Getting Specific about Community

In my last post called Clique or Community I talked about embracing the beauty of the other.  I made some general applications to marriage and the local church, and wanted to chase those applications a little further this week.  Before getting to that, I want to first take a minute to show that this kind of approach to others comes from the nature of God himself.  So first a theological foundation, and then some pretty specific applications.

The idea of being united with people who are different from you is beautiful because it is an expression of the nature and character of God.  God himself is perfect and cannot be improved upon.  You could say that the nature and character of God embody the best of all possible situations.  God is good and he is the standard of goodness.  There is no other standard to compare him or anything else to.  In other words, it is not possible for things to be better than they are with God.  But why do I say that being united with diverse people is an expression of God's nature? Well, God is one.  And that one God eternally exists as three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  The Father is fully God.  The Son is fully God.  The Holy Spirit is fully God.  And, the Father is not the Son.  The Son is not the Spirit.  The Spirit is not the Father.  Here you have something of a mystery, but what we can see clearly is unity and diversity held together in perfect harmony.  God is not more one than three.  And he is not more three than one.  He is one God.  He is three persons.  Neither side of this equation diminishes the other.  So what all this means for the topic at hand is that in the most perfect situation possible (the nature of God) you have perfect unity existing alongside perfect difference.  You don't have uniformity, you have unity.  This being the case, God sets up community life down here in a way that we are shaped by unity with the other.  Thus, the examples last week from marriage and the church.  So let me chase those applications down the trail a bit further.

1.  We should be laboring and praying for unity among different denominations within the Christian church.  This unity should be sought along the lines of the truth.  I am not advocating a kind of lame group hug where we pretend we don't disagree on important issues.  The church in our day needs more truth and more conviction about the truth than most of us have ever even smelled in a church.  However, we also need incredible humility to see the strengths of our brothers and sisters who are different from us.  Imagine a single church with the intellectual rigor of the presbyterians, the zealous affections of the charismatics, and the fervent mission practice of the baptists.  We miss the beauty of the diversity when we act like the strengths of our own denomination are truly the best and the others just don't get it.  We miss the beauty of the unity when we divide up into our separate camps with suspicion of one another.  Pride will keep us apart as we focus on our own strengths and everyone else's weaknesses.  Love would bind us together in humility, as we consider the strengths of others and the weaknesses of ourselves.

2. We miss these things when we form culture based ministries and churches.  Baptists are surprisingly adept at this.  We have skateboarder churches, artist churches, cowboy churches, and even country churches for those who are country but not cowboy.  We have been doing it within our churches, and we are now gunning it into the fractured future of the church.  We have divided up internally for years along lines of age in our "traditional" and "contemporary" services.  We are now starting whole different churches for everyone under the sun.  Next is the church for rodeo clowns who prefer pop country music to bluegrass or more classic country and who jump over the fence with their left leg first instead of their right.  "None of those nasty right leggers in this fellowship!"  We should grieve over the disunity we are sowing into the church, which is supposed to be made up of different people united in Christ alone.  "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one Spirit."

3. We do it in marriage as well.  She is upset that he isn't more sensitive.  He is upset that she isn't stronger.  We forget that she is his glory and he is her strength.  She wishes that he payed more attention to details of their life.  He wishes she payed more attention to the big picture.  And so resentment grows.  Again, this happens because we think it is better if others are just like us.  Why?  Because we are proud and we think our gifts and our strengths are the best ones.  But love would have us consider others as more significant than ourselves, and learn from them in the perfect unity of love.  

4. Homosexual "marriage" is the institutionalization of this.  It is a turning away from the other to someone just like you.  It is uniformity rather than unity in diversity.  It may seem new and thrilling and different, but at the end of the day when the buzz fades it is a clique instead of a community.  It is peanut butter and peanut butter instead of peanut butter and chocolate. 

5. Racism is a classic example of missing this.  We see people who are different from us and either from fear, hatred, greed, or whatever else, we resist them.  We marginalize, oppress, abuse, exclude, and separate.  The lines of separation grow deeper and we all lose out on the cultural richness of the other as we shrivel in our fearful pride.  Love would compel us out towards the other to labor through the misconceptions and cultural barriers to increasing laughter, understanding, and riches.

Let me conclude by clarifying a few things I am not saying.  

1. I am not saying that all religions are true.  It is love that will bind us together in our differences and love rejoices in the truth.  If it doesn't rejoice in the truth, it is not love.  All religions and views of where we came from, what went wrong, and how it is going to be fixed are different.  The different religions are contradictory and cannot all be true.  This is evident to anyone who looks deeply into them.  

2. I am not saying that all interpretations of the truth are accurate.  When someone says something, they mean some specific thing, and not anything that their words can be twisted to communicate.  Anyone who has sought to understand another human being truly understands this.  The Scriptures are no different.  They mean something, and language is functional enough that we can come to discover what that meaning is.  There are disagreements because of our biases and confusion.  The more we listen to each other and talk through different biases, the closer we will get to the truth, provided that we love and therefore actually rejoice in the truth.  If not, we will remain awash in what we wish it to say in order to justify some other end we truly have.

3. I am not saying that every opinion is equally valid.  Many opinions are wrong and should be humbly submitted to correction.  If you disagree with me on this, then you actually agree with me.  Think about it.  The problem most of us have here is that we nod our head, and go on our way assuming that it is other people's opinions that are wrong and should be submitted to correction to mine.  This is where humbly living in community with people that are not like us bears so much fruit.   We commit to love people who see differently than we do, and over time we come to realize that they may be on to something.  This corrects our faulty opinions, humbles us, and grows us to see more of the beauty of truth and goodness.  

4. There is a dividing line.  That dividing line is truth and lies; goodness and evil.  Lies and evil do not represent diversity to be learned from and embraced, but rather enemies to be resisted.  Understanding where to draw the lines is crucial, drawing them is even more crucial.  People unlike me help me to do this better.