When I was growing up, paper chains meant it was almost Christmas, or some other celebration. It was an easy, inexpensive way to decorate. You cut strips of construction paper, loop the first one, tape it shut, thread the next through, and keep going. Link after link.
No single link is impressive on its own. You could tear it apart with your hands in a split second. But loop together enough of those flimsy little strips, and you get something that can stretch the length of a room. Something that holds together.
I think the Apostle Paul understood paper chains, even though he probably never saw one. That’s basically what he describes in Romans 12: “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of each other.” One link doesn’t make a chain. A pile of unconnected links doesn’t either. It’s the linking that makes it something.
Paul tells us what the links look like. Love that is genuine. Hospitality. Not just “welcome one another,” but welcome the stranger. It would have been easy for the church in Rome to build a chain that only looped around people who looked and believed like they did. Paul won’t let them. The chain has to reach past the people who are easy to love.
And that’s hard. In a community like ours, it might mean sitting beside someone you don’t know well at the Monroe Arts Center, or noticing the person at the edge of the room instead of only catching up with the people you already know.
Sometimes it asks for more. Paul says bless those who persecute you, and overcome evil with good. There are times I want to match the temperature of whatever’s being thrown at me. But Paul describes something closer to moral courage. It takes far more strength to name what’s broken and still choose love than to strike back or say nothing.
Writer James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Communities need people close enough and brave enough to say the hard, true thing. It stings. But if someone risks that with you, it’s usually because they still want to be linked to you.
Paper chains are fragile. One link tears and the whole chain can sag. Romans 12 is about staying linked: weep with those who weep, rejoice with one another. None of that can be done by ourselves. A town, a family, a friendship survives on the messy work of staying attached even when it would be easier to drift, or snap the link, and walk away.
So here is a question for you, whether or not you sit in a pew on Sundays. What is your hope for this community? Not what you want it to gain. What do you want this community to become?
Maybe it’s hospitality wide enough to loop around a stranger. Maybe it’s courage to push past the status quo. Maybe it’s to be the best possible community by supporting one another, regardless of race, status, political affiliation, you fill in the blank…
No single link looks like much. Look at the whole. That’s a community: this fragile, sacred thing we keep doing together, link by link, trusting that grace is what makes something this delicate able to loop and link together.
— Reflections appears regularly on the religion page. The column features a variety of local writers, coordinated through the Monroe Area Clergy Group. Rev. Christina Schoenwetter is the Associate Pastor of Engagement at St. John’s United Church of Christ in Monroe.
