Easter 7, Year C, May 16, 2010

People of the Way #4

Do you ever have those weeks when you feel like you might just implode if you have one more thing come your way that feels like criticism?

Yes, I see you can relate.

So here we are in week four of our People of the Way series.

And the main thing I was feeling this week was my shortcomings as a Christian, my daily failings as a follower of Jesus.

I was feeling cranky about that.

On the one hand, we know we’re not perfect.

Clearly we know that.

And on the other hand we know that God loves us unconditionally as a gift.

An unearned gift.

And yet, even though I know that in my head…

…I had one of those weeks where I just wanted a break from that feeling of falling short.

But instead we’re faced with talking about community life as Christians.

How annoying is that.

So I started doing some reading….Henri Nouwen was the first author who came to mind.

He has a great quote he uses about community.

“Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always is.”

That sums up my crankiness some days.

But I went deeper.

I found an article he wrote called “Moving from solitude to community to ministry”.

I’d like to share some of his wisdom because it struck me just the right way.

I was feeling bogged down by my self-perception of never-ending failure as a Christian who finds the idea of being in Christian community too much to deal with some days…some weeks.

This really helped me.

In our printed booklet about this series it says:

People of the Way live in the community of faith. It is within this community that they learn to love, care for and serve one another, and the world around them.

Frankly I just don’t have the strength of character some days to pursue that.

I admit that I can be cranky about people instead of viewing them as the community in which I am learning to love, care and serve.

Nouwen talks about community as one of three disciplines for Christians.

The first, solitude, is being with God alone in order to create the space needed to hear God naming me as beloved.

This solitude, this prayer time, is about hearing in all the way into our hearts and our heads that God loves us with an everlasting love that existed before we did and will continue after we die.

When we know our belovedness, then we are truly free.

Because then, the circumstances of life and the words and actions of others that may hurt us do not have the same power over us.

We can continue to feel cherished and whole apart from people and circumstances.

When we take time regularly to hear God whisper to us that we are beloved, over time, not in a single moment…

Then we will find freedom from an unrelenting pressure to find affirmation and success and false love.

Nouwen describes our inner lives as being like a banana tree filled with monkeys jumping up and down.

We sit down to have a quiet moment and the next thing we know we’re thinking about work, or dinner, or cleaning the cat box, or some annoying person.

Making time to hear God telling you that you are beloved is not often easy.

It’s usually hard.

But it is that sense of being God’s beloved that makes community not only possible but actually attractive.

Our gospel reading from John today gets to the heart of it.

Jesus is praying that we all may be one as Jesus and the Father are one.

The basis for Christian community is not our love for each other…

Thank goodness, since we Christians have a pretty messy history when it comes to loving one another.

The basis for Christian community is always God’s character of love.

And God’s character of love is lived out, is incarnated in Jesus.

This kind of love, God love, is not a feeling, it’s about character.

Nouwen talks about two things that Christian community must have.

Forgiveness and celebration.

He defines forgiveness as allowing another person not to be God.

Duh, right?

But think about it.

With forgiveness we can accept that other people are only able to love conditionally.

Just like we can only love conditionally since we are human.

If I know that I am beloved then it becomes possible for me to see that you are beloved.

And you and you and you.

And then I can begin to know that it’s possible for me to be forgiven and to see the possibility of forgiving you.

And it’s usually about forgiving each other for being human, right?

Our calling in community is to be watching for all of the moments that we can be forgiving each other…

Instead of allowing ourselves to give in to our tendency of wanting others to make us feel good about ourselves or do what we want them to or act like we think they should.

Which he says is where celebration comes in.

Nowen writes this:

If you can forgive that another person cannot give you what only God can give, then you can celebrate that other person’s gifts.

When we work at accepting one another, forgiving one another…

Then we can see the goodness of that other person because we can see that they are beloved, too.

And then we are free to celebrate their uniqueness, their goodness, their gifts.

It’s not about forcing ourselves to like people.

It’s about truly taking in and then living out that we are beloved.

All of us are beloved by God.

It is that belovedness that gives us the freedom to live beyond our own ability to get along with people.

That is such a relief to me.

It’s not about being an extrovert, or a people-person, or nice.

Community life is not optional for Christians who are introverts or curmudgeons or self-centered.

Community life is not optional for Christians.

The character of God is about community.

The mysterious relationship of the three in one…Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The mutual and self-sacrificing character of God’s love within the trinity.

Then the call of Jesus to all followers to mirror to the world that same character of love.

Not a feeling but a quality of being.

God is love scripture tells us.

It’s one of those God paradox kind of things.

Our very brokenness as human beings makes it “impossible” to love each other well enough to be one in community.

And yet, the foundation of God’s character of love is the source of why it is possible and inevitable that followers of Jesus can live as one.

As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

When we take in that we are beloved by God…

Then we will also feel that connection to a broader human community.

And we begin to sense that this larger community has a calling to do something together.

And that something is simple.

That the world around us might be able to see and experience that Jesus came into the world for them and that God’s love for them is alive and well.

This is Jesus’ prayer:

So that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Being in community is not simply about being a nice person who goes church every Sunday and smiles and compliments people and brings a tuna casserole to that family that just had a baby.

God loves you fiercely and because of that you can feel cherished and forgiven.

And because you feel cherished you can see that God cherishes each person you meet.

And because of that you can begin to learn how to forgive and celebrate other people.

And because of that we can live in community with each other and learn to love, care for, and serve one another and the world around us.

And as we live in community with each other in love…

…then the world around us can see Jesus.

And that is the point.