Hey, Cobblestone,
Here’s the weird part: the Bible book of Romans was written
and distributed after the letter we
know as First Corinthians. I know, flipping through the pages from left to
right, Romans comes first, but all the best evidence points to Romans coming
along 2-3 years after First Corinthians, which, you’ll remember, was the third
letter in the exchange of five between Paul and the church in Corinth. What
makes this weird is that the Corinthian Christians sure could have benefitted
from the clarity packed into the letter to the Roman Christians. As copies of
Romans began to circulate, I can imagine Christians in Corinth, in their finest
sarcastic tones, saying, “Gee, Paul, this
would have been helpful.”
Did God make a mistake? Did he forget to give the Corinthians
all the info they needed? Makes one wonder, does it not? Why would he send this
community of faith into the big/bad world half-cocked?
The letter I wrote to you last week was a primer, the first
in a series of yet-to-be-determined length, in which we’re asking the Lord to
help us develop an accurate and sustainable definition of community. If
community has a recipe (and I believe it does), last week we preheated the
oven. This week we begin gathering the ingredients. I have a list in my notes,
and it’s growing still. Truthfully, I may already have some ingredients that
don’t belong, and there’s always the possibility of others plopping into the
mix. Some years back, I heard a comment about the difference between knowledge
and wisdom: knowledge is being informed that tomatoes are, technically, a
fruit; wisdom is not putting tomatoes in the fruit salad. Please pray with me
for wisdom, so we don’t end up with a Franken-salad definition of community –
there are too many of those already.
Let’s try to imagine: How would a first-century Christian
have engaged Scripture? What Scripture was available? What authority did it
carry? While we’re imagining, let’s remember: There was no New Testament as we
understand the term today. Looking back, we can see that our forbears were
getting their New Testament on-the-fly, all through the second half of their
century. But to them it would have looked like really good teaching – in modern
terms, roughly the equivalent of a great book or a mind-blowing podcast. Did
they have anything of authority that preceded the apostles’ letters? Let’s give
our imaginations a breather and go to cognitive thought:
For I do not want you to be unaware,
brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and
all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the
cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual
food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the
spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless,
with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in
the wilderness
(1Corinthians 10:1-5).
Helpful, no? Maybe not, at least not at first. Let’s try not
to get wrapped up, for now, in what it means to be “baptized into Moses” –
deal? Instead, look at the thrust of the paragraph: the apostle wants his
readers to be aware rather than unaware. Aware of what? Of their history, and
its effect on their lives:
Now these things took place as
examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did… Now these
things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our
instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let
anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall (verses 6, 11-12).
Of all the ingredients on my growing list, vying for first
place in the recipe for community – hmm, what goes there? How about a common goal?
Fellowship? Love? Humility? I don’t see a throwaway on the list so far (do
you?), but if I may be so bold, I’ll insist that first place goes to truth.
Two Sundays ago, standing on the front porch of the church
building, Jack Sasser gave me a verbal recipe for zucchini patties. I didn’t
know zucchini patties would appeal to me at all until Jack started describing
how they’re made. He got me, I think, with the parmesan cheese. Early on, the
ingredients sounded more like they would add up to a stir fry, or baked, maybe
a casserole. When he listed flour, I began to see how this would turn into a
patty, as I understood the term. And then he said, “Oh, shoot, an egg! You
gotta have an egg. That’s what holds it all together.” On my prompting, and
best recollection of Jack’s recipe, Kay made zucchini patties for family night
this past week. There were no leftovers. And like Jack, I was late getting to
the egg part, causing my bride to say, “Where’s the egg? It won’t hold together
without an egg.”
Truth holds community together, making it possible to be in community. And at this point, we have
to become aware of two categories of definitions for community. The terms I’ll
assign, and hope they’re helpful for us all, are “contemporary definitions” and
“abiding definitions.” Not being Latin students, most of us, we might still see
the clues in con-tempor-ary: “with temporal status,” here today, gone sometime
later. Communities that form under a contemporary definition start with
somebody who wants to be in community who finds others who want to be in
community; they get together, after which the members find something to be
together about. The community preceded the chosen binding agent.
By an abiding definition, members of a community bind
themselves to prevailing truth, after which they bind themselves to each other.
The binding agent precedes the community. Under the very best conditions, the
members of a community formed under an abiding definition will have bound
themselves to what has been true in all times and for all people. It won’t
matter what new info comes along – truth has an amazing way of bearing itself
out. The community members can stay in community.
On the force of Jesus’s promise, all truth is available to a
community of Christian faith – just not all at once:
“I still have many things to say to
you,” (Jesus said to
his disciples on the night before his crucifixion), “but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth
comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on
his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will
declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for
he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has
is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to
you” (John 16:12-15).
Just like the Corinthian church, ours was established with
enough truth to get us started, along with plenty of incentive to become better
equipped. On the other hand, Cobblestone Community Church has spent long
periods of time trying to build community by a contemporary definition, and if
there’s anything we should want the Lord to “cook out of us,” like
right-the-heck now, it’s that… exactly. We have got examine what binds us
together. I suspect, at the moment, it’ll be a mix of contemporary and abiding
definitions – in fact, I’m sure it’s a mix. Where we are bound by what has been
true for all times and all people, and we have abiding community – well and
good. Let’s build on that. Where we are bound (supposedly) by what is fleeting
– let’s please stop pretending to be in community on those terms.
So the letter Paul wrote to Rome showed up a bit late in
Corinth – big deal. Actually, Paul alluded to several of the same concepts in
his Corinthian letters – it was only by doing life with his Christian brothers
and sisters that he was able to receive and report the Romans versions of the
same. (Nope, I’m not running afoul of divine inspiration, only pointing out the
complex and glorious process God used to bring it about!) Salvation was their
common starting point, becoming aware, and more aware as time went on, of what
had been true all along. Paul and the Corinthians had bound themselves to
truth. Same goes for the Roman Christians, the Ephesian Christians, and the
Cobblestonian Christians. There’s more community-building available to us, more
opportunity to be in community, than we can currently imagine. We will benefit
our neighbors best, maybe even invite them into true community, when we commit
to a true definition.
Grace and Peace (and an appetite for truth),
John
P.S. Many thanks to those who sent your spontaneous
definitions of community – they’re in the pot! Anybody else?
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