Mark chapter three to kick things off from Jesus of Nazareth, verse 31.

Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived, standing outside Jesus' in a house,

they sent someone in to call him. Now a crowd was sitting around him and they told him,

hey, your mother and your brothers are outside looking for you. Who are my mother and my brothers,

he asked? Now that was a rhetorical question in the first century as it is today. Your mom is Mary,

your brothers are James and Jude. But then he looked around those seated in a circle around him,

which would have been the inner ring of his apprentices. And he said, here, here are my mother

and my brothers. Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother. Notice that for

Jesus, his community of apprentices is his family. What does Jesus call God, what's the number one

moniker Jesus has for God? The Father. And what does Jesus call his apprentices? Brothers and sisters,

in Greek it's one word, a delfoy, and it's used not only by Jesus, but by every single one of the

writers of the New Testament as the dominant moniker for what you and I are. In fact, it's used 342 times

in the New Testament. It is the dominant idea frame for what kind of community Jesus is up to.

So there are all sorts of types of community. Crossfit is a type of community slash cult.

Marriage is a type of community or the nuclear family is a BFF is a type of community. A local school is a type of community.

For Jesus, the type of community that we are, at least his intent, is that a family. Now this idea of family sounds really nice and

you know, G rated and all of that stuff, if not a little bit sappy. But I would argue this is actually one of Jesus' most radical

teachings that was one that contributed to his execution. But to see why we need to do just a little bit of

background. So give me 10 or 15 minutes to content dump on you and then I promise relevance is coming. We will circle back

and talk about what this means for you and I in the practice of community. Two things you need to get your head

around in about first century Jewish culture to make sense of how radical this was. First off, anthropologists talk about a

strong group society versus a weak group society. Or another language for that is collectivist versus individualist. Though that has

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