Community can change the world

My favourite part of the movie “the Matrix” is the part when Neo goes to see the Oracle. As he is waiting in her living room, he encounters a young child who is holding a spoon. The child has the spoon in one hand and appears to be making the spoon bend merely by using the powers of the mind. Neo stands a few feet away in sheer amazement. After completing lots of training, he realizes that he does not have the same capability that this young boy has. The child catches Neo staring. It seems that Neo is caught between two realities. One is that surely this must be a trick; while the other reality is that he knows that it is not, but doesn’t know how to explain it. The boy hands Neo the spoon and allows him to try. He stares at the spoon for a moment, concentrating really hard. Finally Neo gets the spoon to bend ever so slightly before it goes back to its original shape. The child smiles and tells him the secret. It is easy to bend the spoon however you like once you realize that there is no spoon. I’m pretty sure that this simple phrase is immediately lost on Neo, because it was spoken by a child, and in the other room, the Oracle, who was much more important than this child, was waiting. The interesting thing is that the oracle was the one who told him no, while the child gave him the answer to changing the world. Only when Neo realized that nothing in the world could hold him back was he truly able to master it.

Truly I tell you, the first Christians whom we read about in the book of Acts learned that when they no longer conformed to the ways of the world, the people of God grew in number every day. Nothing was able to control them once they realized this.

What made this community so different? The way that all the believers were together and having everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as they had need. Every day they met in the temple, they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Surely this is different than what it was living in a hippie commune or having the state impose Communism upon the people. Instead, this was the people who feared and loved God coming together and realizing that there is no spoon. That if they lived a life that told the people around them that “the world” has nothing to offer, that there was no spoon, then the things of the world would be defeated.

For those of you who have gone to Mississippi, you know about what it means to experience a community inspired by God. Every day there is opportunity to gather together to worship, everyday there is an opportunity to work for something other than our own money, and I think, most importantly, the opportunity to eat meals together and enjoy each others company. As I’m sure anyone in this congregation will tell you who has been to Camp Victor, this intentional community is a world changing thing.

In fact, the earliest Moravians were intentionally living in this different community in the hopes to not live according to the values of the world, but instead wanted to live as if the Kingdom of God was present here on earth. During the time of Comenius, this community lived as part of the “hidden seed”. Unfortunately we do not have much information because they were persecuted for their beliefs, but I think we must believe that their community lived differently than others around them, because otherwise that small, hidden seed, would not have made it to Herrenhut. When they finally did make it Herrenhut, the Unitas Fratrum was able to live out this intentional community the way God desired. In fact, their community drew people from many other faith communities to the Moravians because they saw that the way they lived was very similar to the way the early Christians in the book of Acts lived. Unfortunately, all these different faith communities were at odds with each other as to truly live together. The community only thrived when they lived out this life AND they learned to put aside their differences and love each other.

The whole idea that we have to love each other is more about action than thought. The neighbors of First Moravian Church of Riverside must be able to see that we love each other and more importantly, we love them, which does not include them coming through our doors as the first step. They need to come to the realization that we are not living for ourselves, which is what our entire American culture preaches, but we are living for Christ, and thus we are living for each other because we know that Christ dwells in each of us.

I have no definite answer my friends, to how we go about making visible our community of love. All I do know is that Jesus said that we, his followers, are the salt of the earth and that we are the light of the world.

These two statements are the pinnacle of what it means to belong to the people which God has set apart. Starting with Abraham, God calls us to be separate, to live differently than the rest of the world thinks we should live. The rest of the Hebrew Scriptures are filled with stories of how we have fallen short of being the people God calls us to be. Then we finally get to the New Testament, and we find Jesus, the son of God who sets people apart to be Holy. Jesus spends his ministry telling those around him what it takes to be set apart, what it means to be holy, what it means to not be of the world.

It is an awesome undertaking which can be fulfilled in an infinite number of ways. The epistle lesson for today talks about how we are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God so that we may declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into God’s wonderful light. Because we have received this mercy from God, I do know that simply giving money to a charity or food to a food bank is not enough. Instead, we must dine with the poor and the hungry. Be in fellowship with those among us whom the world considers undesirable, even if it means personal or professional disgrace. Great is our reward in heaven when we are able to live out that calling.

We must be continuing to reflect on our own community within this congregation and look to see the impact we are making on the people around us. One of the great things about this congregation is the rich family context which has been built up for many years. The early Christians who we are looking to model this morning saw themselves as a family. “Family is the dominant social model as well as a metaphor which Jesus uses to engender a specific kind of behavior.”[1]

The family model for Christian community can be a difficult one to live within. There are two main problems to building this community. First is that there are really only two ways to gain entrance into a family. You can either be born into a family or marry into one. The second obstacle is when Jesus says that he came to set a son against his father, or a daughter against her mother (Matthew 10:34-37). This might make us think that Jesus is against family, but in fact, it is showing us that in order to really be a family of believers, we must put aside allegiance to our own family and build relationships which have Christ at the center, which is what any congregation should truly be. And yet, with Christ at the center of our family, we must do everything we can to love one another. If we chose to be nice in order not to hurt one’s feelings, we will continue to be shallow in both faith and in community. Loving each other sometimes saying things which hurt, which bring about frustration or struggle, but those times are when the Sprit grows in us, it deconstructs us and admonishes us, allowing for a deeper walk with God.

This weekend, the men of this congregation went on a retreat and learned about family. We recalled times and relationships which were meaningful to us and almost everyone had a story of some sort of struggle between siblings. Because we are brothers and sisters in Christ, we must not think that everything we say must be “nice” because it hinders growth. I’m willing to guess that all of us at some point in our lives have been told the “truth in love”, even when it hurt. We must seek to do that more often, to be the community in love. “Community is the place where our limitations, our fears and our egoism are revealed to us. We discover our poverty and our weakness, our inability to get along with some people, our mental and emotional blocks, our affective or sexual disturbances, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. An experience in prayer and the experience of being loved and accepted in community, which has become a safe place for us, allows us to gradually accept ourselves as we are, with our wounds and all the monsters. We are broken, but we are loved. We can grow to greater openness and compassion; we have a mission.”[2]

That mission is to show the world that there is no spoon. The spoon in this case our individuality in which we attempt to exist. Once we realize that our individuality does not exist, but our love is show in the way that we love each other. When this community becomes greater than our individuality, we are a force that will change the world. Amen.

[1] Joseph Hellerman. The Ancient Church as Family (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) pg 70.
[2] Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd Ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1989) pg 26-27.