Starlings in flight -
millions of birds in formation making spectacular patterns as they fly in
unison over the English countryside.
· How do they do it?
· How do they know which way to turn?
· How do they not crash into each other?
· Is there a leader that they are following or
· Is there some form of elementary “group
consciousness” which they share?
Though they are
millions for this brief time they truly act as one.
How does it work?
How does it work?
Under the sea in a
most extraordinary gathering of fish.
Millions of jack fish school together forming submarine tornadoes. More than 70% of the entire population of
this species gather in one spot for this mass mating ritual which greatly
increases their re-productivity.
Though they are
millions for this brief time they truly act as one. How does it work?
I watch ants and bees
with the same sense of wonder. We’re so
tuned to think of the individual that it’s hard to comprehend how the colony or
the hive works. Which is first the drone
or the collective?
The community of ants or bees act as one it is as if they were just one being although physical separated somehow connected at a much more primal and significant level.
The community of ants or bees act as one it is as if they were just one being although physical separated somehow connected at a much more primal and significant level.
Anthropologists argue
that we are social animals – that community is essential to being human, to
human being. I’m in absolute agreement and I think we can all recognise the
illness that arise from the opposite of community, - isolation, we end up with self-centredness, narcism,
depression, loneliness. Although there are billions of humans on the planet we
are not as neo-liberalism would tell us individuals, we cannot be
individualised we are beings-in-relationships, we are social beings, yet we
rarely realise our potential in community, we seldom experience anything like
the one-mindedness of lesser beings such as the birds and the bees the fish in
the seas.
Occasionally we might
experience what I want to call the spiritual experience of connection with a
group of people at an almost ecstatic level.
We need to take notice of those experiences and reflect on them for they
tells us something about who we are and as
we consider scripture today we ponder the essential nature of God as Tri-unity
and of all of existences as essentially relational.
Ponder the unifying
and sometimes ecstatic experience of being part of a choir, an orchestras or
even pop group.
When such groups get
it all together, there is a moment when the boundaries of the individual
dissolve and the group becomes one. There is a delight that exceeds an individual
performance and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Jazz bands are known for their improvisation
and at times during a jam or a performance the musical score is abandoned and
the group just seem to be carried away to another place, as they play in
harmony each contributing to the magic of the moment with little conscious
thought and what seems to be an intuitive collective consciousness.
If you are not a muso
you may recognise another phenomenon that happens to a sports crowd or even an
audience at the theatre or the ballet.
At the sports field it is that way the crowd rises to its feet as one,
or when a spontaneous cheers erupts as your team scores a goal. At the theatre it may be the hushed silence
everyone holding their breath. All of
these experiences I want to call spiritual because even if they are a mere
shadow of the what God has in store for us, they are moments when people feel
most truly alive and they are moments when we feel most truly connected to
those around us. It is no accident that
feeling that sense of connection makes us feel alive. We are spiritual people made in the image of
God, made for koinonia, fellowship, relationship and when we experience that by
any means we senses what it is like to have the spirit flow through us.
CAN SUCH EXPERIENCES
HELP US COMPREHEND THE HOLY TRINITY?
Some may say that I am
on dangerous ground allowing experience to form my theology. Surely theology must be based on something
more substantial something more concrete and absolute like the bible.
Yet I contend experience is all that I have, I have my experience of life, my experience of living with others my relationships with people and things and of course my experience of the church, the bible and the teachings of many theologians over the centuries.
The bible itself is an
attempt to record in words the indescribable experience of encountering the
divine.
And when the early
church tried to describe the collective experience of the revelation in Jesus
Christ, the experience of the Holy Spirit - The holy obsession of those early
theologians was to affirm and safeguard the revelation that had been granted to
those who had been with Jesus. They believed there was only one God; one ruling
and integrating power in heaven and on earth. Yet that one God had revealed
itself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There was no way they were prepared to
shift from that treasured revelation. They celebrated both the unity of God and
the revealed three Persona of the Godhead, because that is what they had
experienced.
It is likely the people who framed the
doctrine of tri-unity were living in a world where this sense of communal identity,
or “group mind,” was still present. A world where a man or woman defined and
experienced themselves as a certain family, tribe, or village, before thinking
of their individuality. Therefore they may not have had our intellectual
difficulties with the concept of three in one. We have become fiercely and destructively
individualistic.
Maybe what seems to
the self-sufficient men and women of today to be illogical theological nonsense
was eminently sensible to those early Christians whose sense of community
identity was stronger than their individual identity. They knew that belonging
to a comm-unity did not lessen personality but enhanced it.
The word fellowship,
koinonia in Greek, carries the meaning of sharing. Sharing in a marriage,
sharing in a meal, sharing in an adventure even sharing in a business being a
stakeholder or a shareholder in a common
enterprise.
So we can think of
koinonia a bit like a shareholding in a business.
Among the eighteen
times the word koinonia is used in the New Testament, we have texts where it is
a shareholding (koinonia) in Christ, a shareholding in the Spirit, and
shareholding in God
Koinonia is part of
the essential nature of God. As Christian people, members of the body of Christ
we are sharing something of the true nature of God, We are no longer individual
we have been delivered from the stark solitary ways of individualism. Through
God, we are linked to each other, the members of the one body. Paul encourages the church on many occasions
to be of one mind he may have meant it more literally than we have
previously thought.
We are members of that
one body, the church, which from the beginning “held all things in common.”
FLASHES OF TRUE
COMMUNITY
The rank individualism in our contemporary
culture has infected all of us to some degree. It has sorely impaired the
quality of our Christian fellowship and diminished our experience as human
beings made in the image of the tri-une God
We do experience flashes of the true koinonia.
This can happen as we
sing praise together. Sometimes we experience it in prayer. Sometimes when
we are working together on a charitable or outreach project.
Yet for much of the
time we live like self-contained individuals who intellectually hold a belief
in common, and politely greet each other once a week in a church building,
before returning to our isolated lives.
The fellowship we have
with God affects the fellowship we have with each other and vice versa.
Through prayer and
praise we let go of our egocentricity and we begin to share in the fellowship
of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, this opens us up to deeper fellowship with our
sisters and brothers. And whenever we
truly meet each other as brothers and sisters in an open caring way, it
enhances our fellowship with God.
The reverse also
applies, whenever we become preoccupied with ourselves and neglect our
relationship with God, we are liable to become indifferent or critical of
others around us and human fellowship withers and dies. Or whenever we withdraw
our real caring from those around us, we find we have also lost a sense of
communion with God; divine fellowship withers and dies.
And because we are
built for relationships, if our relationships with others withers and dies –
guess what - so do we? And if our
relationship with God withers and dies – something in us withers and dies too.
John’s first letter
starkly expresses this truth in another way. “We know that we have passed out
of death into life because we love each other. The one who does not love,
remains in death.”
God in three persons, blessed Trinity
Community is the best
possible form of living.
Individualism is a
kind of death.
So on this Trinity
Sunday recall that you are made for koinonia, fellowship, relationship, You are
at heart a relational being even as God is in god-self a relational being. And remember this. true life is to be found
in loving one another in connecting with your God and with your fellow human
beings.
In Community is life
the life for which you have been made!
