Epiphany
3 January 24, 2016 Community Christian Church
Roger
Ray, pastor “Can Progressives Form a
United Community?”
1
Corinthians 12:12-26
12For just as the body is one and has many
members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is
with Christ.13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one
body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one
Spirit.14Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of
many. 15If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do
not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the
body. 16And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I
do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the
body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing
be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? 18But
as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he
chose. 19If all were a single member, where would the body
be? 20As it is, there are many members, yet one body. 21The
eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the
feet, “I have no need of you.” 22On the contrary, the members
of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,23and those
members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor,
and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; 24whereas
our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the
body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, 25that
there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same
care for one another. 26If one member suffers, all suffer
together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
If
you go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, if you turn to the right as
you go in, you come first to their collection of Egyptian art and artifacts.
With all of the fabulous reliefs, sarcophagi, and statues, it would be easy to
miss but there is a passageway there that contains displays of hundreds of
pottery fragments that we call “epigraphal” finds. . . that is, they pottery
shards have writing on them.
In
the ancient world, most household pottery was sun baked and as such it was
extremely brittle, so everyone had plenty of broken pieces of pottery around.
Paper was expensive, broken pottery had no value, so those pottery shards
became the scrap paper of the ancient world.
It
was also common practice to cover the floor of your homes with pottery shards
and then cover that with a bit of sand to make a hard floor that didn’t get
muddy when it was wet. So, many archaeological sites are rich with finds of
these little pieces of broken pottery that have writing on them.
Most
of them are no more than the ancient equivalent of “remember to pick up milk
and eggs at the store,” but others give insights into the daily lives and
conversations of ancient civilizations.
This
particular collection of pottery shards at the Met were of particular interest
to me because they were written in Greek and were from the Alexandrian area of
Egypt. They were notes written by the first of Christian monastics, a group of
people we mistakenly call “The Desert Fathers,” which is a rather unfair
moniker for the nuns who also lived lives of great hardship and isolation in
the desert.
But
the sayings of these desert monastics formed the original inspiration for my
doctoral research and they are featured prominently in my dissertation. I had
read all of the collections of their wisdom sayings and I had an image of these
ancient saints who seemed so brave, so disciplined, so Christ-like in their
loving and sacrificial lives.
These
notes, however, their unpublished thoughts, told another story. These amazing
people did not seem to get along with one another very well. These pottery
shards which were the 4th century equivalent of e-mail and Face Book
posts revealed harsh judgments, anger, gossip, broken relationships, and even
jealousy, as if you could compete for who was the most poor, silent, and
prayerful monk living in a shack in the desert.
They,
like we, had a persona that they thoughtfully presented to the world; the
things they had learned through years of disciplined isolation, silence, self-denial,
and prayer. But, sadly, they, like we, had a less guarded, less thoughtful, and
distinctly less kind side of them as well.
It is
no wonder then that the major theme of all of Paul’s letters collected in our
New Testament is a concern with preserving community. And the theme continues
in the letters of John and Peter, in Hebrews, and in the later letters of
Clement and the Didache.
Paul’s
illustration of saying that members of the church were like members of a body…
the parts are different in appearance, different in talents or usefulness, but
none of them should be seen as being easily disposable. You can survive without
your eyes but wouldn’t you rather not?
Apparently
you can even survive with less than half of a brain but I am resolved not to talk
about political candidates today.
But
in the Alexandrian desert of the 4th century, in the persecuted
church of the first century, getting along with one another was often a matter
of life or death. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that their very
lives depended upon their ability to maintain healthy community relationships
and yet they seemed to fail miserably at it, enough to fill up the pages of
both scripture and early church preaching.
Now,
in the modern era, such connections have become remarkably disposable. Modern
transportation and homes makes it so that we often don’t even know our
neighbors. We are not tied to a plot of land, a tiny village, or blood kin. There
are over 300 churches in Springfield, MO. There is no obligation in our society
to be a part of a church but if you want to, you could change churches once a
month for the rest of your life and you might never run out. There is nothing
urgent, or irreplaceably crucial about staying in a particular dinner club,
bowling league, bridge club, golf course, or church. And most of us have more
than one sibling, parent, or child that we no longer talk to.
We
are not as dependent upon one another as we were in past generations and,
frankly, social media has allowed us to know one another a lot better than we
used to. I have gone to church all of my
life and have been a pastor for 37 years and I can tell you, 20 years ago, I
could not have told you with a high degree of accuracy, which of my church
members were Democrats and which were Republicans. I wasn’t treated to daily
pictures, quotes, shared articles and videos, that betrayed people’s personal
opinions quite so well.
It is
no secret why most pastors almost never say anything publicly about any current
events or anything in their own lives. Sermons in churches across our country
are full of sports illustrations, quotes from the funny pages, and long
narratives about ancient texts and the nuances of their interpretation.
What
do you learn in catechism or church membership classes? You learn about beliefs but not about ethics.
You
learn a series of truth claims about God, heaven, hell, scriptures, sacraments,
doctrines, and dogma, not one line of which has even a shred of evidence to
prove that any of it is true and clearly, none of has anything to do with
anything that any of us ever do. They still have difficulty remaining popular
and holding their congregations together but I promise you, if you actually try
to prophetically speak truth to power, your circle of friends gets very small.
This
is especially true among liberal intellectuals.
People who are used to being the boss at the office, the professor in
the classroom, the generally “smartest person in the room” are not willing to
be easily organized into a community. We often wear our feelings on our sleeves
and demand nearly 100% agreement on all topics out of those with whom we are
willing to share confined space, even if it is only for an hour a week.
I
could fill a book with stories about inane church conflicts and dramatic exits
from the community…. And, in fact, it is more than a little likely that I will
write that book, but it will almost certainly be from whatever retirement
hiding place I end up in.
But
let’s let go of church community for a moment and let’s think about our modern
hypercritical selves in an entirely different context. A British Travel agency recently shared some
of the customer satisfaction responses they received from their clients after a
beach vacation:
2.
"My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were
placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be
re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened
if you had put us in the room that we booked."
4.
"We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring
our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the
price."
5.
"The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to
our room."
8.
"No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were
scared."
10.
"I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience
store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."
12.
"It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the
Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."
16.
"We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no
air-conditioning."
18.
"I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention
mosquitoes."
19.
"They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very
distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."
I’m not saying that all of our
conflicts are quite this silly but a lot of them are. And the ones that are
not, the matters of real substance, are exactly where we need to put down our
pottery shards, stop libeling one another and figure out how to solve the
problem. As Plato said through the
character of his teach, Socrates: When the debate is won, slander becomes the
tool of the loser.
In philosophy, it is called an
ad hominem fallacy. That is, when you cannot win against the facts, try to
destroy the character or credibility of your opponent. Paul compared this to
cannibalism…. It is like devouring the flesh of someone you had once claimed to
love.
As Dr. Eric Berne so famously
said a half a century ago in Games People
Play, the only way to stop this kind of game is to just stop playing the
game. Just stop it.
As our society continues to
become more partisan, more divided by both ideology and class, as we become
comfortable with disposing of friends and associations that have inconvenienced
or somehow failed to mention the mosquitoes of human interaction, the more the
world needs for progressive churches to role model healthy community… known not
just for tolerance but for love, no so much out of unanimity of belief as by
decisive acceptance of differences. And not just for being well informed and
capable critical thinkers but also for being generously forgiving and intent
upon reconciliation.
If we can do that, we have a
real mission in the 21st century. If we can’t do that, then, well,
we have become a part of the problem haven’t we?
