July 23, 2000

Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr

The Community Church of Sebastopol

It’s a classic “Peanuts” cartoon. Many of you have heard it before but I couldn’t resist sharing it again. Linus has just told Lucy he thinks he would like to be a doctor and as usual, she is very supportive.

Lucy:             You a doctor? Ha! That's a big laugh! You could never be a doctor! You know why?   Because you don’t love    mankind, that’s why!

Linus:            I love mankind…it’s PEOPLE I can’t stand!

Well, I can identify with that sentiment and I suspect many of you can as well. In the church, at city council meetings, at service club meetings, in schools, we all talk about the importance of community – building community. Everybody seems to think that community is a good idea. It was T. S Eliot who asked, “What life have you if you have not life together!” And this morning we heard Paul speak of the Jews and Gentiles being brought together in Christ into “one new humanity.” He goes on to say, “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…” All of you – Gentiles and Jews – are now one community. Everybody loves to talk about community; it seems everybody wants community. I know I do…I think.

            Yes, I would love to be a builder of community, I would love to be part of a community, if…well, if only I didn’t have to deal with people! Human community would be so easy to achieve if it wasn’t composed of humans. O yes, Paul sounded so warm and welcoming in our text today. Lots of warm fuzzies there. All of us – no strangers or aliens in the church of Jesus Christ. But what happens when he learns that the good folks at another church at Galacia may be following other teachers, perhaps embracing another Gospel? Well, his tone changes. He calls them “foolish – bewitched.” Accuses them of deserting him and Christ. He cannot believe they have turned against him and his teachings. “You foolish Galacians” he writes. Paul was well-acquainted with the difficulties of building community, even within the church.

            I'm reminded of an old story told about a young rabbi who found a serious problem in his new congregation. It seems that during the Friday service, half the congregation stood for the prayers and half remained seated. Now, that wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that each side shouted at the other, insisting that theirs was the true tradition. Nothing the rabbi said or did moved anyone toward solving his impasse.

Finally, in desperation, he sought out the 99-year-old founder of the synagogue. He met the old rabbi in a nursing home and poured out his troubles. “So tell me,” he pleaded, “was it the tradition for the congregation to stand during the prayers?”

“No,: answered the old rabbi.

“Ah,” responded the younger man, “then it was the tradition to sit during the prayers?”

“No,” answered the old rabbi.

“Well,” the young rabbi responded, “what we have then is complete chaos! Half the people stand and shout, and the other half sit and scream”

“Ah,: said the old rabbi, “that was the tradition.”

Where two or three are gathered together, can conflict and disagreement be far behind? I would love community if I just didn’t have to deal with people. They make it so complicated.  Sometimes I think I love the dream of community more than community itself.

And one other difficulty in building community. If we stick with each other long enough, our true selves will come out. Jesus is literally days from the cross.  As he turns his face toward Jerusalem, he begins to teach his disciples about the meaning of his coming suffering and death. How do they respond? They get into an argument about which one of them is the greatest. It’s as if they haven’t heard a word he has said. Writing in “Sojourners” magazine, Chris Rice says, “The problem with genuine community is that your true self can’t hide. Stick around anyone long enough and you’ll discover they have a dark side. The very place that offers the only hope of belonging, our community, is the same place where we become most disappointed with others and with ourselves.”

Barbara Lemmel is a Methodist pastor in upstate New York. She describes a frustrating attempt to build Christian community: “In the township where I pastor, there are five United Methodist churches. A hundred years ago, during the boom days of logging and tanning, the local population sustained those churches, one in each tiny hamlet. Now that nearly a century of economic recession has lowered the population by half, churches struggle hard to just stay afloat. Clearly, our best option is to work together. But when we make an effort to come together, we have to pick our way through minefields of decades-old feuds and fears. Even one of the most successful collaborations – three congregations merged into one – stumbled when divisions and concerns about rank threatened to overshadow the Gospel.” The effort to create community, to sustain community, can be very dis-illusioning. “We are Christians here, we say. It shouldn’t be this difficult.” But no sooner do we say that than the Board of Trustees or Church Council or some other group finds itself dealing with a difficult issue; people disagree; feelings are hurt; and we begin to wonder if the dream of community is worth all the trouble. (Of course, I’m talking about some other church – that could never happen here.)

But it is a question worth considering – is the search for community, the struggle to create and sustain community, worth the effort?

In the Douglas Coupland novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, At one point, the lead character says, “All looks with strangers became the unspoken question: ‘Are you the stranger who will rescue me?’ Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes.” That character gives voice to a deep longing for connectedness in our world today, a connectedness so many of us fail to find. Internet chat rooms have standing room only, yet we remain so lonely. In the words of that noted theologian, Bruce Springsteen:

Everybody needs a place to rest

Everybody wants to have a home

Don’t make no difference what nobody says,

Ain’t nobody like to be alone.

Everybody’ got a hungry heart…

We’re back to the T. S. Eliot question: “What life have you if you have not life together?’ then he adds, “There is not life that is not community…”

Frederick Buechner shares an experience of community from his own life: “I remember an especially dark time in my life. One of my children was sick, and in my anxiety for her I was in my own way as sick as she was. Then one day the phone rang. It was a man named Lore Patrick, whom I didn’t know very well then even though he has become a great friend since, a minister from Charlotte, North Carolina, which is about eight hundred miles or so from Rupert, Vermont, where I live. I assumed he was calling from home and asked him how thing were going down there only to hear him say that, no, he wasn’t in Charlotte. He was at an inn about twenty minutes away from my home. He knew something about what was going on in my family and in me, and he said he thought maybe it would be some help to have an extra friend around for a day or two. The reason that he didn’t tell me in advance that he was coming was that he knew I would tell him for Heaven’s sake not to do anything so crazy. For all he knew I might not even be there. But as luck had it, I was there, and for a day or two he was there with me…he was there for me. I don’t think anything we found to say to each other amounted to very much. There was nothing particularly religious about it. I don’t remember even spending much time talking about my troubles with him. We just took a couple of walks, ate a meal or two together, and smoked our pipes.

“I have never forgotten how he came all that distance just for that, and I’m sure he has never forgotten it either. I also believe that although as far as I can remember we never so much as mentioned the name of Christ, Christ was as much in the air we breathed those few days as the fragrance of our pipes was in the air…We are called to be Christs like that to each other , I think.” Or in the words of our text, “In Christ the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord…one new humanity.”

Community is tough. In the community which is the church, in many of our smaller groups, in our boards and committees, we get to know each other pretty well – our strengths and weaknesses. There are times when we are gifts to each other, there are times when we drive each other crazy – Oh, yeah, it can happen during the same meeting! Is it worth sticking with it? Yes, its worth it. Because there are moments – the moment when a young adult came to me after she has sung a solo in church and was completely blown away by all the people who came to her after church, to tell her how much they enjoyed her music – “I didn’t even know most of them,” she told me. Community. There is the moment when, in the courtyard following worship, I see a teenager holding one of the babies who have been born in our congregation in recent months – that infant doesn’t know it, but the size of his family has just expanded by a few hundred people; there is the moment when I rush to the hospital, and find church members who have gotten there before me, keeping vigil with another church member whose husband is in ICU. It's community  - those moments when we are Christs to each other.

Yes, I often wonder if the effort to build community is really worth all the effort, But always I come back to those moments…moments when hungry hearts come together, moments when all the fractures heal and the light shines through, moments when we accomplish far more together than we could ever have managed alone, when we truly are more than the sum of our parts. Oh, there are those moments – moments when the Spirit breaks through us and warms the darkening world, where the light of Christ breaks forth like the dawn, when we are caught up in some power beyond our individual selves and we become what we are meant to be – the new humanity spoken of by Christ, the body of Christ, strangers and aliens no more.