Living Beyond Community

Living Beyond Community

Rev. J. Cody Nielsen

           If Love is all you really need to know… then the question becomes how you learn to make Love an active practice… The answer, live in community.  And to really learn how to love, live beyond community, in communion.  And that is where our story begins.

            In the beginning. There was only face to face contact… it was simple and challenging.  You knew the people who lived down the street from you, you talked to people who showed up at your door.  It was challenging because if you lived more than about an hour or two away, you had to send letters.  And you then, slowly, telephones and email became the way to talk to each other.  People spread out, distances did not matter as much, and the world got smaller and smaller and smaller.  The mail stopped being sent, people slowly stopped writing things by hand, people lost track of who was in their neighborhood, let alone who their next door neighbor was. And then… In 2004 facebook entered the world.  And everything changed.  That’s when people stopped talking to each other.  I mean, that’s when people started talking to everyone, just not really considering what it meant.  There were chat room and there was AOL and MSN messanger sure, but facebook changed everything.  In fact, Facebook was the beginning of the end.  And from there, everything went downhill.  For a little while…because people slowly started to realize that you couldn’t just make friends over a text box, and so twitter came into the world for those who are older and missed out on facebook.  But everyone said, we need something more than words…  And so, skype entered into the world.  And then people struggled with skype and so other face to face contacts entered the world, like facetime on my iphone.  Today, at this moment, anyone in the entire world, from my mother, to my friend Gary in Hong Kong, could call me right now, in the middle of this sermon, and catch me up on his world.  BUT NONE of it, despite what anyone might say, is REAL. 

            Sure, we do the best we can.  And I honestly want to live a distance away from my parents.  But my relationship with them is not as real as say, my relationship with my friend Aaron, who I talk with and see most every week.  To live in community with people is more than just a simple passing by.  It takes time. And energy, and a space. The term community is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as, “A social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.”  One can not authentically live into community from a far distance.  It is not community.  It’s more like friendship from afar.  That’s a little why some of you are a little homesick right now.  And we still can’t live into community with one another by simply being around once a week for an hour where no interaction takes place.  You can go to worship, but if you don’t interact what’s the point. You can’t experience the deep calling that we are supposed to be living into.

            In church speak, what we are called to be is that which is called Communion.   Communion respectively is defined as “ An interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions; intimate communication.” Emotions and intimate communication is what strike me here.  It is no surprise that after Jesus gives the disciples the bread and the cup through which to remember him, he then tells them that the new commandment is to love one another as Jesus has loved.  Emulate the love I just gave you at the table fellowship.  Care and share deep connections with each other.  Don’t just see each other once a week, shaking hands when you pass by, sending a text two or three times a weeks that has autocorrected to something else.  Live in community, in fact Live beyond community, beyond what the Romans now do with their spectacles and rituals, more than just shaking hands and living off indulges in the world, live authentically, love mutually, seek each other’s common welfare.  Love, as I have loved you, and you will find life beyond community:  COMMUNION .

            Communion comes from the greek word “Koinonia,” and in that context it is way beyond anything most of society was living into at the time.  As Jim Walker pastor of Hot Metal Bridge Church in Pittsburg attests, Koinonia  was and is not about the superficial sharing that we so often do with each other.  It’s about going into deeper, authentic levels with people.” And honestly, authentic levels of emotional intimacy is hard. Living into a life beyond Community is hard:  we are all very busy.  We are also not always around, nor are we wired during college to care about others nearly as much as during other times in our lives.  This is the self-serving time, the time for me to identify what we are doing for the rest of our lives, for me to be a little self-indulgent about my needs and my wants so that in the future, I might be more self-giving.  This is the time for me.  And yet, we know that is ultimately not true.

            It’s also hard because to live this way is a both/and situation.  You have to share your life as you seek to share in someone else’s.  The last time you sat around with someone and shared your emotional self intimately with someone was…think about that while we continue.

            Every research study that has analyzed the competitive self-serving culture in higher education has correlated that those who feel like it’s a me me me world also have higher rates of depression.  Self-serving attitudes regarding behavior often lead to poor health in relationships, including a lack of satisfaction around sexuality.  People who are living into a time of self-servingness often find themselves to be more lonely than at any other point in their life and will often succumb to more mental health problem. Yes, college is a time of self-servingness, but the reality is that we are intricately connected together.  We always have been, and we always will be.  But boy is it hard work. 

            Just look at Paul’s message to the Romans.  Let your love be genuine, outdo one another in showing honour.  Do not lag in zeal.  Be ardent in spirit.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering. Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers.  Geez.  Does this list end.  But the beauty of this list is its simplicity.  Once a long time ago, a Jewish Rabbi named Hillel (yes that Hillel) was asked by a lay person to recite the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot.  His response, while standing on one foot: That which is hateful to you, do not do onto one another.  All the rest of is commentary.  And Jesus’ later statement: love one another as I have loved you.

            It is hard work to live out the message of the Bible.  It is extremely hard work to contribute to the needs of others, to extend hospitality to strangers, to feed the poor, clothe the naked, to love one another as Jesus loved us in emulation of God’s love for us.  Of course it is.  Because if Love is all you need to know, and we still don’t know it after all this time, then it’s certainly not going to happen overnight.  But it is in living beyond community, in this practice of communion that we can fully learn what it means to love.

            It may be hard to imagine acting yourself in this way, but if you could imagine a group of people who acted like this toward you, oh how you would find yourself amazed.  If you could walk into a setting and have a group of people care for you and authentically wanted to know about your life and how to support you and then did support you, oh how would that be the kingdom of God manifest on earth.  And so many people would want to come, because they would be cared for.  This is the call we are faced with: to live like this in love with one another, beyond simple handshakes and into communion, the practice of following God’s love and making it into our own act of love both in receiving and in giving.  This is the greatest challenge the world has ever known, because it would truly solve almost every problem we have, almost every discourse we might make with each other, and would dissolve lines of division and strife. 

            That’s the Wesley Foundation way we are called to be. We love each other and we spend time with each other.  We don’t just show up just one hour a week.  In fact, John Wesley would tell us “the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.” There is no such thing as a solitary community, no thing as a group of 1 gathered together, but of two or three gathering together and there God will be.  In community, beyond community, God is calling us to mutual affection.  For in this space, all you need to know is indeed known and the kingdom of God is present.  So come, let us truly learn to live beyond community.  Let us learn to love one another as God has loved us.  Everything you need to know: it starts here.