Reflections on Community
During the past few weeks we have been reflecting on the spiritual practice of community through our sermon series and in our discussion groups, and we’ll be continuing to do so for at least a few more weeks. If you stop to think about it for a bit, it may seem odd to even consider community a spiritual practice. This seems fair especially if you base your understanding of community on our common, everyday experiences of community. But one of the most fundamental aspects of what makes the church the church is that it is a community. This is not because it’s useful for an institution like the church to be made up of a bunch of people in order to function decently. Nor is it in the first instance because we need to come alongside one another and support and encourage each other because it’s right and good and feels good and helps us to (hopefully?) become better people.
Community is fundamental to the church and is a basic spiritual practice of the church primarily because of who God made us to be as humans: beings created in the image of God, who therefore are made to look like God and reflect his character here on earth. And as the church has confessed for the last 2000 years, God is not merely unity, but is in some mysterious way also a plurality. The God who taught Israel in Deut. 6:4 that the Lord is one, also said in Gen. 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Bound up with imaging God is the reality that God is an “us”, the Scriptural beginning of a long lineage of revelation that God exists in mysterious commune of three persons of such profound and deep intimacy that God must also be conceived as a unity. It is this “Tri-unity” that caused the early church to simply invent a new word “Trinity” to capture the concept.
But in the biblical story the intimate “us” of God that humans are supposed to mirror gets fractured and broken as the human relationship with God gets fractured and broken through sin. The community that humanity should exhibit becomes fractured in deep and complex ways at all levels of its existence such that community at all levels exists more often in ways of uniformity that pushes out differences. Tensions abound in states of attempted uniformity, and further fracturing is common as revealed differences are unable to be accommodated within such communities.
When we get to the New Testament we find that Jesus comes to restore both levels of brokenness. The estrangement between God and the human is restored, and the human can once again be in unity with its creator and the one who loved him/her so much as to call them into existence. But integral with this restoration is also healing the human brokenness with one another, healing the very part of the human that makes them look like God: their being together in community, their “us-ness”. And Jesus casts this vision as he prays for the church in John 17:21, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” That they may all be one. And the measure of this unity is only reflected in the Godhead itself: that they may be one just as the Son, one unique person of the Trinity, is in the Father, another unique person of the Trinity and vice-versa. Both maintain their distinctiveness such that neither is subsumed into the other, but yet neither can anyone simply transcribe their separateness – to see one is to see the other (John 14:7-10).
Furthermore, all who constitute the church, the new humanity in Jesus, are to be unified just as the members of the Trinity are unified so that “they also may be in us.” The three members of the Holy Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - are not satisfied to simply maintain the boundaries of their sphere of existence. The goal of community is participation with and entrance into the domain of the Godhead. Those who are in Jesus find ultimately that movement toward God is inextricably bound up with movement towards one another – enjoying one another’s presence through the good times and bad. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, and in such a journey we find that we encounter Jesus over and over again as we love one another in this community and carry out the hard work of undoing the fracturing of community that has so deeply characterized human existence.
This is not just a product of human effort, but as Jesus ended his prayer in John 17:26, “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” As Jesus continues to make known the name of the Father – that is, the character of the Father - an amazing thing happens. The very love of the Father that he shows towards Jesus manifests in his church community, and Jesus himself is among us. In some amazing and profound way we are carried up into and participate in the very love that each member of the Trinity exhibits towards each other. And as the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:18, as we behold the glory of God, “we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Let us seek to move towards the Father by finding ways to move towards each other in community in this season of fractured, post-pandemic, hurried life. Let us take time to seek Jesus in the face of our neighbor.
Soli Deo Gloria
Carl Ayers