Christ Plays in Ten Thousand
Places
Eugene Peterson
Question: What are the signs and symptoms of a healthy community?
“I didn’t come to the conviction easily, but finally there
was no getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no
obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an
immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not
the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ
is at play.”[1]
Resurrection
is the first thing Peterson goes to as he tries to describe how the people of
Jesus should incarnate the life and ministry of Jesus. He writes that resurrection is something we
cannot take credit for or make happen.
We didn’t raise Jesus from the dead and we can’t raise ourselves from
the dead. It is something God does. That
truth applies to everything God is doing. “The more we get involved in what God
is doing, the less we find ourselves running things; the more we participate in
God’s work as revealed in Jesus, the more is done to us and the more is done
through us.”[2] Therefore, the first sign of a healthy
community of believers is submission to God’s formation of us and the world
around us. I take this partly to mean that we start with an attitude of worship
and gratefulness, waiting on God’s presence and listening for His voice, rather
than allowing people’s needs or our paradigm for ministry to dictate the way we
serve or engage in community.
The gospel
of John highlights the way Jesus goes about forming a resurrection community on
the night of his betrayal, during the Last Supper. He starts out washing the disciples’ feet, he
eats and talks with them for an extended period of time, and he ends by
interceding for them to the Father.[3] Jesus shows his disciples that a good leader
demonstrates authority and leadership by serving. His example is to serve, not to be served. A
healthy community, therefore, is composed of servant-leaders who seek to honor
each other.
After washing their feet, Jesus’
conversation with the disciples follows a pattern that Peterson lays out as
follows:
I washed
your feet; you wash one another’s feet. (13:14)
I have
loved you; you love one another. (13:34; 15:12)
You’ve seen
me; you’ll see the Father. (14:9)
You’ve seen
me work; you’ll do my work. (14:12)
I’ve been
with you; the Spirit will be with you. (14:16-17)
I live; you
also will live. (14:19)
You are in
me; I am in you. (14:20)
I am
teaching you; the Spirit will teach/remind you. (14:25-26)
Abide in
me; I abide in you. (15:4)
I was
hated; you will be hated. (15:18-25)
The Spirit
will testify; you will testify. (15:26-27)
I go away;
the Spirit will come. (16:7)
I haven’t
finished what I have to say; the Spirit will tell you. (16:12-15)
I am no
longer in the world; they are in the world. (17:11)
Father, we
are one; may they be one. (17:11, 22, 23)
I don’t
belong to the world; they don’t belong to the world. (17:16)
You sent me
into the world; I send them into the world. (17:18)
I sanctify myself;
they are sanctified in truth. (17:19)
You are in
me and I in you; may they also be in us. (17:21)
You love
me; you love them. (17:23, 26).[4]
This repeated and reiterated and reinforced pattern that
Jesus weaves into the conversation with His disciples is saying clearly that we
are to continue what Jesus has been doing, and we are to do it by the power and
guidance of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, a healthy community ministers to people
in the same way Jesus did (showing hospitality to strangers and outsiders,
healing physical and emotional and spiritual brokenness, speaking up for truth
and justice in ways that offend even the religious establishment), and does it
by being filled with the same power Jesus was (the power of the Holy Spirit).
According
to Peterson, the greatest threat to healthy community is sectarianism.[5] He defines it as “deliberately and willfully
leaving the large community, […] and embarking on a path of special interests
with some others, whether few or many, who share similar tastes and concerns.”[6] In
other words, it is an easy substitute for the diversity and reconciliation that
must exist in true community; a sect imitates community by involving a group of
individuals, but it counterfeits community by drawing dividing lines based on
all sorts of differences. Therefore, a healthy community avoids becoming a sect
by renouncing selfism and individualism, by practicing radical hospitality with
its neighbors, and by intentionally rooting itself in the place it exists.
Peterson’s
first grounding text for the section on community is the book of Deuteronomy,
and he places the 10 commandments (‘ten words’ in Hebrew) at the center. Simply
put, the book of Deuteronomy is Moses’ last sermon to the Israelites before
they enter the Promised Land, and he is laying out the necessary framework for
how they are expected to live in community together as a holy nation. The ten
words simply expand on the importance of loving God and loving others, and
Moses follows them up with 16 chapters of instructions that deal with specific
situations and how the people should deal with them. He covers everything from what sort of meat
can be sacrificed in the temple to how an Israelite can marry a foreign woman
captured in battle. Peterson sums it up
saying, “If we are going to live in community we can’t brush things like this
aside, trusting them to be worked out between men and women of goodwill who
are, after all, ‘saved.’ We have to deal with these housekeeping details of
getting along with each other.”[7] Therefore, a healthy community has clear
expectations put in place for how to correctly love God and love other people,
and has specific, clearly communicated standards for right moral behavior that
are applied and enforced with its members.
Peterson’s
second grounding text for his section on community is the two-volume work of
Luke/Acts. He highlights Luke’s emphasis
on the Holy Spirit throughout both books, and points out that the Holy Spirit
is the direct cause of two very important conceptions: the conception of Jesus
and his cousin John, and three decades later the conception of the church at
Pentecost. In both cases there is a
miraculous beginning that is followed by a completely ordinary journey of
growth and development. Jesus and
John—despite being conceived in a miraculous way—must learn to eat, crawl,
walk, talk, obey their parents, work, pray and read just like any other
child. Similarly, although the church is
begun by the Holy Spirit descending on the disciples with tongues of fire,
those same disciples must now learn to preach the gospel, pray, love their
neighbors, appoint elders, partake in communion, and all the other thousands of
activities that compose the life of the church. Commenting on the power of the
Holy Spirit Peterson says, “Whatever the power of the Spirit means, bullying
force isn’t part of it. It is certainly not what takes place when a fuse
ignites a stick of dynamite (named after the Greek work for power, dynamis). The power of God is always
exercised in personal ways, creating and saving and blessing. It is never an
impersonal application of force from without.”[8] In other words, although the Holy Spirit
fills us and empowers us and performs miracles through us, there is a very
important process and journey of growth that must also occur in healthy
community, and that no power of the Holy Spirit will allow us to short-circuit.
Therefore, a healthy Christian community has a clear understanding of the role
of the Holy Spirit in its midst, and a strong ethic of investing in the daily
life of the church.
There are
five famous prayers in the beginning of Luke that help define how the church
should respond to the Holy Spirit, and participate in the way He speaks and
works in our lives: the Fiat mihi,
the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Gloria in excelsis, and the Nunc
dimittis.[9] The most important leaders of the Acts church
spent most of their time praying.[10] Therefore, a healthy Christian community has
prayer as its common language, and is steeped in prayer.
Both Luke
and Acts end with trials—Luke with a trial of Jesus and Acts with a trial of
Paul. Peterson observes that neither Jesus nor Paul—two of the most important
men in the history of the church and in shaping the history of the entire human
race since then—made much of an impression on the authorities interrogating
them. It is a stark reminder that the
church, even at its most dynamic, will never impress or arrest the attention of
the world. Peterson writes, “Hebrew history capped by a full exposition in
Jesus Christ tells us that God’s revelation of himself is rejected far more
often that it is accepted, is dismissed by far more people than embrace it, and
has been either attacked or ignored by every major culture or civilization in
which it has given its witness […]”[11] Therefore,
a symptom of healthy Christian community is that the world around it is either
disinterested in or actively rejecting its offer of salvation through Jesus
Christ.
In summary,
the following are signs and symptoms of a healthy Christian community.
Submitting to God’s formation of us and of the world around us, composed of
servant-leaders who seek to honor each other, ministering to people the same
way Jesus did and filled with the same Spirit Jesus was, avoiding sectarianism
by practicing radical hospitality and connecting to a specific locale, creating
and abiding by expectations for how to love God, love each other and behave in
a way that pleases God, welcoming the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit while
simultaneously working daily to grow and develop the church and its members,
and avoiding the temptation to work for success and acceptability to our
culture by accepting the reality of the world’s disinterest in Jesus.
