“Whoever is not against us is for us”
Proper 21, Year B
September 20, 2009

What does it mean to be Grace Church? What does it mean to be the body of Christ that meets in this place? Those are questions I’ve already asked you from this pulpit before. They are questions I will continue to ask. My hope is that you have begun to ask them of yourself, that you have begun thinking and talking about them. They help us explore what our role in this community is. But they also explore what it means to be community and how to be community.

These are not easy questions for any one or for any congregation, but they are particularly difficult given Grace’s past. They would be difficult even if we didn’t have the history of conflict that we do, for in the twenty-first century, the question of community is at once more pressing than ever before. Community building is more difficult, even though technology seems to have made it easier to communicate.
Community and communication go hand in hand, one can’t create bonds across the aisle, across the generations, across cultural and linguistic divides without communicating clearly and carefully. Yet almost everything in our culture makes such communication more difficult. Our political discourse has devolved into shouting matches, people trying to score points rather than listening, and that carries over into the rest of our culture. Dialog is devalued in favor of making and scoring points.

And then there is the decline of face-to-face communities. Some of you have heard me tell this story before, but it’s a good one, so it bears repeating. As most of you know, I spent most of the last fifteen years teaching in liberal arts colleges as well as serving in ministry. Over that time a vast chasm opened up between my experience, my cultural values and those of the students I was teaching. Of course, that was inevitable. The students got younger every year. But the depth of that chasm came home to me one day in the classroom. As class ended that day, I noticed that as students began to leave the room, not one of the fifteen or twenty was talking to another student. Instead, they had all put in their Ipod buds, pulled out their cellphones, or continued sitting, checking their email. They had abandoned face-to-face community and communication for the virtual variety.

The most obvious reason for such behavior is that my students, even though they were at a small liberal arts college, preferred nurturing community with friends and family who were separated from them by a few hundred feet or hundreds of miles, rather than do the hard work of talking to someone who sat in the desk next to them. Most of us are tempted by such virtual communities. We have facebook pages with dozens, hundreds, sometimes, thousands of friends. We know what those friends are doing from minute to minute, thanks to the status postings. But what is the quality of those relationships?

Of course, it’s easy for someone like me to complain about social networking. I’m over fifty and the realities of the lives of younger people, even people in their thirties, elude me. I don’t text, I can barely see the numbers on a cellphone let alone try to use my thumbs to write messages with it. But it’s not just that. There are now virtual religious communities, apparently. In a way, it’s an extension of the televangelist phenomenon of the seventies and eighties. People related more deeply to the tv-star preacher than to their local church. Now, the relationship is with a virtual community, that may or may not involve real people.
Above and beyond that, here at Grace we worship as a community on Sunday morning, by and large in three distinct and separate congregations. Each week we have visitors who may or may not return, other people who come here seeking connection. But for the most part, we are community on Sunday morning. Some few of us may have relationships that are deeper than that; some of us have known one another for years, decades even, and so there is something of a core, or perhaps cores, webs of relationships. But on the outer boundaries of those webs, there are many others, who are tied to us by the slenderest of threads. With all of these obstacles, how do we create and nurture community?

We should take some small comfort in the fact that early Christian communities described in the New Testament struggled to create and maintain community. Paul’s letters are vivid evidence of the intense conflict that roiled early Christianity, but that conflict is also reflected elsewhere, even in the gospels.

The author of the letter of James urged his community to take care of its weaker members, the ill as well as those who might have strayed from the path. The image of community he depicts is one in which members pray for one another especially for the sick. But the ties that bind them are so strong that they also confess their sins to one another.

In the reading from the Gospel of Mark, we have a pot pourri of sayings, that seem somewhat disjointed. But what unites these disparate sayings is a concern for community. The first odd, saying of Jesus is in response to a rather strange event. An exorcist, who was not a disciple, was casting out demons by invoking the power of Jesus Christ. When the disciples complained rather bitterly, Jesus replied, “whoever is not against us is for us.” Now, what’s odd about this is that just earlier in Mark, the disciples had tried to cast out a demon and were unable to do so. The puzzle is what all this has to do with discipleship, but it would seem to me that Jesus is treating discipleship in rather expansive fashion, “whoever is not against us, is for us.

Then come the central teachings about community. As did the writer of James, Mark wants his readers to recognize the importance of maintaining the community, and the dangers that conflict within the community present. It is not just outsiders who are threats. For Mark, writing around the time of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome that culminated with the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple, the Christian community faced severe, mortal threats from outside.

But there were also threats from within: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” The rest of the sayings ought to be read in light of that. It is not that one should pluck one’s eye out, or cut off one’s foot. What might a community, the body of Christ look like if all of us took seriously our responsibilities toward each other?

It is an exciting time at Grace Church. We have weathered a difficult period and come through. We have survived. But being the body of Christ is more than about keeping the doors open and the electricity on. It is about reaching out to others. Among congregational development literature there is an image that has become something of an old saw—the phrase goes “from maintenance to mission.”

In the weeks I’ve been at Grace Church I have come to learn a great deal about those people who have kept things going for the last decade, the last two or three decades. They’ve done incredible work. But they are tired and ready to pass the torch and the responsibilities on to the rest of us, to younger generations, with new energy and new ideas. In a few minutes, one of those torches will pass quite literally, as we install new leadership for the ECW, the Episcopal Church Women. But that’s only one organization, one area in which new leadership needs to come forward.

To take on those responsibilities, to live into our mission, we all need to roll up our sleeves, bend our knees, get to work, and to pray. We need to do the hard work to build community and the hard work of reaching out and extending that community beyond our doors, beyond the worship service which we find most comfortable, and comforting. The gospel for today concludes with a message that continues to resonate, “have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”