Our Community is Not a Tribe

Friends, I'm so glad to be with you tonight. Thanks so much for being here. Like Cody said, my name's Maggie and I'm part of the table team and um, this is always a really big privilege for me. So I just, I'm, uh, very, uh, grateful to the wonderful staff that we have here in the ability to be here with you in this space. So thanks for being here tonight. Okay, friends, as you know, or maybe you don't know, but I'm gonna tell you right now, we have been in this series, the False White Gospel for the last seven weeks. 

And I'm curious if anyone else has been made uncomfortable by this series. Like I have. It's been painful at times because we have really dug deep friends. We have talked about seeing the image of God in every person. We've talked about the importance of being peacemakers, which is a lot more difficult than being just peacekeepers. And tonight we're gonna be in chapter seven. And chapter seven is titled, our Community is Not a Tribe. Our Community Is Not a Tribe. 

And you know, that word tribe has come up in the life of this community. Before, um, several years ago we used to use tribe quite a bit. Um, I would use it a lot in our social media posts and we used it mostly because this community had become chosen family for a lot of people, right? People who felt like maybe they didn't have a church home to belong to. And so we would use it, I'd often use it around baptism, you know, we're welcoming these babies into our tribe. But tribe is an anthropological term, right? And, and for in anthropology tribe is a group of people who share, you know, maybe blood ties at the very least, you know, religious ties, economic ties, social ties. And implied in tribe is there's an us and there's a not us. You can see how that might be problematic in the church, right? 

And it was a friend of this community who was brave enough to say the hard thing. When you say tribe, it makes me wonder if I'm part of that or not. And it was really easy to cut tribe out of my lexicon, right? I stopped using it in our social media posts. That was an easy change. But church is not a tribe. Church is supposed to be us and them with no them. And that is what we're going to talk about tonight. We're gonna talk about the scriptural foundations for this idea that church is not a tribe. And then we're gonna talk about how to do it. 

So church is not a tribe, it's a community of people. And I think the time that I saw this illustrated most clearly was in 2015. My husband Jon and I went on an anniversary trip and we went to London and Paris. And you may not know this about me, but there are two things I think that you should know. When I'm on vacation, I like to go to church. That's weird, right? It's okay, we can say that. And the other thing is, I like to get a deal. 

So when we got to St. Paul's Cathedral in London, there were two lines—there it is, isn't it gorgeous? Two lines: there was the one line for people who wanted to tour the building and then, and you had to pay in order to get in on that line. And then the other line, which had nobody waiting in, it was free if you wanted to attend a service. It was made for me, friends! 

So I grabbed Jon and we went to the other line and I got to the front and I said, “We just want to attend a service.” And they said, “You're in luck. We have a Eucharist service, a communion service happening in 15 minutes. Come on in.” So we went in to the inside of this cathedral and it is the biggest, most light filled building I've, I think I've ever been inside of. 

And they drew some chairs there, right in the center. And we gathered around in a circle and they handed us a service order. It's Church of England, right? I'm not, I'm not Anglican. So I needed a service order to guide me through. But I was following the service order. And when we got to the place where we were supposed to say the Lord's Prayer, there was a little notation and it said, “Please say this prayer in your own language.” 

So we stood and we were invited to pray the Lord's Prayer. And it was a little chaotic, right? I could hear, uh, French and I could hear Spanish and Italian and Japanese and um, and English accents from all over the uk. But it was so beautiful. Different languages, different customs, different traditions, different food, different family, same God, same prayer, same communion. It was one of the more beautiful moments of my life. 

So in chapter seven of Jim Wallis’s book, he takes us to Paul's letter to the Galatians to see where we get this idea of church as a community and not a tribe. So we are gonna read the larger passage just for context, but I want you to know that the book of Galatians was written to a bunch of communities in Pisidian Antioch, in Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. Those are all part of Southern Galatia. And that is modern day Turkey. Okay? Do you have it in your mind? Now we're in modern day Turkey. And so this is what Paul writes, and he's very passionate. I'm gonna do my best to give it some Paul passion, okay? 

“Now, before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore, the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian for in Christ Jesus. You are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ, have clothed yourself with Christ.” And here it is, friends, “There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male or female. For all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring heirs according to the promise.” That's from Galatians chapter three. 

The church is not a tribe. The church of God is a community of many tribes who have all come together. And the beauty is that you and I, we are not limited anymore by just the old markers of race and class and gender. Were all one in Christ Jesus. 

So why did Paul write this even anyways? For this, I had to go to the Jewish scholars. And my favorite is Dr. Amy-Jill Levine. Debbie quoted her last week. She is a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, which I think makes her particularly trustworthy to help us understand what is going on in this passage. And she says that Paul is writing this letter to a group of gentiles, not Jews, but gentiles, who are under the assumption that they have to follow the Jewish law in order to be part of this new Christian Church. 

And Paul is saying, no, you don't have to do that. You don't have to follow the law and you don't have to get circumcised in order to be part of this church. And friends, I would imagine this was good news for many of the men who are recent converts to this new church, right? In a day and age where there's no anesthesia and no, uh, antibiotics, it's good news you don't have to have surgery to follow Jesus. 

So Dr. Levine says that Paul had this belief that God was to be worshiped by all the nations. All the nations. But if the nations converted to Judaism, then God would just be worshiped by the Jews. And that was not the image that Paul had. So the nations needed to remain the nations. And so Paul's letter to the Galatians says, over and over, indeed many of his letters, you find this all over, uh, what we call the Pauline Corpus. It's all over: You don't have to look like Jews. You don't have to be Jews to follow Jesus. It is Jesus who brings you into Abraham's family. 

There's another biblical scholar, his name's James Dunn. He literally wrote the book on this. I'm not kidding you. The title is Neither Jew nor Greek. And he says that these distinctions that Paul lays out, neither Jew nor Greek male nor female, um, slave nor free, these are being relativized to each other. They aren't being removed. And I think that's important for us as Americans. We tend to ascribe to a melting pot idea. That's not what Paul's about here. He's not doing away with difference. Paul is not saying that tribes are a bad thing. Paul's just pointing out that it's Christ who binds us together, our differences included. This is a call to unity in diversity, the working together of different people towards a common cause. 

And it's interesting, I learned from, uh, Jim Wallis right here in chapter seven, that this passage became part of the baptism litany of the early church, meaning when people would convert to Christianity, uh, baptism was this symbol, right? We put you under the water. You are dying to your old life. You are raised up out of the water to new life in Christ. And they read this passage at the baptisms. 

Wallis tells us that this portion was read as like a reminder. It was like, Hey community, this is who we are. We are all about breaking down divisions and tearing down the, the, the differences between us. This is the kind of radical inclusivity that makes up our DNA. And if you are not comfortable with that, we might not be the right community for you. We don't always get it right. We don't always do it perfectly, but you need to know that this is a core part of who we are. 

And when I read that, I thought, “Am I, am I missing something here? The early church stood for radical inclusivity. Can you believe that? Especially with the day and age and the culture that we're living in now, their inclusivity is what set them apart. And ironically now we have arrived at this moment where our culture is outpacing the Christian Church for radical inclusivity. It's almost as if people outside the church are looking in and saying, if you are not gonna be the kind of community that does away with difference and breaks down barriers, you might not be the community for me. See the difference? So when I say that to you, are you envisioning a particular kind of church? Maybe the kind of church that says all are welcome here, but women can't preach and gay people can't lead, right?

This series over and over again has invited us to look inside. And I'm going to extend that same invitation to you tonight. Uh, as the kids say on TikTok, the call is coming from inside the house. Don't look at me too closely. I'm actually not on TikTok. I had to Google that 'cause I watch my Tiktoks on Instagram Reels like an elder millennial, okay? 

We are at a very base level. We are uncomfortable with difference. And here is how I know: What if I rewrote Galatians 3:28 with this series in mind? It might read something like this: There is no longer Republican or Democrat, evangelical or progressive, family values or women's rights, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. It's a little harder, right? Is it harder to acknowledge that somebody whose ballot looks completely opposite from yours is one with you in Christ Jesus? Does that make you as uncomfortable as it makes me? I think this is where we have to press in, friends. This is where we need to sit. 

Why is it so much easier for a community like ours to say we affirm the image of God and all people, every black person, every white person, every trans person, every immigrant. And it's harder for a community like ours to say we see and acknowledge the image of God in the person who's standing outside Planned Parenthood, holding a megaphone in the person who is a QAnon believer, the image of God in the person wearing an all lives matter shirt. It's hard for us because as people, it is not easy to stay in relationship with people who have different values and convictions than we do. This series has been so challenging to me because I know I'm being called to stay in relationship with people who are different from me, people I disagree with.

And a note on this, because I know that if I don't say it, Mike Ganyo will call me out on it. Because he always keeps me grounded in this. Here's what I'm not saying, my friends, I am not asking you to stay in relationships with people who are abusing you. I am not asking you to choose relationship with people who believe that you should not exist and are actively working to make you quiet and intimidated. I believe that boundaries are also gifts of God and we ought to practice those. If there are people in your life who are making you feel unsafe, I am certainly not promoting that you should find a way to keep them in your life. 

But if we are talking about people that we disagree with, if we're talking about white Christian nationalists, how are we supposed to do this? What does this look like? What is the way forward? Because we are all one in Christ Jesus and that includes the Christian nationalists. So what I'd like to introduce to you tonight is the idea of the third way. Some of you have heard this term before, some of you have never heard it, but the third way is shorthand for finding another option when the culture gives you two. Uh, it's Richard Rohr who says that Jesus's call is to love and to pay the price for that loving. It's also been said that the third way is the middle way between fight and flight. 

Here's a couple of examples. So Jesus is our primary example of the third way. He did this all the time. And I want you to think about the story of Jesus with the woman who'd been caught in adultery. Do you remember the Pharisees say to Jesus, well, are we gonna stone her or not? And Jesus has this iconic line, let he who is without sin cast the first stone and may put their stone down, stones down, and they left. And Jesus turned to the woman and he said, um, there's nobody here to condemn you. I'm not gonna condemn you either. And He offers her forgiveness and mercy. That's a third way. 

There's another third way of a plethora of third way examples available to us from the Civil rights movement, right? There are largely two options in the civil rights movement. You can ignore that it is happening. You can pretend it doesn't exist. That's more of the, uh, flight. It's the avoidance side of things. Or you could repay violence with violence. That's the fight. And in people like Dr. Martin Luther King, we see a third way we see the example of radical nonviolent protest. 

Another person similar, uh, era to Dr. King who practiced the third way is a guy named John Perkins. Uh, if you recognize his name, he's an author and a teacher he founded or co-founded the organization called the Christian Community Development Association, uh, addressing the needs, uh, both from a spiritual gospel perspective and a social gospel perspective. And, I had to read this book for my class this semester and I stopped suddenly when I got to one part. 

So Dr. Perkins, uh, lived in Mississippi and he would preach in white churches and in black churches and everywhere that he would go, he would be asked questions and sometimes the questions were meant to corner him. So one of the most frequent, uh, questions that Dr. Perkins received was, um, “What do you think about Martin Luther King Jr.?” And he knew that that actually was a way of asking “How do you feel about violent protest?” And so here's what Dr. Perkins says, “I said what I felt needed to be said, but I just stated facts as I saw them. I never severed ties. I never cut off communication with anyone willing to talk because you know, love is a giant thing if the person who has the complaint will not break the relationship.” Love is a giant thing if the person who has the complaint will not break the relationship. 

If we are committed to being the kind of community that tears down divisions and practices, radical inclusivity, if we are going resist what I feel and I know what many of you feel is this radical polarization in our culture, then it's, it's gotta be the third way. I don't see another way forward for us. And what I suspect is that if we practice the third way, we might just reclaim our humanity in the process. We are at risk of losing our human dignity if we fall victim to these two extremes. But if you and I are willing to walk the third way, we might just have a chance of saving it. 

Now, some of you are gonna be interested to learn more about this third way. And I know some of you like to do a lot of reading, a lot of research, a lot of study first. And so I have some resources for you. You might wanna get out your camera and take a picture of this. I mentioned already Richard Rohr. This is his book, Everything Belongs. The other person who writes extensively about the third way is a guy named Walter Wink. And these are his two books, The Powers That Be and Jesus and Non-Violence: A Third Way. 

But some of you like to learn by doing and to you, I'd like to talk to you for just a moment. You can start practicing the third way. Now you have people in your circles, you've got neighbors, you have um, coworkers, you have kids at school, right? People with whom you disagree. And some of them, as we have heard over and over again, they might be sympathizers with white Christian national nationalism, but maybe they haven't bought in all the way yet. Those are the folks that, um, Doug Pagitt and Jim Wallis say can be invited into something different. 

And if you find yourself in a conversation with somebody, instead of choosing fight or flight, stay in the conversation. Start by telling them how your changing. I promise that if you lead with how your thinking is changing, how you are adapting, that will be a great bridge to begin building with these people with whom you disagree. If we can do this, if we can stay in the messy third way, we can truly call ourselves a community that isn't a tribe, a community that is all one in Christ Jesus. 

And we are committed to helping you find practices for that. It's why I'm so excited about our sermon series coming up. I think it's just, just after Advent. Am I getting that right? Yeah. And it's on the ways of Jesus. We call ourselves a community that practices the ways of Jesus. What are those ways? We're gonna be looking at those together in the New Year, and I invite you to be with us for that.

Friends, would you pray with me? Creator God, who made every nation and tribe and tongue in your image give us the courage to walk the third way. Help us proclaim your image in every person that we meet for we are all one in Christ Jesus. Amen.