Daniel T. Hans
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: June 7, 2009

"The One and the Many"

Does God suffer from a personality disorder? The reason I ask is that God seems so inconsistent in dealing with people. In the Old Testament, God reacts to human sin with harsh judgment. Yet, in the New Testament, tender mercy expresses the divine response to human disobedience. Our readings today are a case in point.

In the Book of Joshua, the offender and his entire family were condemned and cruelly executed. In the Gospel of John, the offender was told she was not condemned and was let off with a warning.

We are quick to find hope and comfort in God’s handling of sin through merciful compassion in the New Testament and even quicker to flinch with discomfort over God’s handling of sin through harsh judgment in the Old Testament. What’s going on in these conflicting approaches taken by the one God? Does God suffer from a personality disorder? And what does all of this have to do with us, the modern church?

A distillation of this morning’s message is this: God is concerned with the rights of the individual and with the welfare of the community. Yet, in any human society conflict exists between these two concerns.

I.   The Protection of the Community

In the Old Testament, God is frequently portrayed as a harsh judge. Israel understands divine law to require people to be executed for such offenses as adultery, disobeying parents, cursing, and breaking dietary laws. Israel seems to need the 8^th Amendment to the US Constitution that protects against cruel and unusual punishment.

Achan’s story is a prime example of what appears to be divine overkill. His guilt of keeping the spoils of war for himself was discovered. Consequently, he and his entire family were executed. But why? This action, ordered by Joshua, was essential for Israel’s survival during its infancy stage as an emerging nation.

Sin was and is a contagious virus upon humanity. If not confronted, sin spreads, with the one infecting the many. Therefore, it was deemed better to cut off the infected toe named Achan (and his family who conspired in his greed) than to allow his infectious greed to impact the whole body of Israel.

Jesus expressed this principle when, in speaking symbolically not literally, he told his followers it is better to pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin than to let that one bad eye destroy your whole body. In the realm of nature, this principle was seen by fur trappers in the days of steel traps. Often a trapper would return to a trap to find it sprung with nothing in the trap except the leg of an animal. To save its body, the trapped animal chewed off its own leg.

Human sin is like that steel trap. Having used the word "sin" several times to this point let me define it. Sin is any destructive action or demeaning attitude that threatens the well being of both self and others. The best and simplest definition of sin is putting self first and elevating individualism to the realm of ultimate concern.

When individual sin is a threat to the well being of the whole body, it must be addressed - even if by extreme means at times.

We might well ask:

In the Old Testament’s understanding of life there is no such thing as individualism, at least not to the extent we understand and worship it. In the chronology of the Bible’s composition, the value of the individual did not appear until the Book of Ezekiel when Israel was in exile in Babylon after Jerusalem had been destroyed. The emphasis on the individual that we see in the New Testament arose from the influence of Greek culture beginning in the second century BC.

The Bible contains a combination of Hebrew focus on the community and Greek focus on the individual.

There was no Bill of Rights in ancient Israel elevating the individual and protecting individual rights. This was not because the individual was unimportant; rather it was because the community as a whole was more important. Bear in mind that in our own national history, the Bill of Rights is not the basis of our nation.

These are amendments to the document on which our nation is built – a document called The Constitution which opens, not with an emphasis on I, the individual but on We, the people.

Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung applies this truth to the church when he writes: The essential part of the Christian message is the idea of salvation for the whole community of people, of which the individual is a member…Since this call is addressed to the whole people of God, the individual never stands alone but within the community, just as individual communities are part of the one community.    (The Church)

Our modern notions of freedom focus upon the privileges of private live and often neglect the obligations of communal life. We have problems when our political and legal and spiritual decision-making rests solely on procedural policies centered exclusively on the individual and fail to ask how such policies will affect the common good.

Achan was not Achan alone. He was part of a family that was part of a tribe that was part of Israel. What he did affected all Israel. As English poet John Donne put it: No one is an island, entire to himself; every person is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

God loved the Israelite Achan but God loved the people of Israel. In dealing with sin at this time in Israel’s young development, God gave priority to protecting the whole community.

The welfare of the many couldn’t be sacrificed to the freedom of the one.

(We can see this same principle expressed in the New Testament in Acts 5 in an incident involving a couple named Ananias and Sapphira.)

II.   The Liberation the Individual

We have a hard time understanding such harsh handling of individuals. While ancient Israel’s priority was on protecting the whole community we in 21^st century America give priority to liberating the individual. For us, the one is more important than the many. We are not products of the Exodus but of the Enlightenment. Our concept of life in western culture is the outgrowth of the European Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation of the 16^th -18^th centuries that stressed the value of the individual.

This liberation of the individual from the tyranny of the church of the Middle Ages and from the tyranny of European kings was a great step forward for human civilization. The liberation of the individual is needed even in democratic governments as the 19^th century British political philosopher John Stuart Mill warned: A State which dwarfs its people, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small people no great things can be accomplished.

In his classic book, Christianity and Social Order, William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote:

The primary principle of Christian ethics and Christian politics must be respect for every person simply as a person. If each man and woman is a child of God whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society. The person is primary, not the society; the State exists for the citizen, not the citizen for the State.   (p. 45)

There is great value for a whole society when the freedoms of the individual are respected and protected. However, our cherished liberation of the individual can become a plague if individualism becomes ultimate and is worshiped. Wonderful as our Bill of Rights is in liberating and protecting the individual, it was never intended to deify the individual and promote a worship of individualism over the well being of the community. In the 1830s Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his study of American life entitled Democracy in American wrote that our American worship of individualism might eventually so isolate us from one another and blind us to the needs of the whole that it will undermine the basis of our freedoms.

Whenever the freedom of the one is protected at the expense of the welfare of the many, problems will arise.
   1) We see it when an individual’s freedom of expression through pornography is placed above the welfare of women and children who are brutally exploited by that industry and placed above the well being of the society that is threatened by the violence resulting from the actions of those addicted to pornography.
   2) We see the welfare of the whole sacrificed to the freedom of the one when, in a marriage, individuality trumps mutuality. When one’s personal pursuits become more important than the commitment of the two becoming one, a marriage gets a death sentence and the whole family suffers.
   3) Could we be witnessing this problematic phenomenon as present when one corporation becomes the property of the many tax payers?

Let me apply all of this to the church for a moment. In a fascinating and troublesome article entitled How Responding to People’s Needs Hurts the Church Elizabeth Steele wrote:   (Alban Institute 6/9/08)

Defining the church’s ministry by responding to people’s needs is a common notion; but, because of the blurred line between want and need, no matter how much we speak of needs or perceived needs, it puts the church in the position of being defined not by its faith or history but by [individuals’] wants….When we say the church is to meet people’s needs, many people [think] If I go to church, those folks will take care of me. In selling the church as a place where people’s needs are met, we attract people for whom there is, at least in their perception, an implied promise that if they come to the church it will provide them with what they think they need. The measurement of a congregation then becomes personal: Is it meeting my needs? [Such people] believe it is the church’s job to listen to them, act on their ideas, and support their beliefs. Other aspects of the congregation’s life, other things it might be doing, are strictly secondary to the parts that impact them directly. So, if their concern is children’s ministry, they aren’t interested in outreach to singles or empty-nesters. If their interest is in traditional music, contemporary hymns or a praise service will be deemed unimportant. At best, they will treat such activities with disinterest. At worst, they will see such endeavors as detractions from their concern that should therefore be eliminated. [This line of thought] reduces the church to a service-provider whose clients/recipients are free to complain whenever they are dissatisfied. [Here is the key point:] Lost is the idea of people being and becoming the church. Lost is the understanding of the church as a community of faith whose members struggle together to draw closer to God and to express that closeness in how they live and interact with the world.

Churches become dysfunctional in the same way families do. It happens: when the wants of the individual dominate and threaten the well being of the community, when the one gets all the attention at the expense of the many, and when present problems occupy energy and resources to the detriment of the future prospects.

III.   The Redemption of Humanity

This tension between the interests of the one and welfare of the many is a struggle that must continue out of necessity. It is never resolved. Thus balance between the one and the many is the goal. We live with this tension and need for balance in our post 9/11 world in the debate and dilemma over the welfare of the community through national security and the rights of the individual through personal privacy.

We certainly don’t want to go back to the old way of dealing with offenses where the one was lost to the many. In the New Testament story of Jesus and the adulterous woman, it is clear that the religious leaders who brought her to Jesus had no concern for her as an individual person. We celebrate the way Jesus responded by not condemning her. However, neither did he condone her action nor remain silent before sin. By saying: Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more, he affirmed her individual worth and protected the community’s well being.

How does God address me-first and me-only dysfunctional sin today? How does God maintain love for the individual and opposition to the attitudes and actions that threaten both the individual and the community? In the cross, we see judgment on sin and mercy toward sinners. While God loves us as individuals, God does not love our dysfunction. While the church is to love all people, the church cannot condone any destructive behavior whether it impacts the community or the individual. The church is called to work for the redemption of all things not the acceptance of all things. How this call works out in practical expression will differ for us as individuals. However, we all have been given this call.

God calls us to love and respect individuals as Jesus did the adulterous woman and to confront and combat sin’s threat to the community as Joshua did with Achan. For the people of God today there may be times when we have no choice but to chew off a trapped leg trapped in order to save to body. But we must first seek the better approach which is to recognize that the love of Jesus can free and redeem that problem leg while protecting and redeeming the whole body.

Beyond the protection of the community and beyond the liberation of the individual lies God’s greatest concern – the redemption (the salvation, the liberation, the well-being, the health) of both. That which is the object of The Constitution’s protecting and liberating power is also the object of the Cross’ redeeming love – the individual and the community, the one and the many.