Count on Me: Community
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – November 12, 2023
Count on Me: Community – 1 John: 4: 7-12
Nathan Pyle’s comic series, Strange Planet, follows a planet of blue beings without gender or race who have human traditions and behaviors but discuss them in highly technical terminology, such as saying "I crave star damage" instead of "I want to get a sun tan."
One of Pyle’s strips describes well my feelings about the original version of the board game Monopoly. Two aliens are shown with the game between them. One asks, “But how does the game end?” The other replies, “In sadness.”
I have played some fun rounds of original Monopoly, but in my experience it does so often end “in sadness,” and I think that’s probably because it encourages hoarding for some and starving for others. It’s like real life can be but doesn’t have to be.
On more than one occasion, I have played Monopoly with children and adults who couldn’t handle it. Some cry. Some get angry. Some throw pieces or toss the board and storm away.
On more than one occasion though, I’ve played with children who decided the game would be fun if they just agreed to break the rules together by sharing paper money and buildings and avenues, sometimes giving up the rounds entirely just to create a whole new story and imagined life for the little pieces on the board.
Early Christian communities were breaking the rules, too. They were imagining a whole new way of living and being together. Their renewed way of living was based less on the practices of honor and shame surrounding their blood family or the strict confines of cultural and religious law, and was founded more on the expansive love of God that they knew in Christ.
In letters like the one we read today and descriptions of the earliest communities in the book of Acts, we find that they shared what they had and became a close-knit, family-like network of support for each other. These communities came to include folks of diverse wealth statuses and cultural backgrounds. Those who offered leadership in these communities included young people, older people, women, men, and folks described as eunuchs who existed outside binary gender understandings.
Many were estranged from their blood families either because they had left home to find work or because they were ostracized for their Christ-following beliefs or behaviors. That was the first century community to whom the writer of today’s scripture wrote. Those were the ones he called “Beloved” and encouraged to “love one another.”
Like many of you, I know intimately what it means to have very few or no people in my geographic area who are committed to me by blood ties. In every place I’ve moved I have had to knit myself a new network and while I have a lot of advantages that make it easier I still can’t say it’s easy to do.
I think one of the things that makes it harder is the common myth, to which I am not immune, that each one of us should be sufficient on our own. Or that each marriage should provide all the emotional and social needs either partner ever has. Or that each nuclear family ought to be able to handle all the pressures and responsibilities that they have on their own. According to this myth, friendships are frivolous and intergenerational or communal living is a sign of someone’s failure. But those aren’t things I read in the Bible. Neither are they rules that seem to make us very happy.
No one is an island. Friends are important, and it takes a village to care for anyone. After all, Jesus himself highly valued his friends, those named twelve and others too. He also often set off the miracle of sharing, turning a few loaves and fishes into enough to feed thousands.
In her book, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, Mia Birdsong quotes David Hackett Fisher when she explains that “the word free is derived from the Indo-European friya which means “beloved.” Friend also shares this common root with freedom.”
In this country that so highly values individual freedom, what if we understood freedom to mean a network of friendship, belovedness, and well-being? What if we understood freedom to mean that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need–love, food, shelter, safety? I think that’s the kind of Christ-like belovedness the writer of today’s scripture is encouraging their audience toward.
I think it would be lovely to see how that could be acted out on a nation-wide or global stage. But in the meantime, I take a lot of comforting hope from the practices of this kind of community building that I see in churches and beyond churches, too.
I talked to you last week about how much I love trick-or-treating because of its potential as a love-filled community-building practice, but I also see the community-building potential in so many practices that so many of us engage in on a weekly, monthly, annual, or occasional basis. I see it in our church’s weekly Men’s Breakfast and Sacred Stories groups. I see it in baptisms, in potlucks, in Sunday Schools, in Soup Kettle, in fellowship times, and in baby dedications. I see it in Thanksgiving gatherings, in book clubs, in supper co-ops, in monthly full moon bike rides, in the annual Gail Borden Public Library Dia De Los Muertos ofrenda, in LGBTQ Pride Parades, and in neighborhood block parties.
There are plenty of pundits who will tell you to be afraid, very afraid of your neighbors. I’m not saying don’t lock your doors or don’t take proper security measures. I’m saying we’re living in an epidemic of loneliness and the only way out is by actions that build community.
Whether we name Christ’s presence or not, I believe we find that holy love anywhere we are knitting together networks of kindness, neighborliness, and care.
Today’s scripture talks about the costs of Christ’s sacrifice. Among us we have different understandings of how that works and what it means. Today’s scripture uses the word atone however. It could be literally understood to mean at-one. Across the spectrum of Christian understanding of what Christ’s saving work is and means for us, there is strong agreement that God’s love as known in Christ makes us at-one with each other and at-one with God.
While I’m not sure this scripture, likely written well after the time of Jesus as an interpretation of a community of followers, names entirely my understanding of or experience of Christ, I do know that love and community building often cost something. Sometimes it’s actual money that helps give you enough bandwidth to build community. But I’m thinking more of other costs. I’m thinking about the costs of vulnerability and the costs of time to put yourself out there to give or receive someone’s help or attention.
Those networks of community are not always easy to build. They will cost us something. But I believe the potential love and freedom we can experience and share is worth it and is from God.
Before moving here eight years ago, I pastored a Church of the Brethren in rural central Iowa. Both my parents and extended family and Parker’s too lived hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania. And we moved there pregnant with our first child. We didn’t really understand at the time exactly how hard it would be to start new careers and become parents so far from any established network.
A saving grace was the patterns that church had for building community even with the pastor’s family. They held weekly potlucks and invited us to all their age-based small group gatherings. But there were also one or two families in particular who took us in and gave us childcare breaks when we didn’t know how we would handle it all.
One family, whose children were older, was particularly adept at being community for us in worship. While we tried to juggle parenting and pastoring, they would slide into the pew behind us with a bagful of age-appropriate toys, they would make encouraging or silly faces at our curious toddler driving a toy truck along a pew back, and they would even take a screaming baby off our hands to bounce in the back until the service was over. They built this relationship with us over time. We learned to trust each other. It was never lost on me though that they paid a price for supporting our children and us in that they could have sat there in the pew and enjoyed their worship experience encumbered perhaps only by grimacing at a struggling family. But they never seemed to hesitate to scoop us up, and they always seemed to enjoy the relationship they built with our growing children.
Parker and I were supposed to be the pastors, but it was this family who showed us God. For, as this scripture proclaims, God is love. God is love far beyond the connections of community. But for many of us community is where we meet God whenever we encounter the warm glow of love in the laughter of a friend, in the bowl of soup shared, in voices raised in harmony, or in feet washed.
Are our eyes and hearts open to perceive that holy love in our lives?
Are we ready to identify, value, or start new community-building acts?
It’s not always easy but I believe there’s a lot of healing that can happen when we practice building and rebuilding communities in which we can share that holy love. It’s the only antidote to hoarding, loneliness, and violence that I know of. I think it’s how we become the kind of people who can say with integrity, you can count on me.
I give thanks to God that I can count on so many of you.
May we all learn to count on God, too.
May it be so. Amen.
