This has been a fun quarter. As some of you know I am on campus more. I turned in my dissertation to my committee for evaluation, and so I am taking the opportunity to bang out some pre-recs for another degree I have my eye on…so I am in freshman bio 2 and 3. Dan has enjoyed my transition from PhD candidate to intro bio student and taken the opportunity to nick name me Benjamin button.
But one of the cool things is that there are no fewer than 7 college lifers in my Bio 2B class. We have Professor Strong for this class who is off the hook. He is passionate and hilarious…often of the unintentional variety. We giggle all the way through that class. In our third class, he put up this slide to talk about latitudinal biodiversity gradients and then told us an anecdote. He said he had a girlfriend in college who had one of these…called a bush baby. The first time he went over to her house, it cautiously greeted him and when he sat on the couch, the bush baby came over, climbed up on his head and proceeded to urinate into its hand – rubbing the collected pea behind professor strong’s ears…thus initiating him into the social group. Kiho flashed that warm but devious grin of his and said, without missing a beat, ‘Cool, a new College Life ice breaker.’ 
I thought the anecdote marginally related, because today we are going to be talking about community. Jesus and the early church simply assumed that the life of faith would be something done in community…but this turns out to be a radically counter cultural assertion in our particular cultural moment. Let me try to illustrate this with a couple of quotes:“I have my own spiritual thing, but am not part of an organized religion. I think religion is very special and individual to each person.” - Jessica Alba
“I think I find more strength in faith than I do in organized religion.” - Jon Bon Jovi
“I'm not into organized religion. I'm into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we're all just part of nature.” -Neil Young
"Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you." - Jesse Ventura
“I believe in a higher being. You can call it what you want. But…I don’t believe in organized religion.” - John Mellencamp
"I don't belong to any organized religion of such, but I'd like to believe in a higher power." James Iha -guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins“I have always been a spiritual person, but I’ve never really subscribed to an organized religion…”
- Nick Harmer bassist for Death Cab for Cutie
“I don't want to be restricted how I can go about my religion and my life. And I just, again, want to know what's going to make me happy. So I think that (religion is) still part of me, it always will be, but I might not be as public about it.” - NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the teachings of Jesus, but I am suspicious of organized religion.”
- Madonna,
Um, anytime you can get NASCAR dude and Madonna to agree about something, you know that that think is pretty deeply ingrained in our cultural moment. And it is not just platitude spouting celebrities.
Three weeks ago The Economist (a decidedly high brow[1] periodical) made the case that “something people badly want (is) a way to acknowledge faith can be taken seriously as a response to deep human yearnings without needing to subscribe to the formality of organized belief.”[2]
Honestly, this is one of my little pet peeves…when someone says something like this, usually taking the form of “I’m not into organized religion but I am a very spiritual person” they usually think they are being profound or original or at least clever. I’d just like to deconstruct that for a minute. This is about the most clichéd, tired, derivative view of spirituality you can have in our culture. It isn’t rebellious or clever, it is tired and trite. I mean, if you are going to make a comment as inane as this, at least do something unique with it, like…this one I enjoyed:
“I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants.” ~Dave Beard
But this obviously antipathy against ‘organized religion’ is a deeply and widely held sentiment in our culture, and it is not without an element of truth or at least of resonance. Anything this widely believed probably has an element of truth to it. Clichés are usually clichés for a reason. And I agree that the human religious impulse is mostly a dark and broken impulse and that religion is, in many cases, is as far away from the message of Jesus as hedonism is. I also think the church has a relatively poor record or representing Jesus.Tim Keller says that ‘all of the arguments against the existence of God are pop guns of doubt compared to…‘If Christ is so great why is the church the way it is?’…There is nothing that can create doubt like that.’ I am going to touch on this just a little bit today, but it is not my topic. I have given whole talks on this question before, as has Keller and Os Guiness, so if this is a significant problem for you, I have thrown the mp3s of all three talks onto a few CD’s and you can get them after the talk.
But something else strikes me about these quotes. Let me go with one more that particularly brings this out.
“I don’t necessarily believe in organized religion. I love my God, my higher power, but it is mine and mine alone, and I create my connection, and I decide how my connection is going to be.” –Will Smith
“I don’t necessarily believe in organized religion. I love my God, my higher power, but it is mine and mine alone, and I create my connection, and I decide how my connection is going to be.” –Will Smith
Now, to be fair, I love Will Smith. He is the biggest movie star in the English speaking world, 7 pounds was probably the best studio film to come out last year, by all accounts a he is descent family man, and dude is disconcertingly handsome…I mean, that is a beautiful specimen of humanity…and I’ve literally grown up with him. Seriously, the first album I ever owned was ‘I’m the DJ, He’s the rapper’ back when no one knew his real name.
But look at that quote again. Of the 36 words in it the words I, my or mine make up 9 of them. That is 25%. And that, I think, gets at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The foundational tenet of contemporary god talk - the litmus of contemporary spiritual ‘orthodoxy’ if you will - is ‘individuality’.
But tonight we are going to look at two of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. The reason I love these passage is that they describes a shocking vision of Christian community. On the one hand, it pitches Jesus-following as irreducibly corporate, something that can only done in tight connection with others. But on the other hand, it paints a picture of ‘organized religion,’ if you will that is so startlingly foreign from the one-dimensional caricature posited and reiterated by these quotes. Let me suggest, as my thesis, that the appropriate response to the evils and ills of ‘organized religion’ is not individualized spirituality but Biblical community.
The talk will divide into 2 parts:
I. The Importance of Community
-I am going to try to deconstruct the idea that following Jesus is something you can do mostly on your own, particularly in college. I will make the case that Christianity is irreducibly corporate and that, far from being a liability, this is one of its most beautiful and helpful features of this world view…despite being entirely counter-cultural.
II. The Elements of Community
-Then we will look at 4 elements of community lifted directly from the account of the earliest church and try to think a little bit about how these could play out in our little community
Essentially I am going to try to answer these two questions
Why is the Church? What is the Church? So let’s dig into it.
I. The Importance of Community
Here is the thing. It is definitionally impossible to follow Jesus by yourself. You can try it. You can pray and read the Bible and try to ‘love your neighbor’ by yourself…and you can have some measure of ‘success’ in achieving these objectives…but as soon as you try to do it alone it is, by
definition, not following Jesus. It is something else. Authentic Jesus following can only be done with other people trying to do the same. It is irreducibly corporate.
Look at the text. Verse 2:44 ‘All the believers were together’ and then again in 2:46 ‘they continued to meet together.’ Tim Keller said that these passages and others give the impression that they ‘met together relentlessly’ that ‘they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other.’ The early Christians appear to have an insatiable appetite for being with each other. From the very beginning, normative Jesus following was done together – Christianity can only be done in community.
My sophomore year in HS I took a sculpture class. Art classes weren’t like other classes in High School because you got to talk, the radio was on, it was all very informal. And every art class I ever took worked the same way. The three or four popular seniors in the class would talk about their sexual exploits, either real or imagined, and the rest of us hung on their every word. I wasn’t a Christian yet, and not having experiences to add, I listened attentively. Our teacher Mr. Geller mostly stayed out of it. But I remember one day one of the guys admitted that over the weekend he fell asleep while having sex. This was more than Mr. Geller could bear and he finally jumped in. He said, ‘I’m sorry, if you are falling asleep during sex, you are just not doing it right.’[3]
This story came to mind when I read this passage. It seems to me that if you have the impulse to make your devotion to Jesus a private matter…if you find a personal, individual experience of God more compelling or fulfilling than a corporate, community experience of God…then you just aren’t doing it right. Normative Christianity is typified by people who can’t get enough of each other. If that doesn’t describe your experience, I suspect you are not doing it right.
I really like what Eugene Peterson has to say about this “I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But I soon found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus. I did not come by the conviction easily, but finally there is not getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart form an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself.” –Eugene Peterson – Christ Plays in 10,000 Places[4]
Peterson asserts that to be human is to need other people…that at some level we do not fundamentally experience our fullest personhood when we are alone – but when we are in community. But Christianity in particular is irreducibly for a couple of reasons. Let me briefly pitch 3 theological reasons why Christianity is fundamentally a community experience:
1. At the center of Christianity is an admission of need and incompleteness, we require connection to other Christians.
2. Christianity is irreducibly corporate because God is. At the heart of the Christian faith is one God, who is himself, a community. The Trinity is not just some sort of abstract theological concept, it, among other things, demonstrates that if a God who is fundamentally corporate, creates us in his image. It would be really striking if a God like this created us for a private, individual experience of him. (Pinnoch – the dance)[5]
But tonight we are going to look at two of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. The reason I love these passage is that they describes a shocking vision of Christian community. On the one hand, it pitches Jesus-following as irreducibly corporate, something that can only done in tight connection with others. But on the other hand, it paints a picture of ‘organized religion,’ if you will that is so startlingly foreign from the one-dimensional caricature posited and reiterated by these quotes. Let me suggest, as my thesis, that the appropriate response to the evils and ills of ‘organized religion’ is not individualized spirituality but Biblical community.
The talk will divide into 2 parts:
I. The Importance of Community
-I am going to try to deconstruct the idea that following Jesus is something you can do mostly on your own, particularly in college. I will make the case that Christianity is irreducibly corporate and that, far from being a liability, this is one of its most beautiful and helpful features of this world view…despite being entirely counter-cultural.
II. The Elements of Community
-Then we will look at 4 elements of community lifted directly from the account of the earliest church and try to think a little bit about how these could play out in our little community
Essentially I am going to try to answer these two questions
Why is the Church? What is the Church? So let’s dig into it.
I. The Importance of Community
Here is the thing. It is definitionally impossible to follow Jesus by yourself. You can try it. You can pray and read the Bible and try to ‘love your neighbor’ by yourself…and you can have some measure of ‘success’ in achieving these objectives…but as soon as you try to do it alone it is, by
definition, not following Jesus. It is something else. Authentic Jesus following can only be done with other people trying to do the same. It is irreducibly corporate.Look at the text. Verse 2:44 ‘All the believers were together’ and then again in 2:46 ‘they continued to meet together.’ Tim Keller said that these passages and others give the impression that they ‘met together relentlessly’ that ‘they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other.’ The early Christians appear to have an insatiable appetite for being with each other. From the very beginning, normative Jesus following was done together – Christianity can only be done in community.
My sophomore year in HS I took a sculpture class. Art classes weren’t like other classes in High School because you got to talk, the radio was on, it was all very informal. And every art class I ever took worked the same way. The three or four popular seniors in the class would talk about their sexual exploits, either real or imagined, and the rest of us hung on their every word. I wasn’t a Christian yet, and not having experiences to add, I listened attentively. Our teacher Mr. Geller mostly stayed out of it. But I remember one day one of the guys admitted that over the weekend he fell asleep while having sex. This was more than Mr. Geller could bear and he finally jumped in. He said, ‘I’m sorry, if you are falling asleep during sex, you are just not doing it right.’[3]
This story came to mind when I read this passage. It seems to me that if you have the impulse to make your devotion to Jesus a private matter…if you find a personal, individual experience of God more compelling or fulfilling than a corporate, community experience of God…then you just aren’t doing it right. Normative Christianity is typified by people who can’t get enough of each other. If that doesn’t describe your experience, I suspect you are not doing it right.
I really like what Eugene Peterson has to say about this “I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But I soon found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus. I did not come by the conviction easily, but finally there is not getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart form an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself.” –Eugene Peterson – Christ Plays in 10,000 Places[4]
Peterson asserts that to be human is to need other people…that at some level we do not fundamentally experience our fullest personhood when we are alone – but when we are in community. But Christianity in particular is irreducibly for a couple of reasons. Let me briefly pitch 3 theological reasons why Christianity is fundamentally a community experience:
1. At the center of Christianity is an admission of need and incompleteness, we require connection to other Christians.
2. Christianity is irreducibly corporate because God is. At the heart of the Christian faith is one God, who is himself, a community. The Trinity is not just some sort of abstract theological concept, it, among other things, demonstrates that if a God who is fundamentally corporate, creates us in his image. It would be really striking if a God like this created us for a private, individual experience of him. (Pinnoch – the dance)[5]
3. The Beauty is in the mess. This passage seems to assert that while Christian conversion is individual it is only authentic if it leads you into community – which is sure to get messy. Think about the scene here. There were 3,000 brand new Christians joined the community that day. How many crass hypocrites did that include? How many annoying or difficult people? How many with did that include who had serious coolness deficits? Running into difficult people in the church is not evidence that it is broken…it is evidence that it is fulfilling its purpose. The only prerequisite to join the Church is to look to Jesus and say, ‘I am a total mess and can’t fix this myself.’ You put a bunch of people like that together and it WILL get messy. But the mess of Christian community (in addition to its joys) is one of the tools God uses to form us.
This is one of the reasons why repentance and forgiveness are so central to Jesus’ teaching? Because we are broken people slowly healing – it just so happens that the church disproportionately attracts those that are more broken, so it tends to be a messy place that can only be navigated with repentance and forgiveness. After I had been a Christian a couple years, I had a pastor tell me ‘Stan, I don’t think you love the church. I think you love the idea of the Church.’ (as an aside – same for marriage – Derik Webb – every love song ‘you are great and I am great and when we get together it is great’ – every time I write a love song ‘I am a broken mess of a person and you are a broken mess of a person but I’m committed to this thing and by God’s grace we are getting by’)[6]
Honestly, I think people like individualized spirituality because not getting into the lives of other people and not letting them into our most intimate space and ideas means that we don’t really need to get into the difficult business of repentance and forgiveness.
But repentance and forgiveness are not optional add ons to the Christian life. They are central. Biblical community not only provides us with opportunities to experience encouragement but also serves as the ‘lab’ for our ‘book learning’ on repentance and forgiveness. Christianity is a lab class. It is irreducibly corporate. If you are doing it alone, you are just not doing it right. It is actually, probably, something else entirely.
II. The Elements of CommunitySo in addition to the basic principal that they ‘were together’, there are at least a dozen things we could draw from these passages to help us think about what normative Christian community should look like. We could teach for a whole quarter just on the elements of community from these passages and I’m convinced that it would be a pretty good series. For, example, James Boyce points out that, according to this passage, the early church was an urban, multi-ethnic mega church. Remember who responded to the message in chapter 2:
9Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 Cretans and Arabs
The urban and multi-ethnic nature of the church become major themes in the Book of Acts and I am going to focus on them in future messages – particularly when I talk about Cornelius and the Church in Antioch at the end of this quarter and the beginning of winter quarter - but for now, lets select 4 “elements” of the early Church that could help inform our experience of Christian community.
1. A Learning, Studying Community
It was a learning, studying community. The first thing Luke mentions to describe this new group of Jesus followers is that they were intellectually engaged. Acts 2:42 “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.”
Now, last week Dan made the case that the early church was typified by a connection and dependence on the Spirit…and I 100% agree. If the work of the Spirit isn’t the main theme of the book of Acts, it is in the top 3. So it seems counter-intuitive that study would be the first mark of such a spirit filled community. But the life of the Spirit and the life of the mind are not competitive but symbiotic. Truth, particularly God’s self disclosure as reveled through the Scriptures, is the catalyst of the Spirit’s activities. Their experiences were grounded in understanding. They took seriously the words of Jesus that the first commandment was to love Jesus with all your ‘Mind, heart, soul and strength.’
My wife spent a semester of undergrad in Texas. She visited churches there where, I kid you not, parishioners checked their concealed fire arms in at the door. The church has been accused of doing the same thing with our brains…and the accusation is not without basis. But we will not ask you to do that here because clearly normative Christian community was intellectually engaged. Deciding how you are going to respond to Jesus is too important a decision to base on a vague feeling, intuition or emotion. You need information. The earliest Christian community was a learning, studying community.
2. A Multi-Scale Community
Second, the earliest Church was a multi-scale community. Look with me at 2:46
46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,
Their organizational structure included large group meetings where they all met together, formal[7] small group gatherings for prayer and worship and informal meals together. We would really encourage you to do the same during your time here at UCD. The structure of CL or any other of the major college ministries where we have a large group meetings, formal small groups and impromptu times or meals together[8] is not an arbitrary organizational structure but actually has Biblical precedent. We would really encourage you to take advantage of each of these opportunities.
3. A Ridiculously Generous Community
Third, a mark of vibrant Christian community is ridiculously counter-culturally generosity. This is the most obvious theme of the passages[9]…and in many ways, the most shocking theme.
2:44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.
4:32No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.
4:34There were no needy persons among them[10]. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
First, I’d just like to point out that this is exceptionally ‘organized religion’ and in Chapter 6 it gets even more organized as the apostles delegate tasks like caring for the socially and economically helpless to what essentially amounts to a sub-committee. But I suspect that many of those who object to ‘organized religion’ would be intrigued by a community like this. On the whole, I don’t think the objection is really to ‘organized[11]’ religion at all, but to irrelevant religion.
So we see in the passage that there is a fundamental difference between ‘hanging out’ and ‘community.’ NT Wright says in his commentary on these verses that Christian ‘fellowship is more than friendship but not less.’ It involves a component of taking material responsibility for each other. Biblical community is ridiculously, counter-culturally generous.[12]
4. An Externally Focused Community
Finally, despite their obvious affection for each other and their discipline of gathering together they remained externally focused. Their primary purpose for existing was not for themselves.
The passage says in 2:46 – ‘they the enjoyed ‘the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.’
It would have been easy for them to say, ‘Whoa now. We just experienced a one day growth rate of 2500%, let’s pack it in a little bit and focus on our personal growth. But while the first church couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they still managed to stay engaged in the larger community and did life together in such a way that others were not only welcome but coming. They interacted with their city in positive ways for the good of all its inhabitants and maintained enough significant relationships outside of the Christian community that
This is the idea behind the growth group kingdom projects. Christian community does not exist only for the good of its members but to be a genuine help and joy to their community.
Let me wrap up with a final story. My first day of undergrad, before my Mom and Dad packed up the Windstar and drove the 200 miles to the school we had chosen, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and could not go back to sleep. So I got up. It was a foggy, cool, September morning in Northern NY. I was a brand new Christian. Seriously, like 18 months earlier I had been an atheist…though not a particularly good one, since I couldn’t seem to keep myself from praying. Anyway, I had wanted to go to a Christian college but couldn’t afford it. I was, honestly, nervous about what college would do to my new faith. I had recently purchased the NT on tape and so I popped Acts into my walkman. A walkman, for those of you who don’t know is this strange device that we used to put these things called cassettes into and which stored audio information on, I kid you not, strips of magnetic tape…and sound would come out through these ear pieces that were held to your head with a metal band.
Anyway, I went for a long walk in that early morning fog listening to the story of the first days of Christianity. As I listened to the story of the early church unfold in a world hostile to their worldview and in the face of huge uncertainty, I began to get a sense that God was going to see me through it. But he wasn’t going to just see ME through it. He was going to see US through it. I didn’t know who ‘us’ was yet…but God’s plan for me at college was to be part of an us…and let me tell you, almost fifteen years later, I am still extremely close with them. You need to find yourself an ‘us’ to follow Jesus with during your years at UCD. You may not know them yet, but I guarantee you that if you find them, they will be among the closest friends of your life and will be directly responsible for how much ground you gain or loose spiritually during your years here.
I have said it before and will say it again – If you spend these 4 years on the margins of Christian community you are RIPPING YOURSELF OFF. Join a Christian fellowship and stick with it. I don’t care which one it is. IV, Crew, or, College Life. More important than which one you choose is that you dive into it and make it a home. You are only in college for a few years, so don’t waste time bouncing between them.
Connect yourself to a community of Christians that is a vibrant studying and learning community, that experiences Christianity as a multi-scale phenomena (go to a large group meeting, join a small group, hang out regularly with a few close Christian friends), that is counter-culturally generous, but always keeps in mind that Christian community exists for those outside of it. If you have had trouble making connections, come on the retreat coming up. Because Christianity is irreducibly corporate and the solution to organized religion is not individual spirituality but vibrant, dynamic, Biblical community.
__________________________
[1] Though far too self important and self assured.
[2] History of Christianity: The Greatest Story or the Trickiest? September 19th, 2009 p95
[3] Now, before I tell you what I think this little anecdote has to do with Acts 2 and 4, I have to take a brief aside. One of the things I love about this story is that it deconstructs the myth that unmarried sex is exciting and fun and married sex is dull and passionless. What you have is a man who has been married for decades, for whom sex has been an effective tool to build lasting intimacy and closeness with a life long partner telling another guy who is essentially just using it for cheap thrills and bragging rights that his experience of the thing is diminished. And let me just say, that we are going to talk more about this. Dan and I have set aside the first 3 weeks of next quarter for a series on sexuality and relationships.
[4] I also loved this quote in that chapter: “People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely and still live badly – live anemically, live individualistically self enclosed lives, live bored and insipid and trivial lives.” Christ Plays in 10,000 Places
[5] As Keller has quoted in his talk on Contextualization- we were deformed through community, it only makes sense that restoration would come partly through the context of a community.”
[6] Let me give you one more quote to round out the point. “The Church offers a way forward beyond mere individualism, beyond mere organization. It is a voluntary community of those who have caught some glimmering of what God means in Christ and how Christ unites all who accept the Accepter. Thus in the Church, at its best, there is both the flowering of individuality and also the sense of belonging, of being accepted, of forgiving, of being forgiven, of loving and being loved.” – Chad Walsh
[7] ‘the breaking of bread and the prayers’ – as contemporary evangelicals we read this and we think of eating together and praying for each other’s needs – but that is an anachronism – it probably is an early form of the Lord’s supper and a liturgy of sorts – there are formal and informal aspects to the community life of the early church – but the breaking bread in v 46
[8] Keller - “You are who you eat with.”
[9] Luke gives more attention than any of the other gospel authors to Jesus’ teachings on money and the poor – it is not surprising, therefore, that he would be intrigued by the economic dimension of the early Christian community
[10] No one in need – ref to Deut 15:4 & 11 (direct quote from the LXX)
[11] The alternative to ‘organized religion’ doesn’t have to be disorganized religion. Biblical community is and was ‘organized’ but was still alive and dynamic. Notice that even in the earliest moments, even in its most organic form, the church is a centralized enterprise – not individual to individual but individualàchurchàindividual. There is a centralized administration of the funds – presumably to protect the community from scams – but also so that assistance came not from the individual but from the community. It is in this context that the verse in 1Timothy makes sense about getting the unemployed jobs so they have money to care for the needs of other. It appears that one of the roles of the early church leadership was to move people from recipient status to giving status.
[12] While the issue of generosity makes us think first (and rightly so) about money – I think it is a fair question to ask ‘What is the scarcest resource for UCD students?’ I suspect it would either be time or GPA. I think it is an important question for Christian students to ask, would God call me to sacrifice some time or GPA on someone else’s behalf.
[1] Though far too self important and self assured.
[2] History of Christianity: The Greatest Story or the Trickiest? September 19th, 2009 p95
[3] Now, before I tell you what I think this little anecdote has to do with Acts 2 and 4, I have to take a brief aside. One of the things I love about this story is that it deconstructs the myth that unmarried sex is exciting and fun and married sex is dull and passionless. What you have is a man who has been married for decades, for whom sex has been an effective tool to build lasting intimacy and closeness with a life long partner telling another guy who is essentially just using it for cheap thrills and bragging rights that his experience of the thing is diminished. And let me just say, that we are going to talk more about this. Dan and I have set aside the first 3 weeks of next quarter for a series on sexuality and relationships.
[4] I also loved this quote in that chapter: “People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely and still live badly – live anemically, live individualistically self enclosed lives, live bored and insipid and trivial lives.” Christ Plays in 10,000 Places
[5] As Keller has quoted in his talk on Contextualization- we were deformed through community, it only makes sense that restoration would come partly through the context of a community.”
[6] Let me give you one more quote to round out the point. “The Church offers a way forward beyond mere individualism, beyond mere organization. It is a voluntary community of those who have caught some glimmering of what God means in Christ and how Christ unites all who accept the Accepter. Thus in the Church, at its best, there is both the flowering of individuality and also the sense of belonging, of being accepted, of forgiving, of being forgiven, of loving and being loved.” – Chad Walsh
[7] ‘the breaking of bread and the prayers’ – as contemporary evangelicals we read this and we think of eating together and praying for each other’s needs – but that is an anachronism – it probably is an early form of the Lord’s supper and a liturgy of sorts – there are formal and informal aspects to the community life of the early church – but the breaking bread in v 46
[8] Keller - “You are who you eat with.”
[9] Luke gives more attention than any of the other gospel authors to Jesus’ teachings on money and the poor – it is not surprising, therefore, that he would be intrigued by the economic dimension of the early Christian community
[10] No one in need – ref to Deut 15:4 & 11 (direct quote from the LXX)
[11] The alternative to ‘organized religion’ doesn’t have to be disorganized religion. Biblical community is and was ‘organized’ but was still alive and dynamic. Notice that even in the earliest moments, even in its most organic form, the church is a centralized enterprise – not individual to individual but individualàchurchàindividual. There is a centralized administration of the funds – presumably to protect the community from scams – but also so that assistance came not from the individual but from the community. It is in this context that the verse in 1Timothy makes sense about getting the unemployed jobs so they have money to care for the needs of other. It appears that one of the roles of the early church leadership was to move people from recipient status to giving status.
[12] While the issue of generosity makes us think first (and rightly so) about money – I think it is a fair question to ask ‘What is the scarcest resource for UCD students?’ I suspect it would either be time or GPA. I think it is an important question for Christian students to ask, would God call me to sacrifice some time or GPA on someone else’s behalf.
No comments:
Post a Comment