Surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, *and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Last week, Pope Francis appeared at the TED International Conference. The topic of the conference was “The Future is You.” The Pope said that he was delighted to be speaking on this topic because it starts a conversation about the future. Because he said “the future is made of Yous, it is made of encounters because life flows through our relations with others. He continued,” I would love it if this meeting could help to remind us that we all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent “I” separated from the other. We can only build the future by standing together, including everyone, because everything and everyone is connected.”
We live in a very fragmented time. People live busy and too often exhausting lives. Days are long trying to complete tasks that often seem to grow the more we tend to them. Time for relaxed dinners together and time to share life’s moments are limited and sometimes strained. People often live far away from loved ones and with everyone’s busy schedule, precious minutes on the phone or FaceTime must suffice to nurture these important relationships. In numerous studies like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2001), social scientists have documented how disconnected and isolated people feel today, accumulating what Putnam describes as a growing “social-capital deficit” that leaves people in our culture longing for a caring community. And as our society continues to build higher and higher walls between socio-economic, racial, cultural, political, and religious communities, we are also becoming more and more distanced from the lives and the needs of others who share our world.
Much of what we believe we know about each other is filtered through the TV channels we watch or the internet stories we read that too often give distorted or, at the very least, limited pictures of these people whose stories we fail to encounter in our daily lives. And yet we know that our very existence depends on our ability to live together, to truly see and hear each other, and to enter into that intersection where hope and possibility live so we can begin to live lives together, invested, engaged, and transformed by, in, and through each other.
In our reading for this week, the writer of Luke’s gospel lets us in on what life filled and transformed by the love of God looks like. Those first believers in the first days and weeks after Easter were, we are told, filled with awe. Many signs and wonders were being accomplished by God working through the apostles. They gathered regularly to receive teaching, to share their daily lives in the breaking of bread and praying. Their possessions were shared so that no one had to worry about basic needs. This example of compassion and goodwill drew others in the community to them so that “the Lord added to their number day by day.”
The joy of the resurrection and the presence of God’s Spirit. inspired them to incorporate Jesus’ teaching into their daily lives so they stopped seeing any separation and saw only the magnificence and compelling inclusion of being a part of Christ’s body in the world. This devotion to Jesus drew them to give themselves over to communal caring where everyone was essential to God’s community. This sharing and participation in each other’s lives was a natural fruit of the love where each member of the community loved every other as his own soul.
What a glorious example this is for us today. As our world grows more and more fearful and hostile to anyone who is different; as too many seek to wall themselves off from others for protection or purification; as bitter voices identify scapegoats to blame for the changes that come as a result of technological and economic choices that advantage profits over people–how wonderful to hear the story of what God moving in and through a loving community of ordinary faithful people can accomplish. It is so very important that we hear this story as one that invites us to participate in a circle of caring that only grows wider– as God’s love moves through open and courageous hearts.
Throughout the history of the church there have been Christians who have found many different and creative ways to live lives in caring community. From Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker Movement that remains committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and forsaken; to Jean Vanier’s intentional community, L’Arche, where people of different abilities, different strengths and weaknesses live together in sacred and mutually supportive relationships in over 147 communities worldwide, God’s love has found many expressions.
Young Christian leaders today are choosing to live in communities of compassion and hospitality with people who struggle with violence, addiction, poverty, and other life circumstances. I recently zoomed through a book written by Craig Greenfield titled Subversive Jesus: an adventure in justice, mercy and faithfulness in a broken world. It tells the story of his travels beyond his safe life to encounter a different way of being that upends his world.
Taking a semester off from his university education, he goes to Cambodia where he witnesses a poverty that he could not have previously imagined. On his first day there, while walking around the city, he meets a gentleman with missing teeth, a missing leg, and a rickety wooden crutch. When the man sees Craig, smiling broadly he extends an upturned baseball cap in his direction. “Sir?, he said. A faded dirty red t-shirt hung from his body. On the front of the T-shirt were four huge, peeling block letters: WWJD.”
Back home in New Zealand he was used to seeing these letter on bright green rubber wristbands. Almost every nice church youth wore one. Craig writes, “I mumbled a greeting and stuffed a couple of bills into his cap, thinking, ‘It’s the least Jesus would do.” Little did he realize that in setting out to learn about the world, his world was about to be broken open. He discovered that the Gospel he had previously known, did not represent such good news in this reality. “Tame Jesus doesn’t upset the status quo or challenge injustice,” he said. His life since has been dedicated to living alongside and learning from those who live in poverty so that he would cease seeing them as ‘other’ and begin to love them as neighbor and friend. He said, “since my first encounter with those who are poor, I have found that if I pray for God to move a mountain, I must be prepared to wake up next to a shovel.”[1]
Spending time with each other does change us. Whether it involves sharing lives and stories with people we meet at the food pantry, in the grocery story, harvesting vegetables in Gideon’s Garden, or sitting down to a meal with an old friend or someone we are just beginning to know, we can be opened to a new way of seeing and a new way of experiencing God’s work in the world and God’s claim on our lives. We can discover the humanity that we share while learning from our differences in the way we see and experience the world. This gift of relationship can lead to greater compassion and kindness. This sharing of life is what we need to begin to understand this God-created amazing, challenging, and complex world where everyone and everything is precious and irreplaceable in God’s eyes; each of us needed to shine a light in the darkness.
Our longing to follow Jesus is all about community. It is all about relationships in this faith community and relationships in the larger world. Jesus’ commandment was to love God by loving each other as we have been loved. And means that we must see each other, listen to each other, walk alongside each other. This story of the beginning church, while radical, touches our deepest hopes for community, justice, generosity, and meaning. It expresses what is possible when people fully embrace the crucified and risen Christ, resting in what the Holy Spirit can accomplish.
Pope Francis in his TED talk invited his listeners into a revolution: a revolution of tenderness. Tenderness he says, “is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears, and the hands. Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. Tenderness means to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need.”
This revolution of tenderness does not require that we give up our lives or give up all that we possess. What it does require is for us to give ourselves to the power of God working in and through us so as a community of faithful people united in purpose and identity we can become witnesses and participants in God’s reign on earth. This ministry is not a thing of the past or a faint hope for the future, but continues through the empowering Spirit of God, in the life of communities of faith.
In the Gospel reading this morning, Jesus tells his followers, the religious leaders, and others gathered following his healing of the man born blind, that he has come to heal, to set free, and to give us not just life, but life in abundance. Not just surviving, but flourishing, not just getting by, but thriving; not just existence, but joy.
Here at Grace Church we are called to be companions for each other, we are invited to recognize God’s love and God light in ourselves and in others, and we are empowered through God’s love to share what we have with the world so that all may experience life, and have it abundantly.
As Christians, relationships are central to who we are. It is not about doing good works, it is about accepting the gift of the presence of others that transforms us. Living the Christian life and excluding others, is a contradiction in terms. Maya Angelou (1928–2014) had it right in her poem “Alone.”
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
[1] Craig Greenfield. Subversive Jesus: An adventure in Justice, mercy, and faithfulness in a broken world. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016, 18.