Called to Community?

A Sermon discussion by Nada Sellers & Patricia Koons

August 7, 2005

Matthew 10:39

Nada: I’m sure that many of you have taken notice of the rash of violent traffic altercations that have taken place in Massachusetts during the past week alone.  If you haven’t heard, here’s a synopsis, drawn from The Boston Globe:

Angry and fearful after a traffic altercation, prosecutors say, 60-year-old Walter Bishop hunted down another driver yesterday, 27-year-old Sandro Andrade, who held his infant daughter as at least four lethal rounds were fired point-blank into his head and body … Investigators said the bloody chain of events began minutes earlier on a quiet side street, when a young, aspiring Cape Verdian immigrant and a frail well-liked older man got into a traffic scuffle.  Bishop told police that Andrade got out of his car during the scrape, screaming profanities and threats … Bishop left the encounter thinking Andrade had taken down his license place number to exact revenge later.  “I made up my mind right there to do something,” Bishop told investigators later ... Bishop dropped his wife at an MBTA station, then spotted Andrade’s maroon Isuzu Rodeo… He swerved his Chevy Blazer across traffic and rammed into the driver’s side door of Andrade’s car.  [According to a witness,] “He’s got the window down, never even gets out.  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!  Four shots.  It sounded like a cap gun …” 

Pat: Or how about the other incident that took place in Malden:

The dispute [that occurred on Weds., August 3rd,] started around 11am when both cars were traveling on the Lynnway.  A Malden driver was charged with assault with intend to murder after he allegedly chased down and shot a mother and her 17-year-old son in their car yesterday ... [T]he motorists in the two cars had been feuding for several blocks.  They had stopped at lights and verbally sparred for about a half-mile.  At a stop sign, the teenager allegedly spat at the other car, after which the driver allegedly got out of his car, threatened, and ultimately shot the two victims. Said Amie O’Hearn, of the Registry of Motor Vehicles, which is among the agencies trying to curb aggressive driving and road rage, “It leaves you speechless. This is certainly a wake-up call that people aren’t getting the message.”

I’m not certain what message RMV personnel have been trying to send, but for us this week, as we were looking into the theme of community, the messages started leaping from the page.  ‘What on earth makes someone think that the thing to do in order to resolve a dispute is to get rid of the offending person?  Is this what we think of other people who wrong us?  And why are drivers so susceptible to becoming so incensed?  What goes on in our cars, and on our streets?  Does anybody care – how can we respond?’

Nada: We place these sobering accounts alongside an in-depth conversation I had with a colleague in ministry I’ve just become associated with in the Gardner area.  We met for some discussion about a clergy event being planned for November, and she began to describe her efforts to support neighbors and members in her largely immigrant religious community who become ill: The fear and isolation brought on by limited language skills; The separation from extended family and familiar culture, where care-giving is readily provided, and one’s neighbors become the support system that gets you back on your feet again;  The poverty and suffering that comes with having few resources with which to negotiate the medical system, let alone grasping the concept of a hospital as something other than a place of last resort where you go to die, as is often the case in the hospitals of the two-thirds world.

She described families becoming homeless or living in inadequate housing, working many low-paying jobs, trying to make ends meet, while at the same time caring for an ailing family member.  And her calling, her sense of the Divine leading in her ministry, is to alleviate the suffering, to be present and to listen; to learn and to care and to make an effort to bring whatever community resources are available, to these persons.  Her lament in the midst of these keen observations about the needs she meets all around her is, “if only we took the time to reach out to one another with what we have, we could reduce so many of the burdens our neighbors face alone.  The suffering could be reduced to a manageable level and we would all grow from helping this to happen.”  She went on to dream of ways to promote more communal, intentional living arrangements in these communities, where group skills and wisdom might be shared, and intergenerational support could be enjoyed.

I could hear the Gospel-in-action as she spoke.  Time pressure simply vanished for both of us, and soon, we looked up to see that 2 hours had flown by without our notice.  Here was a vision for community in North Central Massachusetts I had not yet heard, and if you know anything about this part of our state, you will know that it has many, many social ills.  What is even more striking, is that my colleague is not a Christian minister; she is a Buddhist monk, and as an Anglo woman, who has taken a vow of poverty, and wears saffron robes and a shaved head, she lives and breathes this calling every single day.

When you think about the Christian teaching, to be members of the body of Christ, known as “the church,” similar visions of community may come to mind.  The New Testament is full of metaphor and description, about the way in which believers are brought together, and prepared by the Spirit, to be more than just the sum of different parts:

Read Romans 12:4-5

Read 1 Cor 12:12-19, 24b-26

If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it …

Pat:  Another fertile description often found in Pauline texts, describes the old life and the new creation made possible through Christ:

Read Ephesians 4:22-27, 31 - 5:2

Live in love, “as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us…”  What does this mean?  In what sense are we to “belong to one another” in Christ?  Do we even know each other well enough to say that we have gained this level of connectedness?

Nada begins, then together for questions:  For the next portion of our worship, we’re going to take some time to work on this notion of community, and in particular, the community that is innately a part of what the Christian church is called to be.

1. Identify for your group, which communities you personally belong to.
2. What are some of the features of belonging in these communities?  What does it mean in your everyday life?
3. What do you notice about our “community” of North Church?  What are some of the good things?
4. What’s not so good – what needs to change?

Nada: Of course, the church isn’t just any “community,” although there certainly are similarities with other groups that we belong to.  Amongst the distinguishing characteristics of Christian community is our witness to the overarching rule of God, active, invested and involved in the world God created, as well as becoming part of the people and the peoples God has formed, now redeemed and restored through the life work of Jesus.  And finally, there are the concrete gatherings of people known as the church, called to discipleship and ministry in Jesus’ name.  (McClendon, Doctrine, p362-64)   For Christians, the church starts with the centrality of Jesus – we are drawn to faith through the persuasive life and teaching of  the Risen One who lays hold of our lives through the work of the Spirit.  Through the power of God, this is the place where we come to conviction through the Spirit’s wooing, it’s here in Christian community that we grow in our commitments to this Savior, and as new creatures, seek to follow Jesus as renewed disciples.  Here we are redeemed through the great love with which Jesus loves us, and here we go about sharing our love in care for one another and for our neighbors.  Not just for our friends but our neighbors and even our enemies, according to Jesus’ teachings.

It is also here, that we struggle to understand what it means to live in a world that so badly needs to hear the messages of hope and meaning and joy that are found in living – not just for oneself – but with the intention to care about others.  Listen to following comment from a person who, along with his wife, set aside modern living to join an intentional Christian community:

And this is what community should be all about—love! …  Sharing life with others is certainly not an escape from pain or disappointment. But with the pain comes joy. If we surrender ourselves to the crucible of community, we experience something greater than our personalities with all their foibles and flaws. Such an experience comes only when we become free from having to assess how everything impacts our own little lives.  When we join together because of God’s love and do so in humble recognition of our own selfishness, the ego-transforming power of Christ lifts us beyond ourselves. He stands among us and joins us together in selfless abandon. Although there are personal benefits to living in community, true community consists of becoming free of oneself for the sake of love. It’s a mystery how this happens. It begins by letting go and letting God free us to be the creations we are: beings who live for the sake of others. When this occurs the bond between souls is so marvelous that personal pursuits and fulfillment pale before it.  (Charles Moore in Community 101; Why Am I Still So Selfish? @ www.bruderhof.com)

Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is what being a member of Christ’s body is all about!  If we want to know how to be a community that can set aside our hang-ups, and begin to let people know we’re here and we care, we can start by following Jesus’ command to love as he loved us. To be that compelling community that can share a different message than that of the RMV about how to live together in a violent and destructive world, we start with a broken Christ who suffered and then rose again, to raise us all up into his likeness. 

Communion

This morning we share in the banquet table of our Savior who invites us to remember, that on the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus took bread …