Christmas - A Key Step In God's Community Development Project

The Basic Issue

The author of the book of Genesis opens his narrative of life on this planet with an account of the creation which has an interesting feature. He notes that God did not make community. Nor did he intend us to become a community. That is our invention. Rather he made a unity, a "mankind". He made not a community but a body. That body was a unity, not a pair, not a family not a male as opposed to female; he made a "person", after his own image.

There is a principle of leadership which says "start out where you want to end up. If you have to change directions to get to where you want to be, you'll never get there. Don't start building one thing if you want to have something different. It doesn't have to be full blown, but it has to be what you want. Start small, but make it real."

That is what the author of the creation story notes in Genesis points out about one of the main features of the creation of "mankind", God created a unity, out of which his built-in latent capacity for diversity would emerge in dazzling array, but underneath it all was a body, a unity, reflecting his own unity. In other words, God did not create a daycare full of squabbling, whining runny nose little kids all fighting in the sandbox over too few toys, but rather a person.

To me, the image is that of creating a dance partner. He wanted someone he could "boogie with". Like any good dance pair, one leads and one follows, but as they get comfortable with each other, they step on each other's toes less, and move as a unity, flowing about the dance floor, having just a great time. He provided the dance floor, he provided the eats, and he created the partner with whom to dance.

So the author started out where he wanted to end up, by creating a unity capable of diversity, but underneath it all, a unity, capable of an interactive "dance" with him, a dance of life.

But any dance partner who has to "dance with the one what brung her", is not a happy camper. Friendship is not based on puppet strings or coercion, but on volition. That's the only real dance in town. So God is pictured as setting full provision for his created dance partner, including meaningful work to be doing, the capacity to reproduce and the capacity for fellowship - every aspect of life. But right from the first, the author of the story notes how God made the choice as to life-orientation completely up to us, with no strings attached. We had to decide whether we would "dance with him".

The way the decision was portrayed by the author was by the placement of two trees in the middle of the garden of provision - two attitude trees. They could either draw their life, direction and energy from him, or they could go off on their own and do life their way. The author points out how God even spelled out the consequences of both options. It was the first free an open election, so to speak. Of course, we opted for "please mommy I'd rather do it myself" and went off our own ways. And God accepted that decision, not as a final verdict on his original intention, but rather, as how we wanted to play the game.

He did make the stipulation, for our own good, that extra assistance from him would be conditional on attitude change, however slight, lest we be "empowered" to live out our destructive fantasies for ever without ever waking up to the swath we would be leaving behind us. But that was about the only extra aspect of life which God added in to an already fully-supplied world.

We went about our business, and He is pictured as going about his. And what was his business? Wooing his would-be dance partner with a better life-option than the "fouled nest" we were creating for ourselves out of his well-stocked world. The various authors of the Bible speak of the great lengths he went to in getting and keeping our attention, helping us realize some of the principles he had designed into life in order for it to work well, picking us up and placing us on our feet when we fell down, and helping us restore the terrible disunity we had created amongst the singly-unified humanity he had created.

Finally, after many generations, the authors note how he decided the time was right to get in and show us how. He came in the man Jesus (lots of speculation, even in Scripture amongst the several authors as to how) and showed us how to dance with him. He showed us what a human life could be like when God's spirit is within it. He showed us what potentials of power from outside ourselves awaited our enjoyment when we turned and allowed it access through the abiding presence of his spirit. He showed us how the terrors of our fellow man who continued to insist on "eating off the other tree", were as nothing when God's spirit had room to empower and direct our lives from within. He showed us that even the real effects of their inflicting death on us were indeed permanent but not ultimate, and that those two terms were in fact separate.

And he extended an invitation to each of us to join him in a unity. Not a homogeneity of blanch-mange sameness, but a dazzling array of difference in unity in him. He gave us the "Christos"(in Greek), the savior. Saving us from our silly mistaken notion that life outside of, and away from God could possibly be better than that same life lived in unity in him and, in a dance of life with him now and for ever.

To me, God's plan ("visioning" so to speak), his carrying it out at such cost to himself (insisting on "bottom up" development with an open option for a "partnership agreement" with him, totally at his expense) and his ultimate assured victory (now there's a god-sized "project" if you will), is the ultimate "development" project.

Communion is what he holds out to us. Community is what we settle for - life together without his unifying spirit at the center. Community development is all very well, I guess, but it fails continually to get to the real essence of the problem in my estimation. We want to develop community outside of god's spirit. We want inter-dependant co-operation, and peace amongst men without submission to the one thing that can make it all possible, the spirit of our creator continually flowing into us in a life-giving , empowering, unifying flow of his grace. Our efforts at structuring and re-structuring community remind me of the myth of Sisyphus a; rolling a roc up a hill only to have it roll back and have to start again. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, but it can. We can continue to refuse his invitation into a better life , a possible life, and a victorious life. But we don't have to accept it. It is an opt-in situation, not an opt-out. The invitation into "body life" into a partaking in his original vision of a humanity as a "one partner" dancing as of one mind and spirit with each other (through the breadth of earth's variety and through the depths of time) and with him.

And he will have it. As I understand the nature of his non-coercive community development project, of which Christmas was a key step, "until we all have made it ,none of us have made it. Or as the Scripture author put it "someday every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is lord." That is what that line means to me. He leads in the dance and we know the moves which make sour community life together in him exceedingly enjoyable.

There is a scene in a Crocodile Dundee movie where the bumpkin from the outback of Australia is held up at knifepoint by a mugger in New York City. Dundee looks at he knife he is being threatened with and says to the mugger, "that's not a knife", and (pulling out his own huge bush knife says, "now that's a knife" (and the mugger flees).

To me that is my image of Christmas on the prairies, amidst the overwhelming sense of loss or threats to entitlements of all sorts. In the midst of this Christ comes to us at Christmas each year and says to us "that's not an entitlement, (and pulling out his own incredible entitlement offered to us from the first, he says "now that's an entitlement.

Rural Development Institute Research Studies

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