Koinonia

Robin led the meeting in Don’s absence on vacation.

[Editor’s note: I have taken the liberty of expanding and clarifying my remarks here. Droit d’éditeur!—David]

 

Robin: The Greek word koinonia is commonly used to mean “community” but it is really a specialized form of community that involves intimacy and identifies the idealized state of fellowship and community that the Christian church is supposed to have. The word is used within the Christian Church to participate, as Paul says, in the Communion of—in this manner it identifies the idealized state of fellowship and community that should exist—Communion.

What do we understand by intimacy? Can there be intimacy without a relationship? Does growing intimacy strengthen a relationship?

We think of marriage as being the closest form of intimacy, and it is supposed to be an example of how close our relationship could be with God. In fact he called the church his bride. So koinonia is not just strangers on the fringe of community but people one gets to know intimately—and therefore to respect their ideas, opinions, and feelings, even though they might not match one’s own at all.

Harry: If you try to create a marker, or a flag, that defines community, you are stating a belief that leads automatically to pseudo community. True community is simpler than we think. Friendship subsumes community. Out of friendship, you remain interested and concerned about what happens to your friends, and even the friends of one’s friend, and community grows out of that alone. Where community fails is when you give it a name and say this is what this community is and believes. I am still friends with many of my childhood acquaintances, even though we have all followed divergent paths. This is a true community that happens naturally and has no requirements.

Robin: Respect and trust might be the only requirements.

Francine: I have intimate relations with my children, and they trust me. Not all parents have such an intimate relationship with their children.

Robin: Friends develop intimacy too. Two scriptural references come to mind: Proverbs 18:24: “… there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” and  John 15:13 (KJV): Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Harry: The average family seems not very close knit. One is closer to one’s children of course, because they are part of one. Most of my closest friends from childhood are non-believers, though they are good people with attributes we would call “Christian.” When we try to create community, it usually means we want to convert people to our beliefs, but true community doesn’t do that.

Robin: The early church had more of that ideal state, but has lost it over time.

Harry: The early church was more liberal.

David: The early church was closer to true community perhaps because it had fewer requirements or rules, and more intimacy. Society—human community—sets pretty strict rules around intimacy. But the community Jesus proposes is radical, including in its requirements surrounding the intimate component of community. That vision is not concerned with rules about how to be intimate; but we, in contrast, have rules that say how intimate we can be at various stages in our lives and in various relationships such as marriage. Jesus says the only requirement is love. But like all of these messages that Don keeps forcing us to confront, they make us very uncomfortable because they are radical, counter-intuitive, antisocial. The kingdom of heaven community is like nothing we envision as human community.

Robin: I’ve researched some passages about what community is…

1. Mark 3:31-34: Then His mother and His brothers arrived, and standing outside they sent word to Him and called Him. A crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, “Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You.” Answering them, He said, “Who are My mother and My brothers?” Looking about at those who were sitting around Him, He said, “Behold My mother and My brothers!

2. Acts 2:42-47: They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.

3. Galatians 6:2-3: Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.

4. Zachariah 7:9-10: “Thus has the Lord of hosts said, ‘Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.’

…and what it is not:

5. 2 Timothy 3:1-5: But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.

6. 2 Corinthians 12:20-21: For I am afraid that perhaps when I come I may find you to be not what I wish and may be found by you to be not what you wish; that perhaps there will be strife, jealousy, angry tempers, disputes, slanders, gossip, arrogance, disturbances; I am afraid that when I come again my God may humiliate me before you, and I may mourn over many of those who have sinned in the past and not repented of the impurity, immorality and sensuality which they have practiced.

Robin: How has your community changed in your lifetime? What could be better, what could be worse?

Emma: I prefer the way our church is today to what is was when I was young. It was very strict then. There were more rules. Now it is freer, more liberal, more tolerant. One is less likely to be shunned today for a transgression.

David: I would echo Emma but on a global scale: The world as a whole is a better place. Wars and conflict were more common than today (hard though it might seem to believe). The communication media and especially the internet have increased global intimacy, as well as understanding. Historically, as hunter-gatherer societies we would kill a stranger hunter just to protect our hunting territory, because prey were hard to come by and a tribe could not afford to share its “stock” of prey. So killing was commonplace and unremarkable. But today, sometimes there is global media coverage over one single death, such as of the poor Indian woman brutally raped and killed on a bus two months ago.

And yet… in order to achieve that level of intimacy we have become “cool” and have lost the “grand overpowering loves and grand unrelenting hates” that made humanity… well… humanity. This bland coolness seems almost inhuman, and lacking in something. But I think it is undeniable that we are a better global community today than we were a hundred years ago, when we were preparing to fight two world wars.

The scary penultimate passage [#5] quoted above about “last days” applies to every generation. So the passage is kind of a cheap shot—to every new generation, it looks like it is a new message that applies only to them, but it is as old as history.

Robin: Is it a safer place? I remember my grandparents telling me they could walk around Saginaw at night, sleep with the doors unlocked, and so on.You wouldn’t risk those things today!

Harry: The last days of the Roman Empire were brutal. But things eventually got better. Cults in every generation have declared the end to be at hand. We look at that scripture and think Wow! That’s us! But the fact is, we have always gotten through such bad times. The scripture is fear-based. Fear is what makes religion grow.

Robin: In my observation, those who come into spiritual fellowship out of fear will usually leave when the predicted dramatic development doesn’t happen and they have no developed intimacy with the congregation. They see no reason to stay.

FDR gave a famous speech on January 6, 1941, in which he talked about the four freedoms of national community: Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Following the assassination of MLK Jr., schoolteacher Jane Elliott wanted to teach her young students, who were white and had no intercourse with people of other races, a lesson about bigotry. So she divided the class into brown-eyed and blue-eyed students. (At some Nazi concentration camps, Jews were selected for the gas chambers on the same basis.)

She first gave the blue-eyed group special privileges–extra time in recess, exclusive access to the new jungle gym, extra helpings at lunch, etc.–and had them sit at the front of the class. The brown eyes were relegated to the back. They were not allowed to play with the blue eyes. She told the whole class that there was scientific evidence that blue eyed people had more natural intelligence and ability. It took only 15 minutes for the children to begin to change their interactions with one another.

The next day, the group roles were reversed: Brown eyes were given all the privileges at the expense of the blue eyes. The blue eyes, who had been superior, began to act timidly, and the brown eyes began to act aggressively, though less aggressively than the blue eyes had because they (the brown eyes) were able to empathize with the suddenly underprivileged blue eyes. While in the inferior status, both groups performed worse academically.

The teacher was chastised by parents and fellow teachers but received praise from outside her immediate community.

I experienced a mild form of discrimination when I went to Texas and was called a “Yankee.”

Francine: My son, who happens to have some Italian blood and is therefore somewhat dark-skinned, went with a friend to check out the Adventist Southern Academy in Chattanooga but were treated so rudely and unwelcomingly that they decided the school was not for them.

Emma: I grew up in a town of mainly Irish Catholics. When the war broke out, many southerners, mainly Irish Protestants, moved to the town for the jobs it offered. The enmity between the two groups was strong, to the point where many Irish Catholics moved out.

David: Racism is alive and well in Hawaii. Native Hawaiians (even those with a relatively small percentage of native Hawaiian blood) feel they have been cheated of their land and heritage, which (to America’s shame) is essentially true, though some reparations have been made. They particularly dislike whites, whom they call “haoles”–a regular Hawaiian word imbued with pejorative and racist overtones. I have personally been threatened and told to “go home.”

Robin: We will close with another community statement written in 1946 called “First They Came” by Martin Niemöller who was originally a Nazi sympathizer but later changed his mind:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Catholic.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Perhaps community should not just “be”—it should do. Perhaps we could think of what we might do as a class towards creating a better community.

* * *