Authenticity Fosters Community May 9, 2011
For a couple weeks now, I’ve been trying to establish one simple point: authenticity fosters community. Assuming you agree, how do we fight the easy but disappointing tendency to keep to ourselves? How can we fight for community? My answer falls into two parts, a two-directional approach that targets our own heart first (this week’s column) and then our approach to relationships second (which we’ll take up next week).
In our original created state, complete openness extended all the way to our physical forms: “The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (Gen.2:25). The point here is not nudity; it’s community. They had absolutely nothing to hide. Total openness, nothing concealed. But obviously that state of perfect community didn’t last beyond the first recorded human meal. The first two things they did after their dinner of forbidden fruit were to get dressed and to hide from God. The lesson is pretty clear: sin prohibits authenticity and destroys community.
This realization is a pretty important part of the answer in and of itself, because we don’t usually fear sin for what it will do to our relationships with others. Typically, we fear sin because we like a clean conscience or we want to stay out of jail or we want to keep up our image in the eyes of other people. Rarely do we fear sin because we love being so close to people and we know sin will pull us apart. The simple realization that sin ruins relationships–even sin that is not inherently related to the relationship itself–this awareness heightens the stakes considerably. Temptation loses lots of luster when we realize that even our secret sins like greed and pride and laziness ruin the intimacy in our marriage, our friendships, and our church.
So the first way to fight for community is to fight sin in our own lives. My own sin is the biggest obstacle to intimacy in any of my relationships. Peter makes this point when he writes: “Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart” (1 Pt. 1:22). In other words, we can’t connect when we’re covered with crud. It’s like trying to hook up a trailer that’s been sitting with its hitch in the mud: the connection isn’t possible until you get the gook out.