Rev Barbara Peddie

Building community

Acts 10: 44-48 and John 15: 9-17. Easter 6B 2021

 

These past weeks have seen a series of readings about building Christian community, and the challenge to widen the boundaries of God’s new commonwealth on earth. There’s an air of wonder about them. Not surprising. The new Church was growing and changing almost from day to day.

Pause, and remember the seasons of the year -–and of the church. The early church was in its springtime, and spring in our climate is a time of rapid change and growth. The church today is moving through another season. We can’t pretend we’re at the beginning. We have to work out what the tasks are, for this community, and this Methodist Connexion, in this country of Aotearoa New Zealand. That’s our mission.

At the same time, we can remember and celebrate the springtime of the church, and search out the links for our context. The seasons of the church year get a little muddled for us, because we have Easter in autumn and Advent and Epiphany in high summer – and Pentecost at the beginning of dormant winter. That adds another dimension of challenge us to stretch our imaginations to embrace and celebrate the cycles of change here and now!

Those first Jewish Christians were uneasy because their treasures – their taonga- were suddenly open to outsiders to share. We are often uneasy because our culture is changing around us. We’ve become multicultural – and it wasn’t necessarily by choice. Our churches are fragmenting, as our culture fragments. How do we build our communities when the old materials slip through our fingers? Where do we find our building blocks?

Today’s Gospel gives us some answers – perhaps one of the most important answers, and one of the hardest to live out. Love one another ‘as I have loved you,’ Jesus says. That’s the heart of the Gospel. But today I want to tease out some other aspects of this reading that can get lost behind the great commandment. I want to talk about the gifts of friendship and community.

This Gospel passage talks about ‘laying down one’s life for one’s friends.’ Sometimes we stop there. We hear the call to sacrificial love – and we recoil. It’s too much to ask, and it’s not something that will ever come my way. Probably not – or not in the literal sense. But it doesn’t let us off the hook of taking friendship seriously, and engaging with it, and recognising it as part of the glue that holds any Christian community together.

In Jesus’ world, friendship was valued as a virtue and a fully human love. When Jesus talked about friends, he wasn’t talking about drop-in type acquaintances, mates who come and go in our lives, people we do things with for a while because it’s convenient. He wasn’t talking about companions. He wasn’t talking about allies. He was talking about relationship and interconnectedness.

Friendship hasn’t always been seriously valued in our Western world. But most of us  value the gift and blessing of friendship. What’s a friend? What’s friendship? We all have our own definitions and our own images. It’s hard to put words to our feelings about it. For me, friendship carries something of growth, something that’s unconditional, something of laughter, something of sorrow, something of being comfortable in the silences, something of creativity, something of sharing and mutuality. Anais Nin said:

Each friend represents a world in us,

a world possibly not born till they arrive,

and it is only by this meeting

that a new world is born.

Or, as one of my friends said: ‘Friends are people who ring you up when you’re in the middle of writing a sermon and you can tell them you can’t talk now, and they won’t feel offended.’

Jesus calls us to offer each other the gift of friendship. And it is a gift. We don’t take back gifts once given. And we don’t use them to put obligations onto others. Friendship isn’t a compulsion of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ Friendship doesn’t exact gratitude – and putting anyone under an obligation to feel gratitude can be very destructive. I remember the words of one of Dorothy Sayers’ characters:

‘I hate having to feel grateful. It makes me want to bite someone.’

Friendship requires mutuality – if one party takes power over the other, that’s not friendship. You don’t walk all over your friends.

Lord, Holy Spirit,

in the love of friends you are building a new house,… J K Baxter.

Love for one another as friends, is one of the building blocks of our church. Jesus offered his gift of friendship to his followers. And we’ve got a lot of hymns about ‘what a friend we have in Jesus.’ There is an element of mutuality here, and it’s bound up in the biblical narratives of covenant. But we also live with the tension of mutuality and otherness when we do the God stuff. In our Trinitarian faith, we can’t lose the divinity of Jesus in his humanity.

I want to suggest another building block that sits next to what I would call the sacrament of friendship, and that’s the sacrament of pastoral care. Every Christian community, is called to be a community of care. Care for each other to build up the community is something we do together, out of our collective wisdom and goodwill, and core values.

You might say, well, every community, if it’s going to work, has to look after all its members. What’s so different about a Christian community? Surely we’re talking about common human values here. And, after all, show us the Christian communities that are such a wonderful, shining example. Can we point to any? I think that if we call ourselves Christian, we have some core values that should mark us out. The bottom line is that ‘God is.’ God, however we name God, holds us. We are born into connectedness with God, and into connectedness with each other, and with the whole web of creation. We’re born into relationship.

More than this, we’re born into a dynamic relationship. One of the names of God is ‘I am who I am: I will be who I will be.’ God is, and God is forever becoming. I have an identity in relationship with God, and I am also in the process of becoming. The same goes for every created being. Each one of us is to honour that identity for every other member. That’s part of pastoral care, for all of us.

Pastoral care belongs within the community – not with any one person or any one office. Of course some members may have particular gifts of facilitation, and can call out the gifts of caring in others. It doesn’t have to be the Presbyter. Presbyters bring different gifts as well. A congregation is a very odd group of people in today’s world. It has some particular reference points that mark it out. It has a sort of a language, born out of the biblical narratives and stories of the people. Part of the work of pastoral care is to interpret that language so that it has a meaning for our life in the world.

A congregation has a collective memory – we remember the stories of other Christians, and remember the things that really matter to us in our faith journey. Our liturgy is one of the ways we remember, and especially the communion service. That’s a ministry of presence, reminding us that we’re not alone. Part of our work is to nurture and evoke memory, and to interpret that presence to people who walk through the doors, and have never had access to this culture.

We’re a community of inquiry. We keep on asking questions about the meaning of life – the meaning of our actions, and other people’s actions. We’re not here to give the final, once and for all answers – we’re here to help each other find the answers for our and their time and place.

We’re a community of mutual care, and in today’s ‘I’ dominated world, that’s very countercultural. Community isn’t about my personal transformation, at least, not if I leave it at that, and go blithely on my way rejoicing. It’s about building a dynamic community that involves transformation for everyone. Everyone has a place to stand.

And we’re a community of mission. The church is always open to the world around it. Love of the church is not the first commandment. The church is not called to concentrate on itself, and worship itself. It’s called to get involved in the mess and muddle of the world around it, and part of pastoral care is to help each other recognise that, and equip each other for that challenge.

Of course, we don’t have manuals of pastoral care that say ‘in this situation you follow steps 1, to 4, and everything will be hunky-dory. Don’t be afraid of silence. Don’t feel hurt if what others bring is more acceptable in that time and place. This is something we’re in together, and we each have different gifts of caring – we need to learn how to discern the times and places where they’re needed. A congregation has a collective wisdom. In this complex and mucky life, we need to be flexible.

Love of friends, and mutuality in caring. These are exciting challenges. These are two of the building blocks for our community, and they give us a foundation from which we can reach out beyond our doors. But how do we hold them together? In Jesus, God reached out in love and friendship. In Jesus, we see God moving among the turmoil and the pain, being there in the suffering, being light in the darkness, and hope for the hopeless, reminding us that we are known, and loved and held.

Lord Christ, you are the house in whom we live,

the house in which we share the cup of peace,

the house of your body that was broken for us upon the cross,

the house you have built for us beyond the stars.

………

Blaze in our hearts, you who are Love himself,

till we shine like the noonday sun.        J K Baxter.