“He’s only human…”

Opening Scripture:  Excerpts from Colossians 2:12-15 (NIV)

having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. …God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, …triumphing over them by the cross.

This week we commemorate the final days of Jesus on earth and we remember his death. But what is the significance or meaning of his death?  It might be beneficial to consider that this morning.

Only Human

I think it is interesting this sentence: “He’s only human.”  Usually we say that when somebody has made a mistake or has demonstrated their limitations, right?  There is no question that humans are capable of great and selfless acts.  We see that with the dedication of medical professionals during the coronavirus crisis.  Every day doctors, nurses, technicians and other staff people are infected with the virus because they chose to care for victims of the virus. 

Yes, humans are capable of creative and magnificent artistic, scientific and architectural achievements.  Michelangelo’s great painting of the Creation of Adam, One World Trade Center in New York City, the creation of antibiotics, the discovery of DNA, the Psalms, just to mention a few. 

“He’s only human.” On the other hand there is abundant evidence of the limitations, mistakes, and degradation humans are also capable of: the holocaust, racism, environmental pollution, not to mention the millions of sins committed worldwide every minute of every hour.

Is human nature good?

For most of my life I thought that human nature is basically good and beautiful.  But let’s face it. Our species has an inherent tendency toward self-centeredness. Our species, like all others, wants to survive.  From the first moment of birth the infant cries for attention.  Babies crying can be seen as an instinctual mechanism of survival.  The survival instinct is not bad in itself,  in fact, it is essential. And yet it seems to me that the natural tendencies toward self-centeredness and survival - left unchecked - can lead to great wickedness and evil.  For example, recently we are seeing huge increases in fraud and various scams being perpetrated on the population who feel vulnerable to the coronavirus.  I suppose you could say that even fraudsters are just trying to survive.  The problem is, they are doing it by victimizing others. So, these natural tendencies must be curbed. If you are a parent you know that you must teach the growing child to love others, to put off gratification for a greater long-term good.

These seem like almost self-evident truths.  However, they point to the human need for redemption.  To put it another way, we need to be saved from our own sinful nature. That is why God created and sent Jesus among us more than 2020 years ago.  Humanity needed someone to show us the way to get beyond our natural human tendencies.  I think it is interesting that the early followers of Jesus were called “The Way” before they were called Christians, because they lived differently due to their encounters with the Lord.  The fact that Jesus was the incarnation of God changed them and by those changes and their faith they began showing others The Way.

Are we only human?

Genesis 1:26 teaches that every human being possesses the image of God. Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that God has “set eternity in the hearts of men.” In Luke 17:21, Jesus proclaims, “The kingdom of God is within you.” The Bible teaches that every human being possesses an immaterial soul-spirit, and it is this part of us that connects with God (Hebrews 4:12).  It also means that we are NOT totally controlled by any ego, selfishness, and darkness within us.  You might say that we are bound for eternity due to grace and faith, we have Jesus’ blood circulating within us.

By nature we are built to need God.  And to be fully human we must fulfill that need.  We are not enough just depending  on our own genius, strength, natural ability, and industriousness. We need more.  We need grace. Therefore, we need God, the giver of grace, and because we ARE human we need God come in human form, Jesus Christ. 

Although I was redeemed by Christ through my acceptance of and surrender to him as my Lord and savior and by my pledge to follow him to the best of my ability for the rest of my life, every day I must make the decision to turn that key, to let in God’s grace and in so doing I can enter his Kingdom.  I can certainly turn off the flow of his grace into me by my own sins and moral mistakes, therefore I must continually open the door to Christ by studying the Bible, coming to church and by loving and serving others. 

The Blood of Jesus

Many Christians speak of the importance of the blood of Jesus.  The way I look at it, before Jesus, human blood and the human heart that circulates it needed a kind of transfusion.  It needed to be infused with Godblood.  I suppose it can be said that this is the reason Jesus shed his blood on the cross.  If Jesus were to stay alive as a human being he needed blood within him.  But first he had to die to his human self by shedding his blood.  Only then could he be resurrected in a transformed glorious Christ. We too need to die to self so that we can be transformed.  Would it not be appropriate to say that we needed a transfusion of grace through Jesus Christ – God on Earth? 

The Decision

But before this transfusion can happen fully, we have to make a conscious decision of our own free will, to open ourselves to that grace.  That is, we need to make a decision by accepting Christ as our personal savior. Then we are reborn into the new creation that Christ came on Earth to make.  I think it is accurate to say that we have a key to the Kingdom.  We can open the gate or the door into the Kingdom of God by inserting the key and turning it.  I think this is what is meant when we say “I got saved or she got saved.”  It happens at the moment we say yes to Jesus Christ and surrender our lives to him.  That surrender amounts to a great moment of our dying to self. It is at that moment that we have a special transfusion of that Godblood into us. 

Today is what many Christians call Palm Sunday.  It was a moment when Jesus was recognized as king.  But it was also the beginning of the end of Jesus’ human life on Earth.  Soon after the palms and adulation, that evil aspect of human nature reared its ugly head and the people who were eaten up with their own egos and desire for power, recognition and status, turned against him because they felt threatened by his radical message of love in the face of power.  They were afraid that this new way that Jesus was teaching and showing would upset the way they had been acting for centuries. Yet again we see what fear can do to human beings.

Questions and Challenges

1. What will you do this week to remind yourself of the importance of Jesus’ passion, death, and Resurrection?
2. How can you mark the coming of our Lord into the world and into your life?
3. What are the evidences of God’s grace (the Godblood circulating within you) in your life?

Prayer

Father, thank you for sending us your Son to show us The Way, to redeem us from our sinful human nature.  Please continue to guide us in our understanding and awareness of your place in our lives.  We belong to you.  You love us.  That’s who we are - we are loved by you.  Please send your comforting grace into the lives of the suffering victims of the coronavirus and into the hearts and minds of the medical professionals and loved ones who minister to them.  Comfort the family of Larry Scott as they grieve his loss. 

Devotional for Sunday April 5, 2020

Libraries, Synergy, and Functional Conflict

I recently read two articles in a blog, http://bibliosapien.com in which the blogger, a public library director—in his blog he refers to himself as Bibliosapien—he describes his approach to his job and to public libraries in general.  He describes how he is trying to convey his ideas to his staff in his new position as director in a city in the southwestern United States.  At one time he worked in the retail business and he brings those sensibilities to his role.  The essay below is based on my response to his blog.

I was fascinated with a statement he made: “…the goal is to develop relationships that pay off in a fab synergy over time.”  I had to Google “fab synergy” and was not sure I found anything that adequately explained the term.  Fab might mean fabulous or he might be speaking of fabricating synergy – a concept that sounds pretty exciting to me.  Although I had known in general what synergy means I went to Wikipedia (not always an authoritative source, of course) to flesh out my understanding of the term.  I found a passage that seems to reflect what he is interested in:

“In the context of organizational behavior, following the view that a cohesive group is more than the sum of its parts, synergy is the ability of a group to outperform even its best individual member. These conclusions are derived from the studies conducted by Jay Hall on a number of laboratory-based group ranking and prediction tasks. He found that effective groups actively looked for the points in which they disagreed and in consequence encouraged conflicts amongst the participants in the early stages of the discussion.  …The value added by the system as a whole, beyond that contributed independently by the parts, is created primarily by the relationship among the parts, that is, how they are interconnected. In essence, a system constitutes a set of interrelated components working together with a common objective: fulfilling some designated need.”¹

I have to say those last two sentences remind me of my many sociology lectures on social structure and social change, in which I tried to give my students some understanding of these abstract concepts that seemed so difficult for them.*  Social structure, I told them, is a web of social relationships.  Those relationships are based on and consist of regularized interaction.  It is a truism that one cannot have a relationship without interacting.  However, I have known some married couples who distance themselves from each other and avoid communicating, perhaps because of hurts with each other.  To them it does not seem to be a truism at all.  I wish I could say that I have never drifted away or avoided communicating with my wife.  On the other hand, I will say that the single most important factor in the 44 year endurance of our marriage relationship is the fact that we have always eventually been able to communicate even after intense, sometimes dysfunctional, conflicts. 

That third sentence in the Wikipedia quote above, about encouraging conflicts, reminded me of my previous life as a conflict resolution trainer and practitioner.  Conflicts do not have to be conducted in anger.  One can have a quiet conversation with someone in which disagreements and opposite opinions are voiced without strong emotions.  I used to encourage my students to have functional or constructive conflicts, when it seems appropriate to do so in terms of timing, personalities, and circumstance. 

Some of the outstanding experts in the field of conflict resolution, including internationally renowned conflict resolver, William Ury, say that organizations need to have more conflicts rather than less, but have them in a constructive manner. Ury elucidates these ideas beautifully in his book, The Third Side.^2.  Organizations need to create structures and processes that facilitate constructive approaches to conflict and train managers when and how to use conflict rather than to avoid it at all costs – and the costs of conflict avoidance sometimes are quite severe.  Of course, one of the main tasks of managers, in my experience, is to create lines of communication within their organizations in which people can exchange ideas, perspectives, and concerns on a regular basis. These interactions and exchanges often forestall conflicts because people have a better on-going understanding of each other as persons and their interests. 

Earlier in this essay I referred to the library director (Bibliosapien) and his blog.  I was pleased to read of his attempts to create synergy in the library by instituting early in his tenure an outreach to the local public schools, specifically to the librarians.  My wife was a public school librarian and had a good relationship with the local municipality’s public library director, collaborating with her on numerous efforts such as plays and a mobile library for their city.  She also worked to establish community/school collaborations on such events as “read me a story night” in which public officials and other adults in the community came into the school one evening and read stories to the children.  What a wonderful sight and sound that was. 

I am a supporter of Bibliosapien’s idea of installing panels in the library to display school children’s work and perhaps the works of area artists and--I would hope--maybe even poems written by local poets. I had been in libraries in which there seemed to be more concern with clutter and order than with creating an atmosphere that encouraged active involvement of the public (the patrons or “customers”) with the library.  I have seen the negative effects of over-concern with rules and under-appreciation for--admittedly more messy--active participatory activities.  I tend to have a more democratic or active learning approach to things and I like people’s fingerprints, handprints, and excited voices to touch and permeate the environment.  In my own teaching I attempted to institute more active learning, community-based approaches.

In my previous blog, The Poetry in Us, I supported the idea that poetry can operate as a “vector creating social space.”  I stated that I had experienced this phenomenon in our local poetry group, Poetry in Progress, in which there is a diversity of people and poetic forms and content.  I also think that the public library itself can do the same, it can create a social space that facilitates synergy among many differing and perhaps even conflicting elements in the community. 

It appears that one of the concerns of leaders and visionaries--like Bibliosapien--in public libraries is that they focus on the needs of their patrons rather than making primary the interests of the staff.  Many educational and municipal leaders who support libraries fear that they are in danger of going the way of the dinosaurs if significant changes are not made soon.

My perception is that facilitating a creative synergistic process is one of the goals of Bibliosapien.  I believe that these efforts have the chance to bring new energy, interest, and enthusiasm into the library. 

* For more than 20 years I taught sociology in community colleges, later in my career, switching to conflict resolution and mediation training.

ENDNOTES

1.  http://bibliosapien.com The blog that inspired much of this essay is created by a thoughtful individual who is a professional librarian in a public library in the Southwestern United States.

2.  Wikipedia article on synergy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy  May 13, 2014.

3.  William Ury, The Third Side: Why we fight and how we can stop, (Penguin Books; Rev Upd edition: September 1, 2000).