February 23 Communal Responsibility

Deuteronomy 212:6-8 Then all the elders of the town nearest the body shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall declare: "Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Accept this atonement for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, O LORD, and do not hold your people guilty of the blood of an innocent man."

These people are atoning for the death of someone they did not know and a death they were directly responsible for. God's and Smith's points are the same: "None of us live to ourselves. God set us in communities with spiritual responsibilities toward all who live within the community.

I remember when Hillary Clinton wrote her book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, and I think largely because she was a Democrat, a lot of Christians dismissed her and her book. But I do think it is a biblical premise - God sets us in community. He gives us some 34 commands of what we are to do with or to one another and another batch of commands of things we are not to do to one another.

Our western culture, however, has put the emphasis on living independently, of elevating the strong and rugged individualist -the cowboy mentality. Even in the last fifty years, our culture has changed, and not, I think, for the better. I grew up playing outdoors, and by the hour. Most of my growing up years we lived in the country, but even when we lived "in town," it was assumed that all the moms looked after all the neighborhood kids. In those days, you didn't worry all that much about locking your doors even.

Today, too often, your neighbor lives in the next house, and you see them coming and going You might know their name, but that's a might. .No one can just send a child out to play unsupervised because the village no longer exists. It takes a concerted effort to build relationships, to build a village, with other busy people.

And, concerted efforts to build relationships start one at a time. We can not wait for someone else to take the first step. It begins at home, building relationships with people in our church and then building relationships with our neighbors. Even our individuality, our “minding our own business” policy speaks loudly to the world…perhaps about whether our faith is real or not.