Thursday, April 30, 2020

Through Stained Glass: Choosing Community--a sermon

Grammatical Caveat: Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation (i.e., are written for the ear), the written accounts occasionally deviate from proper and generally accepted principles of grammar and punctuation. Most often, these deviations are not mistakes per se but are indicative of an attempt to aid the listener in the delivery of the sermon.


“Choosing Community”
Acts 2.42-47 & John 10.1-10
Sunday, May 3, 2020

Community.
Since I first felt a nudge to ministry, people have asked me why. My answer is honest and straightforward--I believe in community.
When we get right down to it, we are to live life together. Since the beginning, as our faith story has it, humanity has lived in a relationship with all created things: all creation, fellow humans, and God.
The church is Christ on earth. It is a paradox of faith. Christ is our Good Shepherd, the one who seeks after us, but by the Holy Spirit, we are the Good Shepherd, too. Christ never abandoned us, so we are never to leave each other. We are the church, and we witness to Jesus as a peaceable, virtuous, ethical, just, serving, and diverse-but-unified community. We are to be an alternative reality community in the world. Community guided by the Holy Spirit, rooted in the practices of Christ and committed to the abundant life offered by God is how the world, our town, and our own lives, will come to know peace. Here's how.
The church of Jesus Christ can speak life and hope into a fracturing and divisive world. It can proclaim and embody the new creation in Christ, the new humanity, and show a different ethic and way of life in the world. God gifts us, as God's one, unique, and transformed people to recover our humanity and help change the world. The church is the continuation of the incarnation—the body of Christ—as Christ is our good shepherd, so we are the shepherds to our communities.
Breaking this down a little more, the church, as we are discovering in this pandemic, is not the building. The church is the people—the community of faith. As the church, we care for each other, love our neighbors, welcome the stranger, and pray for our enemies. As the Good Shepherd looks after the sheep of their fold, risking whatever it takes to see the lost lamb found, so we are to be shepherds to each other. Doing this takes practice, however.
Growing up, as an athlete, I heard this misleading but good intended phrase a lot, "practice makes perfect." The meaning of this phrase is if you hone your skills, you will put yourself in a position where you won't make any mistakes. Talk about pressure! However, the phrase makes sense in light of being on a team. We practice honing our expertise, as do the others on our team so that when it comes time to the performance, we work together to succeed. If someone makes a mistake, we will have prepared enough to adapt and respond in a way that moves us towards an emphatic finish. Whether you’re playing on a team, a part of a play, performing in the orchestra, or building a house—the completed goal is rarely the result of one person working alone. It is a collective effort by a community of folks who put in a lot of discipline and practice to get to the finish line. The same goes for the church.
We see the church practicing community in our Acts lesson today. Chapter two of Acts tells the story of Pentecost, the day the Spirit [according to Luke’s account] was poured out upon the disciples. The disciples in our text today were gathering after the Pentecost moment.  After a transformational moment, the community returned to the essential practices of faith: the apostles' teachings and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. With the memory of Jesus in the upper room with the disciples is still fresh in our minds, we see the early church practicing what they learned from Jesus. Last week the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus after the breaking of bread, and today, we see the church committing themselves to be a practicing community. In their practice, we see a pathway towards the promise the Good Shepherd makes in John's Gospel—a life of abundance.
In this honeymoon time of the church, the Jerusalem community is filled with the Spirit, and God's Spirit motivates their life together. Perhaps, the author of Acts is using some hyperbole here. Still, the world he describes presents an ideal human community, the beloved community, the body of Christ, toward which we strive, and which is so different from our individualistic, self-interested, win-lose, competitive world. Whether or not the description of the early church is idyllic or not isn't necessary. What is important is seeing how the first communities of the faith committed to bringing the extravagant and inclusive love of God to all people. They were becoming by way of these particular practices the new humanity—the Body of Christ on Earth. Through their practices, they were able to discern, discover, and deliver the promise of the Good Shepherd.
Friends, the good news is that Christ unifies the church. Christ is our Good Shepherd, goes before us, seeks after us, and when Christ finds us, Christ calls us by our name. As Christ promised the early church, so Christ promises us not just a new life—but life abundant. Christ doesn't offer the church new life—Christ infuses the church with Christ's very life-giving presence and power. People from every nation, tribe, and tongue join to receive this life. We are a community of diverse people set out to be Christ's body in the world.
We must choose community. We must choose to be the community Christ left for us. Of course, to be this community, we need each other—all players, actresses, dreamers, and creators. And we must return to the practices Christ left us to know where and to whom we are being called. As a new creation, embodying a distinct way of life that witnesses to Jesus and the reign of God, the church needs these practices to become that alternative community.
The alternative community Christ breathed into us is why I do what I do. In a world deeply divided by so much injustice, it is the church by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit that the world can experience renewal. To be the beloved community of faith, we must embrace and take the teachings of Christ seriously. We must seek unity in our diversity, pursue justice at all cost, and tell the story of our faith not only with our words but through the way we live our lives. We must not play gatekeepers, but be the ones who open wide the gate to the extravagant love of God. Choosing community then means participating in the re-creation of the world; it means joining in the ministry of reconciliation; it means to be a light to a divided and broken world by breaking down dividing walls of animosity, hatred, fear, and discrimination.
Here’s the thing about community, friends. God exists as a community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is a community of selfless love poured out in mutuality and reverence. We are to exist as the Trinity exists—pouring ourselves out in the name of love while also accepting the love poured out to us. Our Acts lesson puts into perspective what the Good Shepherd promises and what the Trinity proclaims—that the community of faith is always about love and life abundant. The Good Shepherd calls, and it is easy to miss Christ's voice because of our busyness, our pursuits for power, and the distracting idols of individualization. God wants one thing for us: abundant life.
So, church—let us choose community. Let us open the gate to the love of God by loving each other. Let us proclaim the good news that God is for everyone. Let us invite as many as we can to this community of faith because without them, we are incomplete, and with them, we have everything we need. Above all, let us choose community because when we do, we choose to be a part of something astonishing—that something is the marvelous work of God restoring, recreating, and resurrecting this good and beautiful world.
           Community is a gift. It is the very way of life for God and with God. Life together rooted in the apostles' teachings and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers is the way we find abundant life. And this community is patient, humble, polite, hospitable, warm, forgiving, hopeful, trusting, and persistent. Who wouldn't want to be a part of this community?
When we choose community—we choose Love.
And that is what makes the world go around.

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