"Koino-nicotine"

New friend Dave Stone is an interesting guy, he's the only person I know who ever attempted a Christian Keg Party (not a roaring success but you gotta love the creativity).
After church on Sunday we were talking about the real source of Christian unity and we realised that the Church has something to learn from smokers. (yup, I said it)
Too often church people find their unity in shared morality, shared politics, even shared activities. None of those things are necessarily bad, they're just not the things that are supposed to bring us together.
Remember the story Jesus told about the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer (Luke 18 for those keeping score)...
Christian unity is properly based on one thing; we are messed up people who know that we need Jesus desperately in this life and for whatever happens when this life is over.
Finding our commonality in all that other stuff doesn't make us Christian, it makes us religious, political, and demographically consistent. We're the Pharisees

Smokers understand this way better than we do. We all see them, the social lepers huddling in uncomfortable herds outside the buildings where respectable people mingle. They try to ignore the scornful glances as they publically prove that there is something unhealthy in their lives. There's an almost admirable honesty in it really.

Every once in a while I experience something like that among God's people. We actually look each other in the eye and admit that we're screwups and we can't get it right. In those all too rare moments something like the presence of God breaks through.

We're told all the time that what people are looking for is community. How sad is it that they're more likely to find it in a haze of tobacco smoke than in a worship service...