I had to unfriend someone on Facebook yesterday. He was one of my college roommates. He posted that he was happy that the Affordable Care Act is probably going to be repealed.

Many of us want to maintain relationships past the point of sustainability. Some will say that it was petty to remove my former roommate from my list of Facebook friends. It is only Facebook, right? Others will say that I should have tried to do what I often challenge others to do: fight for those hard relationships. Do the hard work of persuasion.

However, there are limits. Sometimes specific relationships aren't worth the effort. Sometimes I am not the person to do the work of persuasion with a person. In this specific situation, I have not communicated with him in several years. We do not live close together. Any communication between us would have only served to harden his opinion and raise our mutual blood pressure levels. That's because I have a belief that he and I do not share.

I believe that we are all better together. When we share our burdens and joys with each other, the burdens are lighter and the joys are more powerful. I am a person of faith, a Christian, and this idea is central to that faith. I will do to you what I would want you to do to me. I will not do to you what I would not want you to do to me.

There is another idea in our culture, though. It says that the only thing that matters is me, and maybe my family and friends. Everyone else is a danger. Everyone else matters less. My job as a person to is lift myself up at the expense of you and yours. This is the thought of libertarians and those who follow Ayn Rand. I have another word for it: selfishness.

People will tell you that selfishness is part of who we are as humans, and that we can't get rid of it. They say we have to develop systems to manage the selfishness. They rely on the assumption that people's nature cannot change.

They are wrong. People are capable of enormous growth and change. This knowledge is at the core of my faith, and of many other faiths. The book of Deuteronomy gives us a vision of a sacred society in the vision of Israel, especially in Jubilee. At the core of this society is the idea that we are not our own. Our possessions are not our own. They belong to God and to the community. In the book of Acts, we see the early church giving freely of their possession to those in need. The community of Christ gave freely so that the burden of one become the burden of all, and therefore became light. "Many hands make for light work."

Skeptics, especially those within Christianity, will tell you that Jubilee never happened and that the practice of the early church was unsustainable and unscalable. They will tell you that God is showing us the ideal, but doesn't actually expect it to happen on earth. It will happen in the New Earth, where all evil is banished.

I don't believe that. I take Jesus seriously when he says in the Lord's Prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Our job as people of faith in this world is to work to make this world more like heaven. We are expected to bring about the kingdom, not to survive until God smashes it down on this world.

If those who resist this, who claim the name "Christian", were being honest, they would say, "But I don't want to do that. I don't want to work towards that world. I'm not there yet." If someone said that to me, I'd hug them, because very few people are willing to say that out loud. After I hugged them, I'd say, "We all have to eat our vegetables, whether we want to or not." To do otherwise would be to surrender to selfishness, to greed, to sin.