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Against Tribalism

​Humans have two conflicting intense desires – first, to be accepted by a group, and second, to be distinct from the group. The combination of these two things creates tribalism, and a seeking of distinct identities as a piece of one community as opposed to another. We were made to live in community, and this “tribe-shaped hole” in our heart is meant to be filled by the community of Christ. But all too frequently, we treat the church of God as if it were a worldly tribe, as we create sub-tribes, cliques, schisms and divisions.

This was the situation in the Corinthian church. They had divided themselves up based on the leaders that they followed. Some identified with Paul, the founder of the church. Some identified with Apollos, the current pastor and an eloquent speaker. Some identified with Peter, the overall leader of the church in Jerusalem. Others were super-spiritual and identified with Christ. 

This was largely a spillover from culture. In Greco-Roman culture, it was entirely expected that you would seek to elevate your own rank by associating yourself with somebody of higher rank. Similarly, the Sophist philosophy was built around a student’s identification with and imitation of a teacher. Politics, similarly, was primarily about personality rather than ideas. In all these cases, it was the responsibility of the follower to defend the patron in their absence, and to boast in their successes and virtues.

In the church, this entire concept became tangled up with the concept of baptism. This ceremony originated with Judaism, and were in some ways a ceremony of connection between a rabbi and a follower. There were secular and pagan version of the same thing. So in the church, the person who baptized you became seen as your patron, and you would defend their positions abilities and status against the others who are defending their own patrons.

Paul goes after this whole concept by using rhetoric, asking three rhetorical questions. First, can Christ be divided? Can Christ be put alongside mere human leaders as one of many church leaders? Second, was Paul crucified for you? He reminds them that he (and the other leaders) are merely messengers. Third, were you baptized in the name of Paul? He seeks to strip the concept of baptism of its secular, patron/follower baggage. 

Paul emphasizes that he did not come to them to tick off followers or speak eloquently (with “wisdom of words”). He came to pass on the message of the gospel. That message is that Christ himself is our spiritual patron, and we, as followers of Christ, are called to unity in Him. We can have differences of opinion, but we must be unified as followers of Christ. We can and should treat Him as the culture expects – boasting about him and building him up. But all this must be done in humility about ourselves, knowing that our association with this particular important patron does not build us up to be better than others, but in fact does the opposite. 

The biggest danger to Christian unity is not that we elevate our own views above Christ. Rather, we elevate our views or our tribe as being on the and level as Christ. Too often, we see our conservatism or progressivism as being the natural extension of Christ’s teaching, rather than our own imperfect application. We set up our tribe or our leader as equal with or equivalent to Christ’s kingdom. We become more concerned with supporting or defending our side than with speaking truth. 

We certainly see this in the culture today. If Paul were here, he would demand that we keep all that nonsense out of the church. “Did Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump die for you? Were you baptized in the name of conservatism or progressivism?”

How do we know when I am falling into this? When we disagree with another believer and this leads to a feeling of contempt for them, that is a key indicator that something is wrong in our outlook. 

We cannot imitate what is acceptable in culture. Within the church, we must be able to acknowledge our differences but focus on our unity in Christ. Recent years have made this increasingly difficult in the realm of American politics, so we must redouble our efforts to seek love and unity within the diversity of the community of Christ. 

–Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

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Introduction to First Seattleites

Paul had grown up upper-middle class in Tarsus, a center of tent-making, where he learned that trade. He also studied religious law under Gameliel and was a Roman citizen, so this gave him notable status in the community. He was among the many Jewish leaders concerned about the followers of this Jesus – from his perspective, one in a long line of false messiahs who was twisting the scriptures and putting all of God’s people at risk.

So he became essentially a bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing Christians for execution. At one point he asks for dispensation from the high priest to go up to Damascus and bring the Christians back to Jerusalem to face justice. On the way, he is confronted with the living Christ and blinded. When he is healed, he becomes a zealous follower of Christ, and his preaching causes a riot. From there he went briefly to Jerusalem, where he causes trouble once again, and has to be smuggled out. He returns to Taursus and spends ten years there. We don’t know exactly what happened in those years, but presumably they were spent largely in contemplation of the implications of Christ’s coming. Eventually, a man named Barnabas is sent out to find Paul. Paul comes back to Jerusalem, meets with the apostles, and is sent out again, becoming a missionary for the church.

Eventually, he comes to Corinth, where he partners with Priscilla and Aquila and eventually shifts his focus from preaching to the Jews to preaching up the gentiles. He spent a year and a half there building the church, which he then left in the hands of co-pastors Priscilla and Aquila. This letter was written a number of years later to that church.

Corinth was a center of trade, located on an isthmus where ships went overland rather than sailing around Asia is. It was a center of entertainment, hosting the Isthmian Games every two years. It was a center of religion and sex, as the temple of Aphrodite also served as a city-wide prostitution business. The city naturally had a pretty significant underbelly, and had become a Roman byword for debauchery and dissolution. So the church in Corinth had a lot of baked-in issues, issues Paul would not have been able to deal with in his short time there. This meant that the church there was probably the most dysfunctional church that Paul wrote to, riven by factions, infighting, selfishness, and not a little of its own debauchery and dissolution.

Because of these issues, people were actively leaving the faith. The central message of this book, then, was the reminder that a diverse church can only survive and thrive when it is centered around the simplicity of Christ. The thinking of the people of Corinth is remarkably parallel to that of the average Seattleite, so we have much to learn from this book. (It does mean that going through it is not going to push against legalism, but against license).

Like Seattle, Corinth was regionally proud and technologically advanced – they had Corinthian bronze, we have Amazon and Microsoft. They took pride in their sports and sports culture. They were proud of their intelligence and education. They were proud of their wealth and strong economy. They overall felt superior to the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Aristotle himself wrote about this superiority complex. There are a few similarities here.

And when this sort of superiority complex enters the church, we get significant problems. Factions, boasting, judgmentalism – even judging Paul (who, naturally, responded with great heaping piles of sarcasm). This intellectual elitism led to an elevation of their own reason over the truth of scripture. Paul continually has to remind them that the message of Christ was specifically built to be foolishness when looked at with cold reason. Corinth also had an overall distrust of authority, including church leaders, leading to treating of Paul with extreme disrespect, because he’s not treating others with enough respect.

Corinth was more concerned with individual rights than with love. They were more concerned with spiritual experience than with sound teaching and doctrine. They preferred Greek rhetoric to preaching (TED Talks vs. sermons). They preferred unfettered tolerance to holiness and gospel. All these issues are mirrored in Seattle and constantly validated by everyone around us. Rather than self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of legalism, we get self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of license. Paul usually writes against legalism, but here he writes against license.

There are a number of controversies in this book, mostly stemming from the existence of another letter sent before this one that we do not have (called “Corinthians A”), and another one after this one but before 2nd Corinthians (called “Corinthians B”). These letters are not included in the canon and were clearly not inspired or meant by the Holy Spirit to be passed down. It does help explain some of the very specific-seeming instructions Paul gives.

Overall, the letter is a call to incarnational unity, shedding the divisions and factions created by intellectual elitism and pride in favor of the unity that Christ calls us to and gives us the power to attain.

–Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 1:1-3

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Genesis as Rebuke

The first chapter of the Bible these days gets swept up into debates about evolution, science, etc. But how was it understood by the ancient Israelites when it was written? Why did they consider it important enough to be written down?

It is notable that God calls two things good that the ancient Israelites would generally not have considered to be good, but rather terrifying. Darkness and the abyss of the sea were both symbols of evil, danger and chaos, but God calls them “good” when he places them in their appropriate contexts and within their appropriate boundaries.

Another note – vegetation was created before the sun, which may seem strange. But keep in mind that the Israelites knew very well that the sun was required for plants to grow. This order was purposeful, and the contradiction was purposeful.

Later, man was created – in the image of God. This is in stark contrast to how surrounding cultures saw man. The image of God (or rather, of the gods) was restricted to rulers. The Israelites, though, put the basis for equality and democracy right in their own “founding document.”

The book of Genesis may have been formalized, compiled from oral tradition and other written accounts, during the Babylonian exile. If that is the case, this chapter would have served at least in part as a rebuke to the Babylonian creation account, in which Marduk tears apart the body of Tiamat in order to create the world.

The Genesis creation account puts forth two bold statements that go after the theology of the cultures around them. First, there is one God, not many. Second, the creation of the Earth did not happen in the midst of war and conflict, but was rather a purely good act of creative construction.

The counterintuitive order of creation may also have had something to do with this. The sun gods of the era were vital because of the importance of sun for crops, yet here Israel says “no, in the end even the sun is subservient to the creator God, and if He wants plants, he gets plants, and the sun is irrelevant.”

So how does this creation account impact our own relationship with the culture around us? Regardless of how you interpret the specifics of the passage, we all should take from this passage the understanding of the one God as the creator of heaven and earth. How does this understanding of a creator God set us apart from those with their own creation stories, their own gods of science and chance?

–Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Genesis 1

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Legalism, Spiritualism and Asceticism

Humans don’t know how to function without rules. The Law was given to provide structure around the core concepts of “love God, love others”. It functioned as a starting point, but was ultimately ineffective because it could not cause people to love. Christ came to take the Law into Himself as its fulfillment, model and author. He himself is the new Law, the incarnation of loving God and living others. Through his power we are freed to do that loving. Freedom in Christ is the freedom to live out the spirit of the law.

The expectations were not lowered, but raised – beyond our capabilities, requiring us to depend on the power and forgiveness of Christ. Freedom in Christ is the freedom from guilt and the dominion of sin. The slavery to sin is replaced by slavery to Christ – slavery that is in fact sonship and servitude that is in fact freedom.

But Paul here discusses other forms of slavery even beyond that of sin but that will also separate us from the freedom found in Christ. Paul attacks those here: Legalism, Spiritualism and Asceticism.

First, Legalism. In this case, the legalism of keeping Jewish religious festivals. Christians were being judged for not participating in religious holidays. This can happen in many ways, though. Legalists take biblical principles and turn them into extra-biblical regulations. Applications of principle become new rules by which we judge ourselves and others – and punish and reward themselves and others.

It’s not that morality is relative or that we can’t confront or be confronted regarding sin. Instead, it is that we must not enslave others to the systems, even the good systems, that we develop for ourselves.

Spiritualism is the way of living the Christian life that seeks super-spiritual experiences that then they use as their yardstick for others. Everything from the complex angelic systems of the first century to the elaborate eschatology of the 20th to even otherwise positive theological or apologetic systemics and arguments.

Experience can be a powerful force to trump truth. Be careful of any experience focus that is not focused on loving God and loving others. Do not be bound by the spiritual experiences of others. Seeking experience is simply feeding our flesh desires with a spiritual veneer.

We are also free from Asceticism. We are free from other people’s systems of holiness and standards of purity. Avoidance of pleasure and harsh treatment of the body does not actually kill temptation or prevent sin. It is an attempt to replace Christ with rules in order to solve our sin problem. We now have freedom in Christ to create our own boundaries and standards, but as soon as we start taking pride in these boundaries or judging others by these, we are outside God’s will. (If we pride ourselves on not having these boundaries, it works the same way.)

If we live by these isms, we lose connection with the Head, replacing Christ with rules, experience or some other system built by man. We live as if the rules can do something that only Christ can do. Christ gives us freedom to live in the gray, not just in the black and white.

These rules, Paul writes, have no value when it comes to actually changing hearts. Instead of freeing us to love God and others, they enslave us to rules and self, and then ultimately the system breaks down anyway. Our foundation is not in Christ, and so when that system or leader or whatever fails, we go into a tailspin and are unable to extract the reality of Christ from the falsehoods and human systems.

Per John Piper:

Legalism is a more dangerous disease than alcoholism because it doesn’t look like one. Alcoholism makes men fail; legalism helps them succeed in the world. Alcoholism makes men depend on the bottle; legalism makes them self-sufficient, depending on no one. Alcoholism destroys moral resolve; legalism gives it strength. Alcoholics don’t feel welcome in church; legalists love to hear their morality extolled in church.

In all things, we are to seek to love God and love others, depending on the power of Christ, not the systems of men.

— Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA

Colossians 2:6-23

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