Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

7/30/06 - Proper 12B

The Rev. Sarah Ball-Damberg

Ps. 114; Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16

Community is a loaded word. On the one hand, we seem to have a built-in longing for connection and community. There’s an urban-planning movement getting a lot of attention right now called New Urbanism. Among other things, New Urbanism calls for a return to neighborhoods with pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and welcoming front porches as a way of reclaiming our connectedness and delivering us from the isolation we seem to have gotten ourselves into.

On the other hand, I know someone who grew up in a small village in England who once said that Americans think they want community, but don’t really know what they’re talking about.  When he was a teenager, he said, ‘community’ meant being woken up on a Saturday by the sound of two elderly women walking underneath his bedroom window, loudly discussing his faults.

And, of course, both things are true. We do long for connection, because we’re made in God’s image, and the very essence of God is love and relationship. And as anyone who’s ever lived with anyone else knows, we get on each other’s nerves. It’s all well and good to want to live in community, but the day-to-day reality can be challenging.

Rich and I were once part of a group trying to build a cohousing community. The aims of the group appealed to us. The idea was to build a cluster of homes, all close together, and all facing onto a common green space in the middle. There was going to be a common house where dinner would be cooked for everyone who wished to come, with different members of the community taking it in turn to do the cooking. The plan was to have lots of shared resources like lawnmowers or guest rooms in the common house that so everyone together could have more than they might have on their own.

Which was a terrific idea. The group had a lot of good ideas and, eventually, the community got built. But we weren’t part of it. We opted out for various reasons, including that it was taking forever, since all the decisions had to be made by consensus.

Our experience wasn’t all that unusual. We wanted to live in a place where we were connected to our neighbors; there were some obstacles; and we moved on. Leaving the group wasn’t really a big deal. After all, a lot of our connections to others are optional. We opt in or we opt out.

Which makes Paul’s call for us to live as the Body of Christ a particularly radical and countercultural challenge. How can we live as disconnected, autonomous individuals when we’re the ligaments holding together the Body of Christ? Because the truth is, for all that we like to think of ourselves as independent agents, our true identity is the one Christians are baptized into – we’re members of the Body of Christ. For all the ways we’ve gotten used to making it on our own, our very being is rooted in community.

Which means that we can’t be who God intends for us to be on our own. It means that who I am is inextricably bound up with who you are and vice versa. It means that your sorrows are my sorrows, and your joys my joys. It means that if we go through life acting as independent agents we’re missing out on the fullness of what God offers us. Literally. God’s gifts are distributed among us – some are good with numbers, some with words; some are great at working with our children and others with our elders; some are great cooks or great musicians and others of us are terrific appreciators of good food and good music. God has blessed us with abundant life and we need one another and one another’s gifts if we are to live abundantly.

Of course, the knowing and the living of that are two different things entirely. Paul is constantly pleading for the Christians in Philippi to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” or for the Corinthians to be “united in the same mind and same purpose” instead of quarrelling, or for the Romans to “live in harmony with one another.” I take his pleas to mean they weren’t, in fact, doing such a good job of it.

Paul, if you remember, was a Jew, and a particularly zealous one at that. But the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote were Greeks, people whom Paul once was sure had nothing, but nothing, to do with him. The Greeks, in turn, had a special word for anyone who didn’t speak Greek: barbaros, or ‘barbarian.’ Just in case you were wondering how they really felt about people outside their community. It was utterly unlikely that these two would ever have anything to do with one another.

And yet here they are.

What’s radical about Paul’s admonition isn’t that we now have to be nice to each other. It’s that we simply can’t divide the world into “us” and “them” ever again. We may certainly feel like we’re surrounded by barbarians from time to time and we may be dismayed to learn that we live in community with people who don’t think, look, or talk like us, with whom we think we don’t have one single thing in common. But ever since Jesus Christ came into the world, there’s no “us” and “them.” There’s just “we.”

What’s true inside these walls – that there’s no “us” and “them,” but only “we” – is true outside these walls, too. Just a couple of weeks ago, Harriette called on us to understand that living as Christ’s body in the world means that the ‘haves’ are not called to be patrons of the ‘have-nots’ but to live in solidarity with them. The gifts with which God has blessed His people are gifts for the whole world and we receive those gifts collectively, not individually. We need the gifts of our neighbors, near and far, just as badly as they need ours.

If our lives are inextricably bound up with our neighbors lives, then what happens to people in places as nearby as across the street or as far away as Darfur, or Gaza, or Lebanon, or Louisiana happens to us because they’re not strangers, they’re our brothers and sisters. Not because our tender warm-heartedness makes them so, but because God made each and every one of us and we all stand together before Him.

Any of you who’ve been following the news about the war breaking out in Lebanon may have seen the helpful maps explaining who’s who. There’ll be a map of this small country, and next to it a list of Shiites and Sunnis and Druse and Christians and where they live in Lebanon. And there are arrows linking each of these small communities to other groups in other countries, including ours, and the groups in those countries to still other groups in other countries, and no matter how good the graphic is, it’s still a tangled mess. But however messy, it’s impossible to look at it and still think we’re somehow disconnected.

One of those graphics illustrated how everyone in the region feels about everyone else in the region. The line between Iraqi Sunnis and Iran was labeled “deep hatred” and between Israel and Iran “sworn enemies.” The lines between Israel and Gaza and Israel and Lebanon were labeled “war” and between Israel and Saudi Arabia “deep suspicion and hostility.” You get the idea.

To proclaim that we’re called to as the Body of Christ isn’t to deny the reality of those labels or to believe that simply wanting hatred and violence to disappear will make it evaporate. We’re not denying that reality but pointing to another deeper and truer reality. The reality is that when God sent Jesus into the world, He reconciled us all to Him. The reality is that He is continuing to do so and that He has given us the gifts we need to work for the coming of God’s kingdom. Each one of us is called by God to live as if we are deeply, permanently, and lovingly connected to one another and to all Creation. And we do that by offering the unique and wonderful gifts with which God has blessed us to God and to one another.

Because the question isn’t whether we’re connected to one another. We are. The question is how will we live into that connection for God’s sake and for our own?

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