much of the global church right now. Not defiance. Ordinary faithfulness that somebody else's decision has made expensive.

We don't forget them because we are cruel. We forget them because we cannot feel them. Distance works like anesthetic. The suffering church is on the far side of an ocean, praying in languages we don't speak, in villages we couldn't find on a map. Nothing in our week makes us wince.

So without ever choosing it, we become a body with the nerve cut.

The book of Hebrews reminds Christians to remember those in prison as though in prison with them, and the mistreated — and then gives the reason: since you also are in the body (Hebrews 13:3).

That last clause says it all. You also are in the body. The Head feels what happens to the hand.

Why should a believer in Roseville ache over a believer in Mali? Not because we are unusually tender people, but because of an example we can find on the Damascus road in Acts 9:1-9.

Jesus appeared in a vision to Saul and said, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?"

Saul had never laid a hand on Jesus. He was arresting Christians. Dragging men and women out of houses in Damascus. And Jesus counted every one of those arrests as an assault on himself. The Head feels what happens to the hand.

This is why solidarity across an ocean is not something we work up. We are not asked to manufacture a bond by staring hard enough at photographs. We are asked to believe that the bond is already there — that the nerve runs through Christ, who has already felt every blow they have taken and did not flinch from taking worse.

We cannot make ourselves feel it. He already does. Our union with Christ turns out to be union with the whole body, even those we don't know whose circumstances we can't imagine.

So our proper response is prayer.

Prayer goes where our money and our passports and our petitions cannot. It crosses borders that issue no visas. It reaches a believer whose name we will never learn, through a Father who has known it since before the world was made.

So pray. And pray specifically.

Father, we lift up brothers and sisters we have never met and will not meet this side of glory. Give them courage to remain faithful and strength to endure suffering for your name. Protect the churches and families living in danger. Remind them that they are not forgotten — not by you, and not by us. Let the gospel spread in hard soil, and let many come to know Christ through the witness of your people. In Jesus' name, Amen.