July 16, 2015
Not an Enemy
Currently there is a lot of
political turmoil in the community as the city and county battle one another
for funding, control, and public opinion. Those involved have stooped to ultimatums,
innuendo, accusation and name calling. I visited with a man familiar with local
politics who said, “In this community when you disagree with someone you become
their enemy. We don’t work on issues, it’s about personalities.” Without being fully
conscious of it, people of faith can fall into the same mind set when others
disagree with us, particularly if it is a disagreement over Scripture. Paul instructs
us, “If anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take special note
of him. Do not associate with him, in order that he may feel ashamed. Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (2
Thes 3:14-15 NIV).
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Gail;
-----Words are interesting. Each stands for a rather specific idea. But that is just in one mind. We must say that a word stands for rather specific ideas in several minds. For every individual can only relate to a word through his own experiences. We use dictionaries to keep our meanings on the same page, but as soon as that page is turned all of the personal sentiments and exasperations come crawling back over the face a word’s actual meaning. We say we all talk the same language, but truly, we only talk similar languages, since our experiences are only similar. Then we take disagreements personally when even our way of communication is flawed.
-----Vastly more is known by us all than is known by any one of us alone. Yet, when disagreements come up for any reason, each of us fight as if we do know everything instead of debating as if a learning opportunity has arrived. None of us really want to give the impression we might have something to learn in an argument even though we for darned sure know we don’t know it all. Actually, a good laugh is the emotional value of a good argument. And if arguments are done in that good laugh they become joint workshops rather than battlefields.
-----And that laugh can be had if all the rules of knowing and communicating are followed. But then, we are not going to agree on those either. It seems everybody is going to live unto their own desires and beliefs and make believe that those are the core issues of life for mutual respect, because reasoning out all of the rules of communication and recognizing all the possibilities of misunderstanding is just too much to do. Besides. Thinking isn’t fun. So we creep into ourselves and only let out small portions of our ideas lest we cause public stirs whenever we say too much. And there we remain, imprisoned by our disrespect for the rules of thought and communication.
-----The scripture you quoted is a good example of disregard for those rules. It has provided some of the impetus behind excommunication over the centuries. But, if many of the excommunications are examined carefully it becomes clear that they were not done at the breach of anything Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy wrote in that letter to the Thessalonians, but were rather done at the breach of some other personal aspiration of a religious leader, an aspiration generally even being “beyond what is written“. And note that almost every excommunicated person was indeed sent off as an enemy, not with words, but with the treatment. We can’t even obey the Bible. Probably because we can’t stand rules shaping what we want. There is our prison.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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