Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: 1 Peter 4:8-11; 1 John 4:18-21
Summary: We live in a very individualistic time and place — but Christianity’s story is one of collective walking with God. We need to find ways to prioritize community, and understand ourselves as being in community both with people we agree with and people we disagree with; clarifying these different types of community will empower us to follow Jesus more fully.
Good morning everyone, so good to be with you today.
I want to start our discussion of community today with a story about my brother. In 2015, Mennonite World Conference was having a gathering, as they do every six years; that year it was in the global, exotic city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. About 6,000 people attended from more than 30 countries, did anyone from here go? My brother Lucas was volunteering part time as a youth sponsor at that point, so he went up for a day with a group of high schoolers, and I tagged along as well.
The morning began with a worship service in a big arena that sat several thousand people, culminating just before noon in one of the more meaningful communion services I’ve been a part of. After communion, everyone streamed over to the massive dining area to eat some slightly-less symbolic food. While we were eating, to my brother’s surprise, a friend from Harrisonburg came over and handed him, of all things, Lucas’s wallet — which up to that second he had thought was in his back pocket! Apparently, it had fallen out of his pocket in the arena, and before he had known it was missing, someone had found the wallet and taken it to the lost and found; they had looked at his license, saw that it said Harrisonburg Virginia, found someone from Harrisonburg volunteering that day, they found someone who knew Lucas, and they went to the dining hall to find him right away.
Why do I share this anecdote? Because, in addition to being funny, it demonstrates what happens to us when we’re part of a community: when we know, and are known, when the challenges of life inevitably arise, we have the connections and good graces of other people to overcome the challenges of our lives. When we live our lives in community, we look out for one another and the communal good, rather than just our own individual good. Life in community isn’t always simple or easy, yes, but it is what enables us to keep going in the long term. As one of Mennonite Mission Network’s unofficial slogans, inspired by a South African proverb, says — if you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.
Today, as part of our three-part series on Anabaptism, we’re talking about the second statement from Palmer Becker’s booklet, “Community is the center of our lives.” Tig did a great job last week covering the first, and I would say most important, of the three statements last week — Jesus is the center of our faith. As a refresher, since we in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition emphasize Jesus’ life and teachings, that in turn informs everything about our lives, including how we live together. Some Christians, of course, look elsewhere in the bible for models of how to live together, looking to Old Testament law, or to Paul, or to the monarchy of David, or to the Constantinian era of church-and-state conglomerate; we, however, look to Jesus life and the sermon on the mount as our most important example of how we should live. We want community to be the center of our lives because Jesus is the center of our faiths.
Now, because of my upbringing in one of the so-called “Mennonite Mecca’s” in Harrisonburg, community is an easy topic for me — after peace witness, community is probably the second most common theological theme from my upbringing; and, as the story I told at the beginning bears out, my family has definitely benefited from the global Mennonite community, and that is part of why I love it so much. But I also fully believe that the ties of mutuality that have made the Mennonite community such a good place for us can and should be encouraged and pursued for everyone, not just via ethnic ties, but rather through continuing to become a community of belief, a community united in serving Jesus. While there are undoubted positives to ethnically-related communities, limiting ourselves to ethnic communities is dreaming far too small — because the community at the center of our lives cannot just be our biological family, but instead the whole family of God: the church.
But what does it mean that community is the center of our lives? For one thing, it means that other things are not the center of our lives — since community is the center of our lives, our careers are not the center; individual success is not the center; our countries are not the center, to name only a few. These, and many other good and important things exist, and our perspective on them should be informed by Jesus’s life and teachings, but we cannot allow these things, that we so often have little to no power over, come to dominate our lives and take over the center: By putting community at the center of our lives, we stand against forces of the world that seek to divide us through fear and hatred — community is choosing solidarity and togetherness as our path forward.
This is put well in the classic Mennonite booklet of a generation before this one, The Anabaptist Vision by Harold Bender. Bender’s version of this point on community is as follows, quoted by Becker on page three: “The church is a brotherhood or family. Members not only commit themselves to Christ, but also individually and voluntarily to each other.” I love the way Bender puts this, because it emphasizes something very ‘third way’ — our salvation is not just about our communal connection to God, but it’s also not just something we do entirely individually — it is something we do with each other. The church community is where we form, and live out, our faiths.
Today, I’m going to try to answer three questions about community.
First question — why live in community? The main answer is put plainly in 1 John: without loving one another — without being in community with other Christians — we can’t know what God is like; and this command is backed up by logic — without others to share our joys and sorrows with, our lives become quite empty. We need a community to protect us and challenge us; without a community, we cannot know God.
Second question, and this may be a bit weightier — is the Christian community for everyone? Here, I’ll answer yes and no; because yes, we need to recognize how interconnected we are with all people on earth, even our interconnections with nature point to the amazingness of God’s creation, and everyone is invited to join God’s kingdom; but also no — not everyone accepts that invitation, which means we need to think a little more deeply about who is in and who is out of our community.
Third question — is living in community practical, or possible, in today’s world? I’ll answer yes — but we can’t kid ourselves that it will always be easy or that it won’t come with costs attached. We choose community not because it’s always perfect or easy, but because it’s only together that we serve God’s purposes; and finally, we’ll close with three quick thoughts on how we can pursue deeper community in our lives.
Okay — back to our first question: why live in community?
As with a lot of big life questions, there tend to be two main reasons I aspire to live in what I believe is the Christian way: scripture points to it, and logic and experience back it up. This is very true of the idea of centering community: communal living seems logical and natural, from the family, extended family, and tribe, up to the national and international community: life works better, both for the individual and the group, when when we recognize our interdependence, and work for the common good rather than individual good; this is what community is all about.
And, of course, you would be hard-pressed to find a theme in the bible more discussed than community. The New Testament is full of pictures of community, from Jesus calling the twelve, to Paul’s discussions of how church communities can live together faithfully, even to Revelation’s picture of a new community of faith in the new Jerusalem, where we will be in community even with God. We also can’t forget the Jewish background of Jesus and the new testament writers — the Old Testament is all about communal salvation, God’s covenant with a group of people, not just individuals. The picture we often have of faith — of praying silently by ourselves, studying the bible by ourselves — would have been unrecognizable to the ancient Jewish world; in fact, Jewish law indicates that most prayers and scripture reading require a congregation of 10 adults be present for a service to be held. The bible paints a consistent picture — we need to seek after God together.
Because, as First John puts it, if we don’t love others — if we don’t take the call to live in community seriously — then we cannot love God. Hear those verses again: “Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars. After all, those who don’t love their brothers or sisters whom they have seen can hardly love God whom they have not seen! This commandment we have from him: Those who claim to love God ought to love their brother and sister also.” The need to gather, for accountability and support, with other Christians, is evident; Hebrews 10:23 states this pretty clearly, too; hear that verse: “let us consider each other carefully for the purpose of sparking love and good deeds. Don’t stop meeting together with other believers, which some people have gotten into the habit of doing; Instead, encourage each other, especially as you see the day drawing near.” Becker quotes Japanese Mennonite scholar Takashi Yamada as describing both the church of Acts and the early Anabaptists as meeting in “small groups where they confronted each other and made each other strong enough to confront the world.” This pattern — of worshiping and living together in sometimes uncomfortably-close Christian community, where we hold each other accountable, is often referred to as discipleship: we need a community to disciple us in the way of Jesus.
But we need to address an obvious problem — no community is perfect. In any relationship, mistakes are made and hurt is caused; we offend one another, we do stupid things. The church, while divinely inspired, like any community, is so obviously fallible — we need to remember the foundational concept that allows every community to exist: forgiveness. Becker puts it this way: “The central problem of humanity is not the lack of finances, the lack of education or the lack of power. The central problem is that we offend each other…human beings have offended God and each other through their attitudes and actions. The results have been broken relationships with God, with each other, with our inner selves, and with the whole earth.” The only path for a community to survive is forgiveness. If we want to commit to community, we have to commit to forgiveness, bearing with one another in love, and building up, not tearing down.
This brings us to another important point that Becker makes — scripture should be interpreted in community — something that may sound novel today, but certainly wasn’t in the 1500s. Before the reformation, the average Christian wasn’t allowed or able to read the bible themselves; the priest read the bible, and told the people what it meant. The idea that all Christians should read the bible themselves and connect directly to God is one of the great and positive innovations of the reformation.
But it is not a perfect idea. This is decidedly a pro-Anabaptist-Mennonite series, but it is worth stepping back and critiquing our tradition, as part of the larger Protestant stream, for a minute, from the Catholic and Orthodox perspectives; they look at the hundreds of protestant denominations today and ask: isn’t this hodgepodge the logical endpoint of your ide that everyone should read the bible on their own and connect to God that way? Will you stop before every individual Christian winds up in a little denomination of one person?
While this is a trite way of putting it, it is a concern we do need to take seriously — and we do take it seriously as Anabaptists, countering the over-individualistic idea of faith by committing to live our faiths together, reading and studying scripture together in community, with the guidance of the holy spirit. To put it another way, we seek a Priesthood of all believers — not the priesthood of individual believers, nor the pope-hood of all believers.
We embrace the idea that we, the community of believers, read scripture together, and share various interpretations with one another to arrive where God would like us to be. The universal church — the small-c catholic church — is not about membership in an earthly organization or denomination, but about believers who come together across economic, social, racial, and political lines to try to live faithfully together.
Let me share a small example — a few months ago I preached at Immanuel Mennonite in Harrisonburg, a church about the size of Daniel’s Run; in their Sunday morning worship services are three of my seminary professors, and also a half dozen or so folks who didn’t graduate from high school. This made preparing a sermon for them pretty difficult, but the beauty of that church is that a given scripture speaks to that community with various themes; and they aren’t afraid to share those various interpretations with each other during sermon response time — and they are a much richer community for it
So — why live and practice our faith in community? Because if we don’t love our neighbor, whom we have seen, then we cannot know God; we need one another, need to know one another, in order to center discipleship, walking closer each day to the way God intended for us.
Okay — time for our second question: is the community we’re talking about here for everyone, or just for some people? As I said earlier, I’ll be answering yes and no.
On the yes side — unequivocally, we should view ourselves as being in community with everyone in the world. One of the core messages of Jesus is that we do belong to one another; everyone is created in the image of God; we are, and should understand ourselves to be, in community with people utterly unlike ourselves all around the world, because we are all neighbors, even with people outside our country or faith community. We are and must be in community with people who make different amounts of money than we do, with people with different color skin than our own, and with people of different religious backgrounds. Part of the story of moving towards God’s justice is learning that yes — God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, modeled in Jesus life and death, applies to these people who are not like us just as much as it applies to us; and yes, it even applies to our enemies.
But — and this is an important but — many people have chosen different paths than embracing this message of love and community, and instead embrace messages of fear and hate and individual success, even when it causes others suffering. We cannot ignore these forces of evil, or pretend they don’t exist. As some in the modern Christian Reformed tradition like to put it, “no enemies, no Christianity.” I think this goes a little bit far — I’d prefer no opponents, no Christianity — but we do need to consider the thought: if we don’t understand that indeed there are forces of violence, and brokenness, and greed, and malice in the world — if we call every facet of humanity good and try to live in totally open community even with people who are yet to embrace God — then we fail to grasp the Christian message of reconciling the world to each other and to God.
Part of why we love the enemy, then, is precisely because we realize we are, indeed, in a type of community with them — but it is a different type of community than we have with fellow Christians. Rather, the community at the center of our lives, I believe, should be the fellow Jesus-followers who we know and trust and have made similar commitments in their own lives that we have: our discipling community.
One way to think about these two types of community, what I think of as the discipling, or home community, and the missional community, is with the help of an idea from the beloved United Church of Christ theologian Walter Bruggeman; its an idea I came across in the writings of Canadian Mennonite feminist theologian Lydia Neufeld Harder.
Harder and Bruggeman suggest that Christians should view their lives as having a wall around it, with the Christian community on the inside, and the non-Christian world on the outside. But this is not some giant wall to keep out everything in the world, with everything good on one side and everything bad on the other — rather, it’s a wall meant to be a healthy boundary marker, and it is actually here at the wall where we should spend much of our time. Harder says this — “the wall is more than a boundary that keeps the world out; it is [actually meant to be] a meeting place where people with different perspectives on reality gather. People of faith must [when at the wall]…translate the convictions of the church into a foreign tongue…and propose alternative, [loving] views of reality to those on the outside of the wall.”
We have community on both sides of the wall. Inside, we have our ‘home community’ — of safety, of having each others backs, of more-or-less agreement, of discipling and lifting one another up — but we also need to have our mission community: the people we are meeting at or outside the wall of our familiar spaces. While it is this home community, within the wall of the church, that is the center of our lives, so that we know and experience the love God has for us through the love of other people, it is the mission community that we exist to work in for the purposes of reconciliation — as Tig will talk about next week.
Now, historically, Mennonites really emphasized this idea that we have to be separated from non-Christians — well, really non-Mennonites — mostly relying on the scriptural comment that we should be in the world but not of the world. This is also part of why Mennonite can be quite strict with rules amongst themselves, but quite free in not condemning people outside their communities — and this is not a terrible distinction, in that we should have very different expectations for our Christian brothers and sisters in the church than for brothers and sisters outside it.
Today, however, I think many people have overreacted to historic traditions of internal disciple, forgetting that one of the purposes of community is, indeed, distinction from the world and discipleship: confronting the shortcomings of our siblings in Christ so that they can grow closer to God. While obviously we should be very careful how we do this, not becoming legalistic or vindictive, we also cannot ignore within the church behaviors and patterns that break relationship — break community — with God, nature, and one another. Completely tearing down the wall, or pretending it doesn’t exist, is not a solution to the problem of sin, or the brokenness of the world.
We must seek to walk a middle path here — when we isolate ourselves, as our plainclothes theological cousins and many other Christians do, we fail to be in any sort of community with the very people we claim to want to reach; we deprive ourselves of a mission community. Similarly, if we don’t have home communities that nurture, discipline, disciple, and empower us — and part of having that home community is making distinctions between believing and unbelieving communities — we may forget what Jesus stood for and quickly come to buy into unhealthy, non-Christian narratives, like nationalism, consumerism, racism, and hatred.
We need home communities — and as Becker emphasizes, there is something about true community that can only happen in small groups — communities where we can truly know and be known. We are tempted to think, particularly during election season, that only the national and international matters, but our small communities matter too. As we head into election week, which might drag into election months, this is a time to remember and invest even more in our home communities — because, though national elections of course do matter, it is in families, friends, and local communities that we live our lives and carry the burdens and stresses of life. It is in the interpersonal connection where God so often speaks; it is at small gatherings around tables where God so often comforts and inspires.
Now, we are often tempted to think small communities are ineffective, but Becker argues that we should think of the small group as the main engine of the church throughout history. Let’s look at an example.
Many of you may know that the Ethiopian Mennonite church is actually the largest Mennonite church in the world — and it got that way only because of small groups. Under the communist government of Ethiopia, which was in power from 1974 to 1991, Christianity was technically permitted — but Christians could only gather in groups of five or fewer people at a time. This could have led to the church declining in popularity — but instead it exploded with growth. The magazine Anabaptist World describes the growth during this time in this way — “We went underground, meeting in secret in houses and fields. Women carried Bibles in the folds of their clothing because they were less likely to be searched. Once a group gathered more than 12 connected households, it split up to avoid attention. During those 17 years, the membership of the church increased tenfold.” Under a policy that meant to divide and repress a people, the church grew through the power of connection and community in small groups — the christian community of the coffee shop and living room is often more powerful than the christianity of the impersonal cathedral. Though we need large organizations for some things, we cannot forget that it is in relational spaces that the gospel tends to move and save.
This brings us to our final question: is living in community really possible or practical today?
On the practical side — I believe absolutely it is. So many of the problems we face as a world and as a nation are because of the loss, or decline, of some of our most natural communities: our extended families, our faith communities, our local communities, our loss of mutuality with nature. As we’ve gone more online, we’ve become more connected to people globally on some level, but it’s a shallow connection that means we miss out on the thick community of mentors and mentees, grandparents and grandchildren, neighbors and friends, that leads to thriving, abundant life. We continue to live in a hugely individualistic society, where loneliness is cited by the surgeon general as a deadly epidemic. We need to choose community, not the individualistic way of life that leads to loneliness and fear.
However, these days I see many people choosing against community. This week, one of my Facebook friends posted a request: they asked that anyone who has ever voted for Trump to like their post so that they could block them. Unfriending and exiting a relationship at the point of conflict — that is easy. Struggling to understand the other, to know the people we disagree with, is hard, frustrating, and even scary — but it is also the path that leads to community, and to change; and, when we remember the home community / missional community distinction, we can work to draw boundaries in healthy places to preserve our own wellbeing and energy for the long term while not cutting people off like that.
I ask once again — is living in community possible or practical today? Yes — no matter where we are, we can choose relationship with others, recognizing our mutual dependance, and growing and thriving together.
I want to close with three suggestions on how we deepen our community living, and then end with one final idea.
My first suggestion: do less. Pick something to cut out of your life so you can spend more time with your closest community, your family, or the people you live with. I’ve suggested it before, but consider doing a screen sabbath one night a week — no phone, no TV; fellowship together without the medium of screens.
Second suggestion: make community the default. Pick one night a week, or one night a month, as a standing time to gather with those friends you wish you saw every week but can never quite make the time. Make this community gathering something you cancel, rather than something you struggle to plan, and you’ll do it more often. Its in community that we create webs of strength and connection to one another and to God, so often in the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary.
And third, make face-to-face gatherings and discussions of faith a priority. Becker really emphasizes that community is something that happens in person — while zoom is a good tool and we should use it as such, we all know there is something about in-person gatherings that zoom simply can’t replace.
And a final thought to close, drawing from Native American thought — community is remember that we, as individuals, are not special — but we are a part of something special, together. We need one another to thrive.
With all these things in mind, I thank you all for being my community — may we continue to follow Jesus, together. Amen.
