This week, I
was coming back to St. Thomas from running an errand out in the Industrial
Park, and, as always when on unfamiliar roads, I got lost. I decided to pull
over so that I could look at the maps on my trusty i-Phone and pulled into what
I thought was some giant industrial complex, with its fairly full and busy
parking lot on this weekday morning. When, to my surprise, I saw the sign that
said, “Southeast Christian Church,” I immediately went into defensive mode. “I
wonder what fear-mongering Bible study they are having at Six Flags Over Jesus
this morning,” I thought uncharitably, as I looked with some jealousy at all of
the cars. “They are probably trying to stop all these people from thinking for
themselves…! "The church building looks like the Astrodome,” I mumbled as I looked
around the campus. "How can you have Christian
community in a place that big?!”
Jesus would not have been pleased
with me, as I was acting just like those disciples in today’s Gospel lesson,
the ones who were trying to censure another group of Christians for casting out
demons, just because they belonged to a different group. “Whoever gives you a
cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose
the reward,” he explains, probably with exasperation in his voice. Contrary to
the idealized portrayals in the book of Acts, the early church was as
fragmented and quarrelsome as the Church has always been, and Mark has Jesus
addressing the issue of “us” versus “them” in no uncertain terms in our Gospel
lesson. Instead of accusing other groups of wrong deeds or wrong beliefs, says
Jesus, you had better pay attention to how you yourselves are acting. You are
all my disciples, and we are all walking the same path.
Jesus goes beyond just chastising the
disciples for a lack of unity, however. With frightening hyperbole, Jesus warns
me and every self-righteous little group of disciples that it is going to take
all that we have and all that we are to live lives of Christian discipleship;
our attention needs to be on our own ways of caring for fellow disciples
(“these little ones who believe in me”) and on the series of roadblocks that
litter the path of a Christian life, a life that even our own hands and eyes
and feet can pull dangerously off course from one moment to the next.
All the talk of “hell” in this passage might cause us squeamishly
non-hellfire-and-brimstone-Episcopalians to squirm and shut our ears. That
would be unfortunate. “Hell” here is not Dante’s Inferno of eternal fire that
we imagine when we read Jesus’ words. This “hell” in the Greek text is
“Gehenna,” a real valley near Jerusalem where, at once point in the history of
ancient Israel, human sacrifices were once offered to a foreign god. As such,
it was a defiled and unclean place, a place that was in Jesus’ day a garbage
dump for the city, a place where burning trash smoldered night and day, and a
fitting image of desolation and decay.[1]
If you want life in God, Jesus is saying, you need to rid yourself of
everything that is a stumbling block, even if it seems as essential to your
present life as your hands and feet and eyes. If you hang onto it, it will burn away your time and your will, and you will smolder in the garbage dump of living death, until
nothing is left but dust and ashes. We need to get rid of whatever is
preventing our Christian communities from being places of deep responsibility, responsibility
for the salvation of the “little ones,” total commitment to the healing of our
brothers and sisters.
To be in community these days is tough.
In our fragmented, often isolated and lonely, modern world, we long for
community, but we don’t really know what it means. Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, a pastor
who specializes in community and Christian practice, points out the longing fascination
of our “radically autonomous society” with all things communal: we have “online
communities” like Facebook and Twitter and Match.com; we have “planned
communities” like Norton Commons, that promise the safety and closeness to
neighbors of bygone days; we have “community-supported agriculture” and
“community investments,” that bring us together for a common goal. “Community
Churches” spring up like weeds, hiding the implied fragmentation and
institutional bureaucracy of a denominational name, and marketing a sense of
cozy camaraderie. At the same time that we strive to create the communities
that we long for, however, we avoid making commitments and seem lacking in “any
collective capacity to prioritize the common good.”[2]
We resist “joining” churches and clubs, preferring the freedom to float around at
will. We promote individual success and reward, being the “best that we can be.”
We have little common moral ground, and are disillusioned with the role of government
and institutions in solving our problems. We are left with “communities” that
compete with one another, communities that provide a sense of belonging without
the discipline of community interest.
Here at St. Thomas, I have to say
that, whatever our own stumbling blocks, we do pretty well in caring for the
little ones among us. We have the discipline and sense of responsibility that is
often lacking in communities these days, and we need to honor that in ourselves.
Our little community follows the practices outlined in today’s reading in
James’ letter: we pray faithfully for the suffering, anointing one another with
oil every Sunday at the Prayer Chair. We openly confess our sins and tend to
live our lives without pretention. We pray, and we sing songs of praise. We
look out for one another and encourage one another in discipleship. The way
that we come together to support our children and those in our parish who are
ill or in need is proof that we take our responsibilities for one another
seriously.
Nevertheless, I still think that we,
like all churches these days, suffer from a lack of understanding our role in
and our relationships with the greater community—the community of believers and
nonbelievers in which we live our lives. In our strategic planning sessions
with the Vestry, we face again and again the question of what on earth we mean
when we talk about “community.” Are we talking about our parish community,
about the Westport Road community, about our community in the Deanery or the
Diocese, about the community of Christians throughout the world?
We’re talking about them all, Jesus
tells us in today’s Gospel. We are responsible not just to our own parish
community, but to everyone who bears the name of Christ, whether they agree
with us or not, whether we like them or not, whether it is easy for us to share
with them or not. I hope that here at St. Thomas, we will be able to open up to
work more with the Episcopal churches in our deanery, to participate more fully
and more often at Diocesan events, to work together with the many denominations
of Christians in our area to care for the little ones who would otherwise be
out of our reach. I hope that we can get more involved with the work of Eastern
Area Community Ministries, that we can work with Zachary Taylor Elementary,
that we can join in all kinds of projects with the many churches that line
Westport Road. Working to cooperate and to take responsibility with all of our brothers
and sisters in Christ to meet the needs of the world and one another will not leave
us time to waste in judging one another, and it might just save us from dwindling
down to ash on society’s trash heap.
In
Confirmation Class this week, my challenge was to present the whole of Church
History in about thirty minutes. To engage the kids in what might have been an
intolerably long and boring lecture, I gave them each a handful of Playmobile
figures that I had scavenged from a box of old toys in my basement. Like the
real Church, these figures were a motley crew: some were holding props like
guns and canoe paddles, some were missing body parts, and some were
expressionless adults and children. The task for our young people was to move
these figures in and out of groups as I outlined the history of the Church.[3]
As we went from a small community of persecuted Christians, to a church split
between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, to the divisions and wars of
the Protestant Reformation, to the fragmentation within the Protestant Churches
that creates all of our present-day denominations, the kids were kept
constantly busy moving the figures, as the communities in our story fought and
morphed and divided and dwindled. At the end of the exercise, looking at the
tiny groups of pitiful Playmobile figures, clumped in irrelevant disarray all
over the table with their guns and canoe paddles and missing limbs, we couldn’t
help but shake our heads in sorrowful self-recognition as today’s Church (with
a capital C.) Finally, one of our wise middle-schoolers commented, “Why can’t
all these groups just concentrate on what they have in common, instead of on
the things they disagree about?” Jesus couldn’t have said it better.
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