March 10, 2011
Political Protocol
As an interested observer I attended portions of a week-long trial. Similar to the seating arrangement at a wedding, where you either sit on the bride’s side or the groom’s, there appeared to be a litigation Side A and Side B. Fortunately in this instance the court seating arrangement included a middle section. On the last day of the trial another attendee came up to me and said, “I assume you are here in support Side A.” When I told him I wasn’t there to cheerlead for one side or the other, he said, “Well, it’s good you were sitting in the middle.” Later I thought of the political pressure others tried to put on Jesus for eating with tax collectors or talking to the Samaritan woman. Makes me wish I’d sat on one side or the other.
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Gail;
-----What would lead this other attendee of the trial to think sitting on one side or the other of the room might support one party or the other of the case? The whole process is to examine the relevant facts of a situation to determine their alignment with the law. If the number of folks sitting behind each party played a role in the court’s decision we would be back to mob rule (which in a nutshell is democracy.) That isn’t going to happen in a well managed courtroom.
-----So one might think it lends some moral support. Something about our human nature seeks this for self validation. We each know our own situations intimately, but we only feel their alignment within the vastness of that great sea of “the way things are with everyone else”. That sea is too extensive for any one of us to know intimately; we can only know it generally, and most often vaguely. Unless we spend the great deal of time most of us don’t have for studying the way things are with everyone else, why those things are the way they are, and whether those things are logical or not, we will simply conclude that the more people relate well to us, then the more our situations must be in order. I could have just said it is group norm and peer pressure, but taking it apart and putting it back together was more fun.
-----These norms and pressures are handy and dangerous. Their effect on personal validation is much of what the church is about, yet they are also a grave danger to the church. This relationship with Jesus Christ is a personal thing. For every individual, its most fundamental purpose is to get his own sorry hide saved from the lake of fire. It starts there like a seed, then grows to more. Even though the growth is guided by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God’s effect on his thinking and actions, the great sea of the unknown yet laps against him from all sides. We need each other, therefore we come together for mutual support. That is handy.
-----Mutual support becomes dangerous when we forget that we only effect each other; we are not to make each other. Nor are we to be made by any one man or group of men. The church has somewhat forgotten this. The Presbyterian church has some book of order they observe carefully (I care so little about it that I don’t even know what they call it.) Maybe other denominations do, too. But all denominations do have in common their own group of men presiding over all the churches trying to make sure they all act and believe like they want them to act and believe. “I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another.” (I Cor 4:6). Like every other good tool, the validating effect of fellowship can be misused. Christ’s body still sits grouped behind those they want to support, grouped into the differing ideas of a few who thusly feel great validation. His churches all act like little huts in a loosely connected village. Rather, the Holy Spirit through the Word of God mixing into our thoughts and actions of all being together wants to build everyone into His Temple where personal validation is nothing more than the minor steerage that it’s good for.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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