Community of Love

Last week we remembered our baptism. We were reminded that baptism signifies that we belong to God. It is against this backdrop of the community of God that we read about the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry at the wedding in Cana.

Midway into a week-long wedding celebration, Jesus’ mother Mary breaks the news to him that the host has run out of wine, a problem that would bring shame to the host in their community. Jesus responded to Mary’s proding, “What concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” We might remember that Mary has pondered in her heart from Jesus’ birth his role in God’s plan. Jesus responds to the greater call of a wedding community in need.

Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth gives us insight into the church community. The church in Corinth has remarkable diversity: Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, wealthy and disadvantaged, men and women worshiping together. However, Paul's letter to the Corinthian church was written because they were, in fact, splintered by disagreements, one-upmanship over who was doing what and who’s gift mattered more than another. I wonder what Jesus had in mind for a faith community formed many years after his death and resurrection?

Paul begins by establishing that the basis of our relationships is that we all belong to Christ. In verses 12-13 Paul writes, “For just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we are all baptized into one body… and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” Who we are and what we do within the church is grounded in our oneness in Christ.

What does that mean?

Paul compares the church to a diverse group of people about whom he said, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” In other words, the church is “one body” that somehow works together for the good of all.

How do we live as “one body” in Christ?

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her sermon about this scripture, presents the challenge to us in her own relatable way. She writes,

“The problem begins when you put me in a community with a bunch of other people who look, smell, think, talk, and act differently from me. One is perfectly cheerful but she can talk for thirty minutes straight without stopping to breathe, while another has been so beaten up by life that everything he says comes out as a sneer. One speaks so intimately of God that everyone around her feels like a spiritual slouch and another is a complete imposter, who prays on Sunday morning and then goes home to knock his family around. ‘Now you are the body of Christ.” Paul says, “and individually members of it.’

[Those] other people challenge my established routines. I start doing something one way and suddenly I get lots of advice about doing it another way, or several other ways, until I lose my appetite for doing anything at all.

Do you know what I mean? You join a community looking for —what?—closeness, support, some measure of safety—and nine times out of ten what you get instead is this holy struggle to live and work with people who are just as angular as you are. The brains want everybody to act like brains and the hearts want everyone to act like hearts and there is always a hangnail who brings out the hangnail in everyone else.”

In the book The Company of Strangers, Parker Palmer defines community: “In true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world.” The real purpose of community is not to surround ourselves with like-minded people, but to allow the Holy Spirit to teach us how to live with people we may not see eye to eye with at all.

How do we live as “one body” in Christ?

Parker Palmer continues, “Community will teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear the fullness of God’s word for our lives.

I have been helped by thinking of the church as a “school of the Spirit”, a place where God is continually drawing me out of myself into the larger life….If the church could become such a community - a place where people confront the stranger in each other and in themselves, and still know that they are members of one another.

“Now you [the church] are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Notice that Paul did not say, “you are like the body of Christ.” “You are,” he said. “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Whether you realize it or not, whether you feel it or not, whether you like each other or not, you are the body of Christ.

How do we live as “one body” in Christ? Commit yourself to God…In that commitment you will find yourself drawn into community.”