From the Pastor
Writing in a recent Christian Century magazine, Peter Marty, a Lutheran pastor, recalls the deadly Chicago heat wave of July, 1995. For a number of days, the mercury hovered in the three-digit zone, with high humidity. Before it was over, 739 people in Chicago lost their lives to heat-related causes, with the elderly being the most susceptible. There was wide coverage of this tragic heat wave, but, says Marty, “What the major media accounts failed to report was another killer: the absence of community. The majority of people who died in the heat wave died alone. They had no one checking in on their attic apartments or their windowless lives. No family, friend or neighbor showed up to discover the severity of their plight. Sixty-eight of these individuals died so anonymously that Cook County officials buried them in a mass grave.” I wonder, when the final death toll in the city of New Orleans is tallied, if we won’t discover the same thing. My guess is that as the waters rose and the winds blew, those who were alone and without any supportive community, were the majority of those who perished.
In his play, The Rock, T.S. Eliot wrote, “What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community.” Clearly Eliot was moved by the power of human community to enable otherwise separate individuals to receive life and nurture life. And he was not the first. I think of Jesus of Nazareth teaching that wherever two or three are gathered together, in community, he would be there with them. And Paul always spoke of the early Christians, not as separate individuals, but as members of the one body of Christ...a community.
In speaking of the power of community, I realize that I am swimming against the cultural stream. In the words of Marty, “From the ethos of economic life to the chatter of talk radio, our society is busy promoting the appetites and fantasies of the individual more than it is encouraging an investment in the larger aspirations of a community.” But as I read this newsletter, with its announcements of many exciting activities and opportunities in the life of our church, I hope we can keep before us the goal of building and deepening community. As I said in a recent sermon, my hope and prayer is that our church can be place where we walk into each other’s lives, take an interest in the “mystery and mess” of each other’s lives, and in the process learn how to admire and value and appreciate each other, even those who may think, live, and vote quite differently than we. That’s community…that’s church! Gene
