Roger Ray, pastor
May 15, 2011 Easter 4
Acts 2:42-47
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common;
45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
By being here today you have clearly chosen not to attend the "Get Prepared" conference which is going on this weekend at the expo center downtown. Playing on public paranoia, combined with the political organization of our local Tea Party members, the conference organizers promise to teach people how to grow and preserve their own food. How to convert all of their assets into gold and silver so that they can survive the melt down of society which is sure to come, either by global warming, terrorist activity or the simple fact that we have elected a black, Muslim, socialist to be our president.
If he were alive today, we could take Charles Darwin down to the Expo center and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human kind did not evolve from apes because, clearly, apes are much too smart to attend a conference of this sort. But this shameless celebration of crippling paranoia is a reminder of when this kind of insanity was more broadly expressed in our society with our Civil Defense system.
My former church actually had those stickers in the windows from the 1950's declaring the church's boiler room to be a shelter for the neighborhood in the event of a nuclear disaster.
My generation grew up watching the civil defense films that taught us how to survive in a basement for two or three years while the radiation from a nuclear war dissipated. I still remember the day in jr. high school when my friend, Pryor Johnson, just fainted and fell off the gym bench when they were showing us the film about how to deliver a baby while living underground.
Other films dealt with how to ration food and water, how to seal and contain human waste in drums and how to set broken bones and stitch up gaping wounds. The absurdity of the whole proposition of sending Americans underground to huddle together in basements that would no more protect you from nuclear fallout than the plastic sheets and duct tape suggested by the Bush administration would protect us from airborne anthrax never seemed to occur to the teachers who made us endure these ridiculous anxiety producing films.
Our church doesn't have a basement but, for the moment, let's pretend that it did and that our imaginary basement were supplied with sufficient water, dried foods, candles and potties so that we could all survive down there, far away from the purple rain or whatever it was which scared us into hiding.
Thankfully we are well supplied with doctors and nurses cause, "I don't know nothing bout birthin no babies, Ms. Scarlet." I'll bless them but until that day, I'm not much help. But, as much as I love every last one of you..... even when you are texting me at 11 p.m. or calling me at 6 a.m. to tell me something which could have perfectly well waited until office hours..... I love ya, but 24 hours together in a confined space..... 2 days, a week, a month.... Without scope or right guard???
What they never discussed in the civil defense films was how we are to keep from killing one another. Just imagine if we barred the doors down at the expo center this morning and locked all of those paranoid survivalists in together over night.... How long would it be before all of those "concealed weapons" began to come out of their secret holsters? I can't prove it but I would suppose that the shoot out at the OK Hammons Corral would take place before the donuts arrived the next morning.
In all seriousness, building community is phenomenally difficult even among the most sane and the most decent sort of folks. It is a peculiar irony to me that solitary confinement is the most severe of punishment. Criminals tremendously prefer the company of other criminals over being isolated but then we do even worse when we cannot have isolation at all.
We crave human contact so much that we have gone to great lengths to create a postal system, telegraph and telephone, e-mail and texting and now we finally have the two-way video conversations on our cell phones and lap tops which used to be only on Dick Tracy's wrist in the comics. But with each step of technology that connects us to other human beings more easily, we become a little less connected in fact.
As our population grows, fewer people join civic clubs. Sociologists have commented on the fact that more and more people go bowling but there are fewer and fewer bowling leagues. And even though, here in the Midwest, we have this phenomenon of mega-churches, fewer and fewer people go to church and the mega-church allows you to remain perpetually lost in the crowd for years, sitting in pews surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people without ever meeting any of them.
I'm the pastor of a church that I helped to named "Community" because it is my goal to create community among us but I don't know my neighbor's name. I have never met the two men who mow my yard. I have no idea who delivers the mail or collects the garbage. I have hundreds of friends on the Book of Faces, many of whom I have never met.
We like to look at people. We like to be around people. But when we are forced into close proximity with one another we have real difficulty in getting along. We often find most noticeable about one another the things that irritate us rather than the things that attract us to one another.
In rural Nicaragua there is a saying for this, when you catch two people gossiping with one another, the question roughly translates, "Are you eating your neighbors at the fence?"
The one real exception to this is when there has been a life altering crisis, either a good one or a bad one. The immediate reaction to the news of the 9-11 attacks a decade ago was seen as lines formed at gas stations and grocery store shelves where emptied...... the latent paranoid mentality that makes some people go to a survivalist conference came out in a huge portion of the society, even in an isolated place like Springfield which just isn't going to rank very high on a terrorist priority list.... But within hours partisan divisions began to evaporate.
Public servants, whom we rarely thought about, firemen, became national heroes. People who normally couldn't care less if the east coast just boarded ships and went back to Europe were willing to immediately send the shirt off their backs to strangers in New York City. Even I stopped publicly criticizing George W. Bush.... For several days.
And that is the problem. A crisis can create community for a few moments. When there is a common enemy, even people who naturally dislike one another can become allies. It just doesn't last long. The day Osama bin Laden was killed, the right wing could hardly find anything to talk about. Newt Gingrich was so momentarily confused that he even reportedly made a pass at his current wife!..... I kid Newt!
Finding Osama after a decade long hunt for the world's most wanted man did not lead to a sustained sense of community. The bad news for the 24 hour media is that you can only kill a terrorist once. If he had been captured and put on trial it would have given them months of stuff to talk about but once the news was broken that Osama was dead, the best they had to talk about was whether or not President Obama would release gruesome photographs of the body. I hope that the Tea Party doesn't keep up the drum beat to see the pictures as long as they kept up the demand to see the president's birth certificate.... There's only so much I can take before I am in danger of becoming cynical about their sincerity.
Our scripture lesson from Acts today describes a profound coalescing into community resulting from a different kind of crisis. Luke gives us the only account of the events following the first Easter. And Luke wasn't there so we are getting a potentially heavily polished apple but the basic story is believable to me.
The early church community had witnessed the brutal death of their leader whom they had hoped would become their king after he had led a successful revolt, running the Romans out of Israel. Jesus was dead. The Romans were still there. Everything was the same, only worse, except for the fact that they had realized that in some very profound way, Jesus wasn't dead and the movement wasn't over.
I would not pretend to know exactly what that early community had experienced, not in such specificity as to try to put it into concrete terms, but they had experienced Jesus as Christ beyond the tomb.
After 9-11, I developed the bad habit of sleeping with CNN on all night.... To the point that when I am traveling I can hardly go to sleep in a silent room. More importantly, I found that every sermon I had written prior to 9-11 seemed to look silly to my own eyes when I would open a file to look at how I had treated certain Biblical texts in the past. The world had become instantaneously smaller and more dangerous and things that had once seemed important to me became venial.
In the early weeks of the church, as Luke described it, the people's world had changed in such a way that the value of things changed. What became important to them was their connection to one another. Valuable possessions that they had once hoarded to insure their own security became unimportant and people willingly sold what they had so that they could share with their brothers and sisters with whom they were now knit together in an intense community experience.
I don't know how long it lasted but it lasted at least long enough to give them a name. Church, in Greek, "ecclesia," means "called out group."
They came to be called a church because they did become a community that looked out for one another, shared with one another, loved one another.
I have often observed that Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God but rather than the Kingdom of God, he got the church and one is forced to wonder how he feels about that deal?
Heaven didn't come through a divine invasion of the world of space and time. Evidently, heaven only comes when we find people to be of greater value than things. When we can, with or without a crisis, create a community out of people who could just as easily eat one another at the fence but who choose instead to learn to accept, work with, share ideas with and eventually love one another.
There were several attempts at creating utopian societies in the early settlement of the British colonies. The Spanish had come here a century before looking for gold and silver they could steal from Indians. The French came looking for furs and tobacco. But my people, the British, came trying to get away from other British people. That's an over simplification but it gives me some satisfaction to sum it up that way.
When King Charles had had about enough of Puritan religious snobbery, Puritans began to immigrate to what became the Boston area of Massachusetts. Most famous among the colonizers was Jonathan Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan who hoped that if only they could get away from the Catholics and the Anglicans, that some real Christian people could come here and establish a sort of heaven on earth. He told them: We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ......community.... as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace,
None of the utopian experiments were especially successful and some, evidently, resorted to eating their neighbors at the fence in an alarmingly literal manner.
Our church, our community, our ecclesial called out group came into existence in a sort of a crisis. My personal crisis came as I realized that when I was no longer either a pastor or a Disciple that I couldn't find a church that I could stand to go to. I gave it some tries and ended up reading my e-mail and sending text messages and praying for it all to end. I honestly wish that I had found some place that didn't strike me as being totally irrelevant.
Many of you have reported similar experiences. Some of you were excluded from your mother church because of your sexual orientation. Others couldn't be comfortable in a church where your son or daughter, or your friend would have been rejected because of who they love.
Others had more complex ideological reasons for being among the church alumni association. You got to a point where you just couldn't buy into the superstitious stuff anymore.... You just weren't going to be manipulated by guilt and fear anymore.... Or, as I remember very distinctly my friend Mel Miller telling me, he just got to where he couldn't go to a church where there was no mention of the fact that our nation was engaged in a deadly and questionable war and that we lived in a city surrounded by serious poverty and addiction.
We became refugees through doctrinal torture and religious boredom. But creating community is not automatic for us. Victims have a nasty habit of becoming victimizers. We too can eat our neighbors at the fence.
If we are to become a community in a lasting sense then we have to decide that what brought us together is more important than any of the annoying things that might tear us apart. We are not a community because everyone agrees with everything I say in a sermon or everything I publish in the NewsLeader. Some of you wish you could hear some more traditional theology. Some of you wish I would be less controversial. And some of you are probably wishing that I would tell some more jokes about Newt Gingrich.... Shame on you!
We're coming up on our third anniversary. The crisis of isolation that first caused us to meet together in funeral home chapel is becoming a distant memory. You can forget that we have not formed a new church out here simply out of choice but more because we had no other choice. Most of us would have gone to another church if there had been one to go to that did not insult our character, our intellect or our conscience.
One of the early symbols of the church was a line drawing of a boat. Some historians speculate that the church used the boat image as a way to disguise the cross.... You could mark your home with a cross on the door, letting Christians know where they could come worship by simply drawing a boat at the bottom of the cross, making the cross look like the mast of a ship.
I'm not so sure that was it. I think that it is just as possible that the early Christian communities saw themselves as being in a boat with one another.....like a life boat in which everyone's survival depended upon being able to cooperate and share with one another.... Like being trapped in a church basement together with nothing but communion bread and grape juice to live on for a couple of years.
Our mission statement says that we have formed this church because we want to work together for social justice and boy do we have our work cut out for us.
Do you know that the military budget in the United States has doubled since 9-11 and that's not even counting the costs of three Middle Eastern conflicts? Military spending is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. Why are there no decent jobs? Why do so many families live in danger of eviction, hunger and illness? Because all of our resources are going to a military machine. We have a mission to witness for peace, for economic justice, for an end to oppression, liberation of the unjustly incarcerated and an end of violence.
But we won't have a voice for long unless we love one another. The Peace Network of the Ozarks sprang up in the midst of the crisis of the war against Iraq but it soon fell apart and the war goes on. The interfaith aids network came together in Springfield in the presence of violence and oppression against gays and lesbians but the interfaith groups couldn't get along with one another and that coalition went away and the prejudice remains.
For us to make a difference, for our community to really matter, we have to fulfill that vision part of our mission statement that says that we want to be a healthy community. This means that we decide to be tolerant, even when we feel irritated. It means that we will decide to be agreeable, even when we don't always agree. It means that even when a person seems to be just too full of themselves to be contained in a small sanctuary, that we choose not to burst that bubble.
We strive to be a prophetic voice of social justice for this community and to have the credibility to do that, the first gift we must give to Springfield is the example of a healthy spiritual community.
In spite of our political, doctrinal and personal disagreements.... What we agree on is that we love one another, respect one another and we are resolved to take care of one another both in crisis and in calm times. By learning to show forgiveness and tolerance to the people we do know, we will become capable of showing forgiveness and tolerance to the people of other nations and religions whom we do not know. An old commandment I give to you, that you love one another.
