Sermon Tone Analysis

“You will not know God, change deeply, nor win the world apart from community” -Tim Keller

God’s ultimate intention for creation is the establishment of community.—

Stanley Grenz

The problem of loneliness

Loneliness is a real scourge in modern society.

It has social and health implications.

Note that isolation is the objective measure of how large your social network is, whereas loneliness is a subjective perception of how one feels.

In other words, you can have many friends and be lonely, or no friends and not be lonely.

(Yeh_Harvard Health Publishing)

According to an article in Slate Magazine, "Loneliness has doubled: 40 percent of adults in two recent surveys said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s."

Increased loneliness has lead to the following serous health risks:

Like other contagions, loneliness is bad for you.

Lonely adolescents exhibit more social stress compared to not lonely ones.

Individuals who feel lonely also have significantly higher Epstein-Barr virus antibodies (the key player in mononucleosis).

Lonely women literally feel hungrier.

Finally, feeling lonely increases risk of death by 26% and doubles our risk of dying from heart disease.

(Beaton)

Virtual connection has replaced physical connection.

Jacob Weisberg had a fine essay in The New York Review of Books reporting that, according to a British study, we check our phones on average 221 times a day — about every 4.3 minutes.

Excessive Internet use also increases feelings of loneliness because it disconnects us from the real world.

Research shows that lonely people use the Internet to “feel totally absorbed online” – a state that inevitably subtracts time and energy that could otherwise be spent on social activities and building more fulfilling offline friendships.

What is community?

Community as used here is about the experience of belonging.

We are in community each time we find a place where we belong.

The word belong has two meanings.

First and foremost, to belong is to be related to and a part of something.

It is membership, the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase.

It is the opposite of thinking that wherever I am, I would be better off somewhere else.

Or that I am still forever wandering, looking for that place where I belong.

The opposite of belonging is to feel isolated and always (all ways) on the margin, an outsider.

To belong is to know, even in the middle of the night, that I am among friends.

The second meaning of the word belong has to do with being an owner: Something belongs to me.

To belong to a community is to act as a creator and co-owner of that community.

What I consider mine I will build and nurture.

Peter Block.

Community: The Structure of Belonging .

Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Kindle Edition.

Why is community so hard?

The problem of sin

The power of individualism

Internet as a surrogate

The cycle of fear

The spirit of division

A story of a community

Gen 1-11 as explanatory of human existence and experience.

The contrast between unity and dispersion.

They had one language and unity, but God wanted them to disperse and populate.

So whta is good and what is bad here?

The point is what is community used for.

Community itself.

Their unity was a launching platform for increasing problems.

Therefore confusion was a better preference (and the purposes of God for dispersion was kept.

What is this ambition?

Lets us look at James.

Gen 1–11 always aims at explaining something that is a part of human existence, something that is always related to human existence as created existence, something incomprehensible in the created state, e.g., the pains suffered by a woman at childbirth.

The present situation which is to be explained reaches as far back as the human memory can go and beyond.

It is in this beyond, beyond all human experience, that there lies the event that is to explain the present situation; it is a primeval event.

It is interesting to read this story with some of the earliest readers in mind, especially those who had been exiled to Babylon.

Babylon is obviously the location of the tower building, and the first readers would be familiar not only with the kind of building implied in this story but also with the building materials and with the purpose of such buildings.

The story would hold a poignant meaning for the exiles.

It is a story about how to reach God and, whereas previously the Jerusalem temple played an important role, it had now been destroyed and the exiles had no resources or permission to build another one.

James McKeown, Genesis, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 70.

The most famous ziggurat of all, the one at Babylon, is the focus of the present narrative.

It was known as the e-temen-an-ki, “The House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.”

In the flat, alluvial plain of Lower Mesopotamia, the ziggurat constituted a man-made sacred mountain in miniature, the physical means by which man and god might enter into direct contact with one another.

Significantly, the purpose of the builders includes making a name for themselves.

Building projects are often associated with human pride, and Nebuchadnezzar is reputed to have had his name stamped on every 50th brick to commemorate his building program in Babylon.

The pride that he showed is reflected in the book of Daniel (Dan 4:30).

The divine decision to scatter the people prevents them from completing the city at this time.

The significance of the confusion of their language is highlighted by a wordplay on the similar sounds of the word for Babel and the verb “to confuse”: בָּבֶל/bābel and בָּלַל/bālal.

An example from James

ἐριθεία comes from ἐριθεύω, “to work as a day-labourer,” “to conduct oneself as such,” “to work for daily hire,” and this again comes from ἔριθος, a “day-labourer.”

ἐριθεία thus means the “work,” then the “manner, attitude or disposition of the daylabourer.”

But in R. 2:8 contention or strife is rather too specialised, and we do best to see a reference to the despicable nature of those who do not strive after glory, honour and immortality by perseverance in good works (v.

7), but who think only of immediate gain.

Selfish ambition as fulfilling short sighted needs.

You can have community from below and community from above.

Community from below

Community marked by competition and ambition:

Community as a network.

Finding the right sort of people to help me get what I want and where I need to be.

Community as a a silo.

Finding the right sort of place where I am safe, happy and fulfilled.

This big issue for church.

What is the function of church towards the larger community?

For many church is the new community.

It is the right sort of place we use to escape from harsher realities.

But in the long term — church looses its essence as community.

It becomes a club.

A silo.

Church is εκκλεσια — a catalyst for the larger community.

We turn the world upside down.

A silo church changes nothing.

Community as a project.

"The poor are not a problem to be solved but a people to join."

Eugene Peterson

Community as a fort.

Keeping out the wrong sort of people to makes sure that my wants and needs are not spoilt.

In all these cases community devolves into Babel.