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VISION 2020 - Community BuildingJune 08, 2008 Fourth Sunday after Pentecost “In and through community lies the salvation of the world.” [1] That’s how M. Scott Peck began his best-selling book in the mid-80’s entitled, The Different Drum, a personal and impassioned call to re-awaken profound commitment to building and sustaining strong bonds of human community. Though now perhaps sounding a bit dated and inclined towards dramatic hyperbole, Peck addressed something that was much on people’s minds in those days – a felt sense of personal fragmentation and isolation and a general lack of communal commitment to the common good, to things that were larger than individualistic self-indulgence. The same year Peck’s book came out, and the same year I arrived at Christ Church, Tom Wolfe released his infamous fictional account of the times, Bonfire of the Vanities, that struck a direct hit on the cultural nerve. Hungover from the self-expression and self-absorption of the 60’s and 70’s, beleaguered by the nuclear threat of the Cold War, intractable racism, wanton greed, and broken cities, not to mention broken families, people were longing for reconnection, for belonging to something larger than their own whim – they wanted authentic relationships that were healthy, wholesome and generative. I felt that myself. I was very much a product of my times in this way. I longed for a coherent sense of self and deep connection to others, and to things that really mattered. I suppose that’s one way I could describe my journey towards God, ultimately choosing to follow the peculiar path of ordination. Which, by the way, was a very odd path at the time, very much out of synch with the cultural moment and with the paths being chosen by my peers. I was often met by a quizzical look when I told people where I was headed. Quizzical look, head cocked to one side and the startled response, “You’re going to do what? Where’d that come from?” On the other hand, once I was doing my ordained thing in specific locations, I quickly confirmed that this profound longing for connection was a nearly universal condition. It seemed the very heart of the spiritual quest. Whatever else might have brought people through church doors, this longing for meaningful, fruitful and generative relationship with self and others was at the top of the list and has formed the subtext of many pastoral conversations over these last decades. It was not lost to me that Scott Peck, trained as a psychiatrist – and the highest selling self-help guru of the 80’s with the longest run on the NY Times best-seller list up to that moment – was baptized a few years before the release of his book on community. He, too, stumbled across the threshold of faith while searching for deep connection within himself and with others, ultimately discovering this was nothing less than a holy quest initiated by God who seemed the source-point for loving connection. I’m especially impressed by how many Millennials, those that are now roughly 30-years-old and younger, are oriented towards service and finding so-called “meaningful work”, driving their employers to distraction as these bosses attempt to manage from a different generational perspective. Cultural researchers describe a pragmatic idealism within this latest generation, an energizing, perhaps even crucial evolution of the national character arriving just in the nick of time. Though they have not escaped their own version of self-absorption and self-importance, I find Millennials refreshingly free of cynicism, less captured by the patterns of older cultural norms and battles, and relatively open and undefended against spiritual matters. Creating authentic community is a driving concept for our cultural moment. Of course, in a very real sense, this has always been the case, if not expressed in the same way across the generations. Human beings have always striven to make sense of how individual identity corresponds to the collective – to family, tribe and nation. Well you can see how this longing for authentic community relates to our mission here: “we seek to love God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves,” which is derived from Jesus’ summary of the human agenda: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind' - this is the great and foremost commandment, and there is a second like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” [2] God, self, neighbor. All relationship, all the time. Were I to say today that most of humanity’s intractable problems starting in our individual lives and running through our families, city, nation and world were problems related to broken community, I’m guessing I would find near unanimous agreement. The way we’re using the word community here doesn’t really exist in our biblical text, but the concept is present everywhere. Indeed, that seems the subtext for most everything that is recorded. If we approach the Bible with questions like, “Well, how shall I then live? or, What’s it all about anyway? or, Am I my brother’s keeper?” and so on, we inevitably wind up considering the content and quality of all our relationships – with God, self and neighbor. Each of our scripture passages today speak to the promise and problems of community. Take your bulletin home with you today and re-read these three passages and see how they each address aspects of what it means to be part of the human family, in relationship with God. When we say here at Christ Church that one of our four major foci for our work together is Community Building, we’re not saying a small thing – we’re really addressing ourselves to one of the fundamental issues within the human experience. The other three components of our stated vision – Outreach, Spiritual Formation and Worship – are, to some degree, aspects, or ways of thinking about building community with God, self and neighbor. In our strategic document we call VISION 2020, we describe our commitment to nurturing deep bonds of human community this way: Christ Church provides a spiritual home which inspires formative and nurturing relationships with God and one another. We are mindful that each person is a child of God with unique gifts and we seek to honor individuals as we strengthen secure bonds of Christian community in a city of astonishing diversity. To this end Christ Church will: -Expand small group ministries, including Covenant Groups, that nurture spiritual growth, mutual support and Christian service As the old saying goes, this is not rocket science. On the other hand, it is profoundly important that we be explicit in our commitment on this point because it resides at the very heart of what it means to be a church in relationship with and in service to Jesus Christ. If we do not live into this call to building authentic community as best we can we will nearly miss the point of what it means to be Christian and even more broadly, what it means to be human. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony preached a sermon entitled, “A Model of Christian Charity”, to his fellow colonists before they set foot on land in the year 1630 – 378 years ago. He urged that “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.” [3] I’m thinking this could very well become our own motto as we move into these next years. In a far more radical way than we demand of ourselves today those intrepid Christians pooled their energy and resources into a remarkable endeavor of which we are now the direct beneficiaries. By comparison I feel like a piker. They built community almost from nothing but their passionate commitment to God and one another. They didn’t do this perfectly, and neither will we live into our purposes perfectly. But there is no question about the fundamental agenda embedded within the call we hear as followers of Christ. This means, of course, that community doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t just happen in our families, in our city, in our nation. It isn’t something that we come to receive like a member of an audience experiencing a fine and refreshing entertainment, as delightful as that might be. Instead, community is something we create, something we spend energy building up. It comes from investing our sweat, our talents, our resources, our commitments, our love, such as it is. Holding our minds and hearts and hands open to the world’s astonishing diversity. Paradoxically, we are the beneficiaries of all these excellent things in turn. Community isn’t something that happens to us; it is instead something that emerges almost mystically as our intentions and energies blend with others for the purposes of loving God, self and neighbor. This is a crucially important concept to grab hold of. Indeed, having been called together by Jesus Christ, our hope, we could say, “In and through community lies the salvation of the world.” ____________________ Previous sermon: VISION 2020: Spiritual Growth • Next sermon: VISION 2020 - Worship All past sermons |
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