Mark 2
“Being
Community”
As we continue our journey through Lent, we have explored
a handful of spiritual practices. On Ash
Wednesday, I shared that the word Lent has roots in the word of
lengthening. The days are lengthening as
we move towards Spring. In our reformed
tradition, we can view Lent as a Spiritual Spring, a time of preparation as we
move towards Easter, towards the Resurrection, a time for us to till the soil
of our souls and water the seeds of faith as we seek to bare fruit for our
loving God. Today’s spiritual practice,
in honor of the sacrament of Baptism is:
Being Community.
For so many of you, being community here in this place is
second nature. Many of you have grown up
in the church or even grown up in this particular church. Eleanor Rose is a fourth generation present
here within this place. Not only is she
a part of this community, she is very literally a part of this community’s
family. Many churches describe
themselves as family. That is how I have
always described the church from my own experience in my childhood. My family moved a lot when I was growing up
and one of the first things we always did was find a new church family as soon
as we were settled. Our own extended
family was far away, but we were able to create relationships within our church
family for support, nurture, and growth.
Being Community, being a family of faith, something that
might seem as natural as breathing, is a spiritual practice because we need to
be aware of it. For those of us that are
comfortable within our community, we need to be aware of each other. Not everyone has grown up in this church and
even more so, many people are not growing up in the church at all. So, what does that mean for us? It means we need to be open and receptive to
visitors, to new members, and to ourselves.
God created us people to be in community. Whether it is community with our families,
community within our children’s schools or sports, community with our hobbies
and activities, whatever it is that we do, people tend to gravitate to each
other and form community. Once it was
our neighborhoods, I still remember a new family moving to town back when I was
in high school. We met the new kid at a
school activity and the next day, my best friend and I decided to bake brownies
and take them over to his house and welcome him to town. When we arrived at the house, the mom woke
her son up, not the brother we had met the night before. We were so confused. It turns out they had two sons, the football
player, popular son and the quiet brother.
The mom just assumed we were there to flirt with her son the football
player. Now, so many of us don’t even
know our neighbors, let alone welcome to town with a cake, brownies, cookies,
or homemade bread.
The Spiritual practice of being community. I could have gone with the scripture
passage: Love your neighbor as
yourself. And then the whole conversation
of who is my neighbor? Instead, I chose
the passage of the four friends that go to the extreme to get their paralyzed
friend to Jesus. We are told that the
crowds are so large that these friends cannot get close enough to Jesus. Their mission, their desire, their purpose is
to bring their friend to Jesus so he can be healed. This passage shows extreme love, commitment
to the other, and self-sacrifice in order to bring wholeness to someone other
than one’s self. In our world today, we
spend a lot of time focused on ourselves, we are living in a very independent,
individualistic society. Some of my own
biggest struggles are because I was taught to be a self sustaining, strong,
independent person. Which is good, but
sometimes it is my own worst enemy. We
have to be self aware enough of knowing when being independent is good and when
being a part of community and engaging the needs of the whole is
appropriate.
We can look at this passage in several different
ways. Place yourself into the story –
are you one of the four friends? If so,
who are you concerned about? Who are or
what are you carrying? And who is
working with you? Are you trying to
carry something alone or are you working in community to bear the burden, to
share in the process, and to be community as you seek to encounter God in your
life? Or are you the one that is
paralyzed? Are you the one on the mat,
needing the support of the community to carry you for awhile. And what are those things that paralyze us? There can be many things in our life that
hold us back: guilt, fear, anxiety, stress, the unknown. And so often, we hold it inside, trying to be
strong, instead of being present to our community that is called to carry us
through these times. And again, that is
why it is a spiritual practice, because there may be times that we, as the
community have no idea how to be present, how to carry the other. And sometimes, all we can do is just be
present. We cannot always be the ones to
fix it. These friends could not fix
their friend, they could not heal him, they could not make him whole. And so, together, they bring him through the
roof into Jesus’ presence. This is a community of extreme measures.
Barbara Brown Taylor says this in her book: an Alter in
the World – sometimes “the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the
neighbor as the self-to encounter another human being not as someone you can
us, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone
who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”
Where ever we are in the story, if you are able to find
yourself within it, together we are called to encounter God. Each person in that scripture is hungry for
something, whether it is curiosity, the desire to be healed, a spiritual
hunger, or being present for a friend.
They all have the potential of being in God’s presence and to be
community for each other. Jesus does not
send any of them away, and as chaotic as the scenario seems to be, imagine
someone being lowered through the roof, he engages the moment, brings healing
and wholeness to paralyzed friend, and whether those four friends were looking
for a spiritual moment in their own lives, I am sure just being present to this
divine encounter, changed and altered their own lives as well. The spiritual practice of community, of
giving of one’s self for another, can bring us closer to God.
Taylor shares: “If
you have ever spent a Saturday volunteering at the Special Olympics, taking
Meals on Wheels to the elderly, or picking up trash with the Riverkeepers, then
you know that you can arrive back home dirty and tired but also oddly
refreshed, with more lift in your heart than you could have gotten from a day
at the beach.” I think this is what
happened to those four friends, they perhaps had just as much a healing moment
as their dear friend. The spiritual
practice of community can bring new life, new life to all who are engaged as a
family, as a community, as people who love their neighbor as themselves. Isn’t that the calling of baptism? Celebrating the new life we are given in
Jesus Christ as we are nurtured in the faith and come together to live out that
faith together in God’s holy community.
Amen.
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