Sermon 090599

One of the questions in life that I constantly brood about is "What does it mean to live in real Christian community?" The three scripture lessons this morning create for us a rich, textured and complex picture of authentic faith community. All of us live in a variety of communities, of course; communities composed of people with like interests or hobbies, neighborhoods, families, causes; communities defined by age group or profession, race, gender or class. In its glorious days in particular, the labor movement constituted and still does for many, a profound community of human solidarity. But what about true communities of faith? What are they like and how can they be distinguished?

To begin with what is faith? I recently came across a definition of faith by the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. He writes: "Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the repulsion of the absurd held fast by the passion of inwardness." (Concluding Unscientific Postscript) That’s quite a mouthful, but as I chew on it, I like it. He is saying that faith is being grasped by something that is outwardly illogical, yet inwardly brings passionate truth that can be trusted. When we say that somehow the teacher and healer Jesus of Nazareth is one and the same with the Christ who is alive and gives life in power and that this Christ is one and the same with God; in the eyes of the wise of this world, this is delusional, illusional, illogical and unprovable. Yet that which seems so absurd gives me life, keeps me alive, and recreates me in every moment. It is to say that faith is not adopting a doctrine or applying an ethic. No, faith is being grasped by a transforming power and presence that is inwardly validating, even as our outward objectivity is shaken. To experience faith is not to find outward certainty; nor is it to replace outward certainty with inward certainty. Faith is to live in the tension between absurd uncertainty and inward passion.

So if that definition of faith somehow speaks to you, what then, if we listen to these amazing scriptures, constitutes a true community of faith, as opposed to all the other communities of our lives? Let me suggest three things.

First, God is saying to us "Get serious about living and wake up, because the time is short." God instructed Ezekiel to tell the people that transgression and sin were weighing them down and they were wasting away. If you are feeling exhausted, restless, resentful, bitter, frustrated and depressed, you are wasting away and your life has to change. We walk around in a dream state thinking things are okay when they are not. I got a wonderful birthday card from Bob and Kay Perry. On the front it says "You’re lookin’ good! You’re feelin’ good!" Open the card and it says "You apparently don’t realize what going on." Life is short and how you live matters. And the Word of God drops into our midst like a plumb line. That Word may say something like "Wake up and address the pain and unresolved grief that is eating you away inside." It may say "You are depressed because you are ignoring your participation in a situation of profound injustice and hurt to others." The message of the prophets is always "Wake up. Get a life. Do justice." I recently watched the movie "Analyze This!" In it Billy Crystal plays a psychiatrist who sees a lot of people who are narcissistic, petty and tedious. At one point he fantasizes screaming at this woman "Wake up! Get a life already! You’re boring me to death!" Finally at the end of the film he confronts a dreary and complaining woman and her frumpy husband, saying "Just stop this bickering and complaining! Life is short! Live to the fullest! Just do it!" Too often we walk through life with no sense of the meaning of the past, no vision for the future, and bored in the present. Meanwhile the pain and suffering of this world go unattended. That is what Ezekiel means by the sin of our wasting away. And the cause isn’t just our failing to deal adequately with the stresses of modern living, hard as that may seem. It is the malaise we feel because we have fallen from what God intended us to be. So the first sign of the true church is that people are alive and alert to that Word of God, that call to life, that compelling invitation to the work of justice and peace and reconciliation.

Second, a true Christian community is one in which people are accountable to God and accountable to one another. Christian communities in every time and place have struggled to understand the relationship between truly loving one another and structuring a life together that makes that love real. St. Paul says in Romans that all the laws and commandments come down to loving one another and loving God. That is it. This of course rejects the spirit of legalism for the spirit of love. But yet I think we all realize, and history has shown, that Christian communities need structure. Jesus’ words at the end of the scripture in Matthew are beguiling. He says "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there will I be also." This verse has sometimes lent itself to a kind of warm, fuzzy notion of community as nice, like-minded people having a pleasant time together, usually away from church and out in nature. But these words come right after Jesus deals with the vexing problem of what do you do if you have been genuinely wronged by someone else in the church. This threatens the very essence of community. Jesus’ response to this is to provide a process, step by step, to deal with it. First, the two of you, then more people are involved, and then the entire church. And the outcome of that process is not known. It can result in reconciliation or in the loss of the member.

Christian community is not just nice people getting together, being polite and helpful, and hoping everything goes fine. Living together in community means true accountability to one another and to God. On the one hand we are informed by the simple law of love, treating one another with mutual respect. But on the other hand we are continually learning and re-learning how to do this. We are continually teaching one another. The former Northwestern University football coach, Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American recently gunned down on the streets of Skokie, Illinois by a white supremacist, had just finished writing a book devoted to raising youth, entitled Coaching Your Kids In the Game of Life. Coaching is about teaching personal growth, overcoming obstacles, taking responsibility, learning the rules, and understanding the relationship between winning, losing, self-fulfillment and the interest of the team. Coaching is a good metaphor for how we raise our youth. I think Linda is going to be teaching us a lot about how to coach our kids on the relationship between freedom and responsibility, individual expression and community solidarity, and what it means to put Christ at the center of our young peoples’ lives. We don’t just cross our fingers and hope it happens. The whole church has to make it happen.

These same lessons apply to us. If we are going to truly wake up, get real, live fully because the time is short, then we need to be coached in our mutual accountability to one another and to Christ. True accountability involves honesty and integrity with one another. Jesus said that our conversations should be "Aye, Aye" and "Nay, Nay." There is a certain healthy Christian bluntness that often gets lost in our trying hard to be tactful and understanding. I suggest that there are two "A" words that Christians always need to work on. Those words are anger and appreciation. Expressing anger is a perennial problem with many Christians. Not whether we express it, but how we express it, because anger always comes out sooner or later. Anger builds inside us each when we are not clear and direct about expressing how deeply we feel about something or someone. The person who is wronged in Jesus’ story goes to the person who is the cause and tells him. Anger was not allowed to build. Churches are plagued by the problem of unexpressed anger. Unexpressed anger makes people depressed. And unexpressed anger leads to the time-honored tradition of church gossip. Both approaches kill the soul. The other A - word is appreciation. The happiest most creative and healthy people I know are the people who are the most appreciative and know how to express it and receive it. They are brimming with appreciation for others, for God, and for being alive. I defy you to spend any time with Wilma Woodard and not catching some of her spirit of appreciation. She is a great teacher in this. I think we need to coach one another in both giving and receiving appreciation. It must be really felt - not a tactic or a strategy. But getting real has to be with plumbing the depths of one’s appreciation and letting others know. Appreciation builds appreciation. Steve Gilbert told me that he was amazed at what great hospital care he got when he went out of his way to simply tell the doctors and nurses and staff how much he appreciated what they did for him. They were hungering to hear that. And aren’t we all? So the let’s remember all those A-words: accountability, anger, and appreciation.

And finally, a faith community is one in which, quite simply, Christ is at the center. It is a community in which the spiritual dimension infuses everything we do and say and are. The statement "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there will I be also," is not a warm, fuzzy invitation to a Christian outing. First Jesus discusses how to deal with a very dangerous, threatening situation, for the souls of individuals and a community. Then he utters these striking words:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.

Jesus frequently says that in our private prayer we should be honest and assertive about asking for what we want. Ask, knock, seek, he says. Here he is saying that what we ask for in community, that is, what we agree on as a vision draws power from heaven. Now what does this mean for us at CCC? If we say to God, this is our master plan for our facilities at CCC, we have worked hard, prayed hard, and struggled to define it, Jesus is saying, God’s response will be "If this work is the fruit of your honest and sincere labor, you shall have it. I will give it to you." Accountability binds us to one another. It also binds us to God. And God to us. Of course, God is free and we are free. But if we all share the same vision, mountains will move and come to us. To raise the kind of money necessary for such a project has to stir within us much "objective uncertainty" (as Kierkegaard would say). Visions can seem overwhelming. But at the same time, can we not confess to the tremendous inward passion that this vision is creating? Talk to a member of the Ambassadors Committee if you want to feel that passion. I can tell you that in all my years as a pastor, I could barely dream that I would one day be part of a team a colleagues that included a Linda Carder and a John Touchton and a Dale Ostrander and a Toby Ratcliffe. The road to this new team was a path of sorrow for us all. Yet God has done a mighty thing here. How did that happen? Because two or three and more gathered in Christ’s name and asked for it.

"Where two or three are gathered in my name, there will I be also." It is a formula of explosive power and potential. And of course, such power, like any power can be dangerous. But life, truly lived, is fraught with danger and risk. The life of faith, as Kierkegaard said, is one of uncertainty, absurdity, passion and power. It is a life where belief and its twin brother doubt, live in tension to defeat the enemy, which is fear.

Let me close by noting something I find interesting. Jesus’ words "Where two or three are gathered..." are taken by him directly from the legal codes found in the Book of Deuteronomy. Jewish law stipulates that for someone to be convicted of a crime "two or three witnesses" are needed to testify. Jesus applies this to us in the context of faith. In other words, for us to be convicted of being Christians, two or three must be gathered in Jesus’ name to give testimony. Christians were be-headed by the Romans for being "convicted" of their beliefs. We would say they died because of their Christian convictions.

So as we begin our fall program year, with an astonishing number of important matters before us, why not ponder these questions? Would CCC be convicted in the courts of this world for being a real Christian community? Would we be convicted in God’s heavenly court? And what of each of us personally, you and me? How say you? Guilty or not guilty? AMEN.