The Role of Community in Personhood

09/07/11 Role of Community in Personhood GUMC Youth

Last week, we spent some time thinking about the people that Jesus called to be his disciples. We noticed how incredibly different they were from each other and how they all had their own problems, just like we do, but that through following Christ, they were challenged to grow and become who God had called them to be. I want to take tonight and look at the big picture issue of the role that the communities in which we find ourselves shape who we are. It is particularly appropriate to do this now, since we were just thinking about the community that Jesus called into existence to follow him.

In America, we have a long tradition of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals, who do whatever we want. We tend to see the individual as more important than the community in which that individual finds itself. We have some basic rules about how we live together, but by and large, we consider our individuality to be more important than who we are in relation to others. We like our constitution because it shows us that our community values individuality.

In spite of that, what we are finding more and more is that the community plays an incredibly important role in who we are. Perhaps one of the most important ways it shapes us is in the way our community plays a role in what we can know. Did you know that there are some things that you simply can't know unless you are in a community of people who knows them? That you have to live in the right place and with the right kind of people, and live in the right way to even see certain things and to know certain things?

To give a somewhat simple example of what I am talking about, how many different words do we have in English for "snow?" Just one. However, even though we have only one word for snow, we can actually identify a few different types of snow, can't we? I have not yet experienced a Spencer winter, but I've been led to believe you get a fair amount of snow, so you might know more about snow than I do, but most people I've met can identify about four or five types of snow. There is light, powdery snow, there is wet and heavy snow, there is slushy snow that is hard to drive in, and a few others. But if we are really pressed, we can't come up with too many more types of snow that we experience.

But, if you were to travel into parts of Alaska and meet with certain tribes of Eskimos, you would find that they have over forty different words for snow. But if you looked at the different types of snow, you probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between them. After all, you can only identify four or five kinds of snow. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference, in fact, you might even think that the whole tribe is playing a trick on you, but to the natives, it would be as plain as could be. They have absolutely no trouble telling the difference between the forty-odd types of snow they have; it is as natural to them as breathing.

So, what is the difference between them and us? Why can they see what we cannot? Is there really a distinction that we just can't see or are they just tricking themselves into seeing what isn't really there? Well, there isn't a real difference in their eyes or their brains, so there is no biological reason why they should be able to see what we can't, so what could it be? Well, if we were to move away from Iowa and move in with the Eskimos with the many words for snow, and we not only saw the same snow as they did, but lived the way they did and experienced snow like they did for a period of several years, you would start to be able to tell the difference between some more of them, but you still might not ever have quite as many words for snow as they do.

The reason for this is that the Eskimos have a deep need to be able to tell the difference between the forty types of snow. Their very lives depend on it. If they aren't careful about what kind of snow they go out in, they might very well die. But the reason I bring all this up is because, even though it is as clear as night and day to the Eskimos, people like you and me simply can't see it. They might be able to break down the differences so that you have some idea of what to look for, but even with a great guide, it would take quite some time before you were able to really see what you are looking for. You have to indwell, to use the term of scientist, Michael Polanyi, a way of life and experience before you can really know what is there. It is something like the process of learning an instrument or a sport, or any new subject. It takes time to get used to the rules or how you move your body before you can really do or know it.

The fact of the matter is that knowing is much more complex than we often give it credit for being. You will find militant atheists who try to hide behind the advances of sciences to be the reason why they can't bring themselves to believe in God. They say that, unlike the claims of Christian faith, anybody who simply does the experiment can see the truth of science. Well, this simply isn't true. As it turns out, most people, even if they had access to a world-class laboratory, couldn't actually reproduce the experiments and, even if they managed to pull it off, wouldn't even be able to see what they were looking for. It is only when people have spent years of their lives being trained in a particular field of inquiry that they can actually understand and experience what is really there. Unless you are a trained scientist, the claims of natural science are not any more accessible to you than the claims of Christian faith. You know, even if you were a trained scientist, only a small portion of the findings of science would be open to you. In fact, if you have been a Christian for a while and have your thoughts and life transformed by the gospel, you might be able to understand the claims of Christian faith far better than you could do lab work.

But the trick to all of this is that it means that you can only know the truth if you are part of the right kind of community. If you want to know the truth, you need to be surrounded by people who are also seeking the truth. If you want to really understand what Jesus says, you need to be in a community of people who are passionately committed to what Jesus says. One of the greatest thinkers in the history of the church, Athanasius, wrote a book on God becoming a human being in Jesus Christ. At the very end, after he had written for pages and pages explaining the biblical and theological issues, he says this in his last paragraph.

"But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds."

I want to make absolutely sure that you understand what he is saying. He is saying that, if you insist on living in sin and doing what you know to be wrong and making a habit of breaking God's laws, you will never be able to understand what the Bible says. If you knowingly and lovingly engage in sin on a regular basis, don't be surprised if you can't make any sense out of the Bible. If we want to know things, we have to live in a way that is consistent with them.

You know, this emphasis on community really shouldn't surprise us all that much. After all, one of the core claims of Christian faith is that God is, in God's own life, a community of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For God, community isn't just an extra options that he can choose to be in or not; community is rooted in the very being of God, and we are made in God's image. How can we be surprised when we find out that the communities in which we find ourselves make up part of who we are? God is who God is because of the community that God is.

You know what? Even natural science supports this idea that who we are is partly shaped by those we are around. It used to be, according to a Newtonian view of the universe, that everything could be broken down into atoms that just bumped into one another. They were individual particles that had no real connection to any other particles, unless they all just happened to move in the same direction at the same time. With the insights of James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and others, we have come to see that we can't really think of things this way. All of what we call matter can be understood as knots of energy in a continuous field of energy. Remember the equation E = mc^2? It is saying that energy and matter are not finally separate things, but that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter. The point is that particles aren't just free-floating individual things, but are only what they are in their interrelations with each other.

So, if we can only know certain things if we live in certain ways, and if God wanted to reveal himself to humanity, what would he have to do? Well, he would have to mould and shape a whole culture from the very beginning. So, he would have to pick one person and take him out of his context, so he could start to reshape their basic ways of thought and life bit by bit. God would have to establish a special relationship that is unlike his relationship with another nation, not because God does not also love those other nations, but because God has to start somewhere. Over thousands of years, God would have to teach the people how to live so they might be able to understand him. He would have to give them a law, a distinctive form of thought and life, would have to continually call them back whenever they went astray, and carefully and slowly reveal himself using these transformed words that mean something different in that nation than they do anywhere else. Only after this culture is shaped over a long period of time would God be able to really reveal himself in his fullness.

I don't know if you remember back to Sunday School and confirmation, but this is exactly what God has, in fact, done. God selected Abraham and took him from his home, gave himself to his descendants in a particular way, delivered them from Egypt and gave them a law, sent prophets to call the people back to faithfulness. Eventually, Jesus came, but he couldn't have come until Israel's culture was ready to understand him, at least brokenly. That is why Jesus came in Israel. Not because they were better than other people, nor because they were worse, but simply because they were better equipped to understand him and this is only because God had been moulding and shaping them, sometimes painfully, over the last several thousand years.

The question you might be asking yourself is, "What does all this have to do with me? What difference does this make for my life?" It actually makes a lot of difference, especially as someone who comes to youth group and goes to church. You see, youth group isn't just a place where we can come and hang out with friends or meet new people. It isn't just a place where we can eat some food and play some games. It isn't just a place where we can sing some songs. We are about the business of creating and shaping a whole culture, a community of young people who follow the Lord. There is a sense in which we are constantly trying to develop culture that has been established earlier, since none of us were here with this youth ministry was started, but it is also a culture which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is continually being established anew.

Another reason why this stuff about community affects you is because you are profoundly shaped by your communities outside of youth group as well. If you surround yourself with people who love the Lord, who are passionately committed to the gospel and allowing it to impact every aspect of their lives, you will find that is is so much easier to be faithful yourself. When there are people you can go to for support, when you know that you aren't alone in your seeking after God, it is much easier to do what you are supposed to do, to live right, to read your Bible, to pray. If you, on the other hand, surround yourself with people who don't really care about God, who like to do all kinds of things that are contrary to what God calls us to do and be, you will find that it is incredibly difficult to be a faithful Christian. In fact, if you spend all your free time in destructive communities, it doesn't really matter what your influences are at home or at church, it will be nearly impossible to really follow Jesus.

This is why we need to all work together. If any of us decides that we are going to be lazy, to just show up and go through the motions, it affects the rest of us. It is only when we all work together and support one another in our daily lives that we can really be who God has called us to be. There is no substitute for being part of a group of people who love God. As we work together and as we grow together, do not be surprised if you begin to look at the world differently, that you begin to see and understand things that you never could before. I am going to challenge you to think hard about what you believe and why you believe it. The reason for this is because we simply cannot assume that our secular culture has prepared us to know God.

If we want to study the heavens, we need to go where the telescopes are. If we want to study exotic plants, we need to go where they are found. If we want to know about microscopic life, we need to put ourselves in the places where we can learn about them. As Athanasius said, if we want to see a particular place, we have to go there. If we want to know God, we need to meet with God where he has met with us, which is, above all, in Jesus Christ and in the Bible. Not only that, we need to do it together. So let us join together, as people of different ages, with different backgrounds, and help one another meet with and come to know God in deeper ways every day. Let us pray.

AMEN