Nov. 18, 2012the Beloved Community1
Steve Schumm - sermon preached at Community Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, VA
I am in the church today, because, it is in the church that I found a community that cared about me, where I belonged and where I was claimed. I am in the church because that community called out my gifts and challenged me to live for Jesus Christ. I am in the church because that first community, my home community communicated the gospel to me, the good news of the reality of Jesus Christ and all that meant for my life. I am in the church because that community introduced me to the gospel. And, I am still in the church because that same gospel saved me from that first community. I’ll unpack that later and return to testify to the crucial role community played in my own life.
Community is where we often experience the love and grace of Jesus Christ first: in caring relationships, friendly gestures, in the encouragement and support that is organically exhibited in the body of Christ. It is within the community of the body of Christ where we most often have our first taste of the goodness of the Lord and the grace of God.
At the Mennonite Church convention in Pittsburgh last summer our church adopted seven priorities to guide us over the next ten years, seven priorities that were articulated in a document called the Purposeful Plan. We’ve been looking at these priorities throughout November with guest speakers addressing two of the seven priorities for Mennonite Church USA: Andre Gingerich Stoner spoke on Holistic Christian Witness and Russ Eanes addressed Christian Formation. Today we consider Christian Community: locus of salvation, context of our formation and vehicle for our combined witness in the world. All of the other priorities connect to Christian community either as their context or as the place where we are stretched and formed, supported and held accountable. If I picture these seven priorities laid out in a diagram, I imagine they would look like a wheel with six of the priorities that Mennonite Church USA has named as the spokes and Christian Community as the hub of the wheel – the place in the center where the others come together and are unified - making Christian community ipso facto prior in the ordocognoscendi (to borrow a phrase from Amy Farrah Fowler from the Big Bang).
This is how Christian Community is described in the Purposeful Plan:
“As a sign and foretaste of God’s coming Kingdom, our church communities serve as a vital part of our witness in the world. As communities in God’s mission, we will strengthen the loving interactions within the body of Christ and enhance our witness through worshipping together, extending hospitality, practicing scriptural discernment, cultivating Christ-centered unity and learning to agree and disagree in love.”
This is a little taste of heaven on earth – or at least that’s what Christian community ought to be, when we are doing it right and our communities are infused with and animated by the Holy Spirit. Then we truly become a foretaste and sign of God’s coming Kingdom. If this is the body of Christ, then these are its bodily functions: loving interactions, extending hospitality, practicing scriptural discernment, cultivating Christ-centered unity and learning to agree and disagree in love.
The three scripture texts read this morning in worship, from 1 Corinthians, from Colossians and from Philippians, these are the biblical texts that the Purposeful plan references in support of this notion, this priority for Christian community. So let’s take a closer look at these three texts.
In the 1 Corinthians text we see the dynamic relationship that exists between the individual and the fellowship of the group. Is the church an entity and personality in and of itself, one whole that subsumes the parts? Or is the church a collection of faithful individuals, unified by a common experience, common purpose and common Lord? The answer is both/and – the church is one and many. For the body is one with many parts but even though there are many parts it is still one. So it is with Christ. In one Spirit we were baptized into one body, each of us with our particularity, and we al drank of one Spirit. Indeed, the body is not just one part but many.
In our limited human nature it is difficult to hold this both/and together so that we often wind up with Christian communities that either give priority to the whole over the parts, so that there is little room for individual expression of difference or, we wind up with Christian communities that are merely containers for the individualism we see in society all around us, unified in name only so that it is very difficult to actually hold individuals in the church accountable because we all make our own decisions perfectly fine on our own, thank you very much. I believe that Christian community at its best holds the communal and the individual together in mutual tension. In Christian community, the strengths and gifts of the individual are affirmed and supported and called out and individual expression of identity and personality flourishes. In the body of Christ the individual is willing to set aside rights or privileges for the sake of the other or for the whole. The body of Christ holds individuals accountable, calling them to leave behind expressions of individuality inconsistent with the nature of Jesus Christ our Lord, empowering and supporting individuals to overcome their own weaknesses, temptations and struggles. The body of Christ requires individuals to be in prayerful discernment: reading scripture, reflecting on life, constantly examining our assumptions and practices so that sometimes, it is individuals who call the community to a new or renewed sense of faithful living. In the body of Christ the individual is not subsumed by the whole nor is the community simply the expression of all its parts.
My home community, the Amish Mennonite Church I grew up in was great on the communal aspect of the body of Christ. My Father was formed in this so that he was happy to go along with the discernment of the community on just about anything. My Dad liked that he knew what was right and wrong based on the shared thinking and discernment of the body of Christ. There is a comfort and simplicity to this communal identity and some personalities fit into it more easily than others. He rarely questioned or argued with the morals or ethics presented to him by that community. There was some room for individuality in that community but not very much. I appreciated the love and care that I experienced as a child and teenager in that community (which was leaving behind the Amish-Mennonite identity at that time and merging with the broader Mennonite church.) I felt accepted and loved, encouraged and invited to offer my gifts to the life of the congregation. But I didn’t see a lot of diversity in the life of the congregation, in the professions, the lifestyles, interests and passions of those who made up my home congregation were pretty homogenous: by and large they were farmers, who didn’t like to travel. The men worked in the fields or the barn all day listening to baseball in the tractor or shop or coming in to watch hockey in the winter. The women kept house and raised children. They all went to church Sunday morning and Sunday evening and to Bible study or small group on Wednesday night. They didn’t imagine or question whether or not they would rather do something else at those times – they were at church because that was expected. It was the right thing to do. There were exceptions but they tended to be persons on the margin of the community; their individuality was tolerated rather than celebrated.
I’m not sure the church knew quite what to do with a teenager like me who read Charles Dickens, Stephen King and Gabriel Garcia Marquez¸ who would rather be inside his head than out in the field. I love and value and appreciate the church community I grew up in but I also needed to leave that community to find people more like me and so it was the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ that acknowledged and affirmed individual and particular gifts I found in myself that called me out of that community, called me to consider going to university, studying and doing something (and being something) different from my parents and everyone else in that Mennonite farming community. That was the community that communicated the gospel to me and that was, at the same time, the community that the gospel saved me from. Since then I have found many different Christian communities that have been life giving and I can also go home and appreciate the community that formed me (even if I could never imagine myself going back to live there.) Here you see some of the tension of the individual vs. the communal, the body vs. its members.
My Father still likes to know what his church thinks about new and different social realities. He finds it challenging when the church is unclear about something, when there are differences of opinion and interpretation within the church or when the church changes its mind or shifts its thinking about social or ethical matters. It makes him anxious and he feels like his foundation for being in the world becomes shaky when the church is unclear about what is right and wrong. He is a high-context culture kind of guy where I am more low-context culture (to use the terms of anthropologist Edward Hall). Consider this discussion about moving between high-culture vs. low-culture contexts (High-culture values the communal, unspoken or implicit sense of identity or understanding. Low-culture values explicit communication and individualism.)
An individual from a higher context culture (like my Father) may need to adapt and/or be accommodated when shifting to a low context culture. A lower context culture demands more independence, and expects many relationships, but fewer intimate ones. A high context individual (My Father) is more likely to ask questions rather than attempt to work out a solution independently, and the questions are likely to be asked from the same few people. The high context person may be frustrated by people appearing to not want to develop a relationship or continue to help them on an ongoing basis. The term "hand-holding" might be used to describe high context individuals in an unintentionally derogatory sense.
An individual from a low context culture (like me) needs to adapt and/or be accommodated when shifting to a higher context culture. Higher context cultures expect small, close-knit groups, and reliance on that group. Groups can actually be relied upon to support each other, and it may be difficult to get support outside of your group. Professional and personal lives often intertwine. A lower context individual may be more likely to try to work things out on their own and feel there is a lack of self-service support or information, rather than ask questions and take time to develop the relationships needed to accomplish the things that need to be done.
So which should the church be? The reality is that there are faithful churches that are both high and low context cultures. Some might look at CMC over the years and see a shift from a ‘higher context culture’ in the early days with an emphasis on small groups, priority of time and energies given to congregational life, to a ‘lower context culture today’ where the connections are looser and people pick and choose and decide on their own what they will do with their resources or their time. Some will see this shift as a loss while others will appreciate it and celebrate it.
What is important is not whether we are high or low context – but whether or not we exhibit the characteristics of the body of Christ. Bodily functions of the community that are named for us in the Colossians passage today: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, love, peacefulness, thankfulness, admonishment, worship and the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Community, in and of itself, is a neutral reality. We are social creatures who were created for community and crave a connection with people around us. But community can be fallen, just as easily as it can be redeemed (think of the peer pressure of a community that has a negative influence, think of the ways that we are shaped and formed by our community and society in ways that less than Christ-like).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote "Let the one who cannot be alone beware of community," and, "Let the one who is not in community beware of being alone."[1] Herein lies the tension between the individual and the communal – neither can be discounted and so, in our congregational life we work to create both space where people can come together and share their lives meaningfully with one another (small groups, in fact community life commission as a whole works at this) while also ensuring that there is room for difference and particularity in the makeup of our congregation (diversity in our unity.)
The body of Christ is a wonderful place to be when the Holy Spirit binds us together, taking our individual selves and identities and unifying us in heart and spirit without doing damage to our individuality, celebrating our particularity. Think about this as we gather this afternoon in our congregational meeting – ask yourself, how are we doing? I hope you will find plenty of reasons to celebrate the community that God has created and sustained through the years in this congregation.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Bros., 1954) p. 77