We are many we are one

1 Corinthians 13:12-14

Greet one another with a holy kiss.

All the saints greet you.

The love of our Lord Jesus Christ,

the love of God,

and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,

be with you all :

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?

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.

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 singing 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 godself 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,