Connection

It was May of 2023 in Nashville as my best friend and I entered the sea of tye-dye, body glitter, and cowboy boots. She had scored back-to-back tickets to the Eras Tour and invited me to go with her, to which I of course said yes. We entered the stadium, found our seats, screamed over and over because they were great, and headed to the hot dog stand. Five minutes later, the floodgates opened. The Torrential rain soaked the crowds. Lightning flashed. 69,000 people flooded into the cramped area underneath the stadium seeking shelter. We were packed like sardines. Soaked and sweaty and crammed together for what would be the next four hours. You could barely move. People were fainting right and left and the medic golf carts could barely squeeze through. At one point Anna and I were stuck on a side entry ramp and couldn’t make it to the front of the hot dog line. A man opened up the side door to the concession stand and started hollering to come to his side door hustle. The next thing I know Anna and I were passing beverages and hot dogs and giving change calling out “come on and get your hot dogs at the side door” to hungry people out of options and energy. Women had taken over the restroom spaces as a shelter and lined every wall and floor and spontaneously singing Taylor Swift tunes. Finally at 10pm, the lights on the stage turned on and a countdown clock began. We all screamed and stormed into the stadium. Taylor took the stage and we were engulfed in a sea of voices and pulsing lights that were synchronized from our arm bands. The sensation was electric. We had all waited, wondering if we should have left, if she was going to cancel. But there we were singing together. And when the rain started pouring down again, we kept right on for the next three and a half hours. Soaked to the brim and loving every minute of it. All 69,000 of us trading friendship bracelets and swaying together, connected by passion and persistence and love of music.

Recently I watched my girls experience this while in Branson when we went to Dixie Stampede. Every time they say stampede, our feet joined all the others together across the room in one giant river of stomping. They loved it. Suddenly we were connected across the room by the sound of our feet.

What is it about these moments of communal connection that stick with us and sear in our memories? How do they give way to awe and wonder?

In 1912, social scientist Emile Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence” to describe this as part of his study of indigenous rituals, especially dance. Emile called this sort of collective connection “the soul of religion.”

But is connection all that important? What is at stake when we don’t?

Perhaps you have heard scholars talk about an epidemic of loneliness. You don’t have to be alone to be lonely. Loneliness can happen even when you are surrounded by people because it isn’t just about being around people it is about feeling connected. It isn’t about the numerous quantity of your interactions and relationships as much as it is about the quality of those relationships. Scholar of poverty and homelessness, Don Burnes, describes homelessness as a "poverty of relationships."

Vivek Murphy wrote about the loneliness epidemic in his book Together, saying “While loneliness engenders despair and ever more isolation, togetherness raises optimism and creativity. When people feel they belong to one another, their lives are stronger, richer, and more joyful. Connection is all about belonging. “Connection, Vivek says, not hatred, is the glue that makes us feel we all truly belong.”

Jason Silva says humans need this kind of emotional synchrony, to be in tune emotionally with one another, to sense that we are on the same page with another, a sense of belonging. Poet Ross Gay in his Book of Delights shares about porosity of human bodies, where “how so often, our bodies are the bodies of others.” It is about synchronicity. This happens when you know a person so well that you seem to talk by just giving a look. This happens with the heart rhythms of sports fans watching a game together. The rhythms of our bodies to a shared biological rhythm, breaking down that most basic barrier between self and other, the idea that we are physically separated by the boundaries of our skin.”

God designed us for meaningful connection, with God and with one another, and that connection happens when we worship together. We are the ekklesia, the gathered ones who come together and are connected by the Spirit in and through our worship. The psalmist certainly understood the intuitive connection and power of the gathered assembly. They gathered in praise and worship and they gathered to celebrate the promises of God.

This sense of connection and collective effervescence was the stuff of Jesus’s ministry. He was always drawing large crowds around him who were trying to follow and ask questions and seek healing. But he also did a lot of deep connecting with his disciples and others around tables. And these moments of shared connection and meaning stick with us for a long time. So it is with Holy Communion. In this moment centuries ago, Jesus shared something with his disciples that would stick with them forever, something they would go on to share and experience again and again and again. And it’s not just the meal. It’s also the gathering.

And there is power when we gather and when we are connected. Suddenly it isn’t about just our individual selves but the collective whole. And whatever one is going through we all feel it. We suffer together. We heal together. We pray together. We confess together. We laugh together. We dine together. We rejoice together. We show up for each other, together. And this kind of connection doesn’t just happen.

It happens because we keep gathering.

We keep breaking the bread.

We keep remembering what God has done and what God calls us to do.

We keep bringing our broken down selves and are met with the broken body of Christ and somehow in and through tiny pieces of bread and juice and fellowship and praise, the presence of Christ meets us and the the grace of God starts making us whole again. The Holy Spirit empowers us and syncs us up to one another where the dividing lines that seemed so clear before we walked through the door start to blur under the weight of holy love.

We, like spiritual Legos, are meant to connect with one another. To serve God together and build each other up. Eugene Peterson says it best in his translation of the 1 Corinthians passage.

It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

25-26 The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

27-31 You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this.