Becoming The Beloved Community

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost, September 27, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

“To some God and Jesus may appeal in a way other than to us: some may come to faith in God and to love, without a conscious attachment to Jesus. Both nature and good men [sic] besides Jesus may lead us to God. They who seek God with all their hearts must, however, some day on their way meet Jesus.

  --Weingel and Widgery, Jesus in the 19th Century and After

In our highly individualized, consumer culture there is a tendency to think of everything in terms of how it affects “me.” Faith as the relationship between an entire people, the entire human family, with the living God gets recast (especially after Descartes) as a purely individualized affair, a private decision one person makes in the depths of her heart. Now, of course, there is an individual element to religious faith. Each of us has to speak our “yes” to God not only with our lips but with our lives. We can choose, like the Egyptians, to worship the false Gods of power, control, domination, and profit at the expense of the subjugated others, or we can open ourselves to God’s mercy, justice, and peace. We saw a couple of weeks ago the dire consequences of this decision. The Egyptians drown under the weight of their oppressive societal structures where the few profit from the servitude of the many. The Unforgiving Servant, having received forgiveness of his debt by the King chooses not to forgive someone in his debt. And the result is a hot, tooth-gnashing, and claustrophobic place of loneliness and isolation. Hell, to be certain, but a hell of his own making and choosing.

If we only think of religious faith and the path of Christian discipleship in terms of individual choice, however, we miss a dominant feature of the story of God as recounted in Holy Scripture. Remember, God’s desire is to fashion for Godself a people, a nation who will be a light to all nations. God’s desire is for the building up of a community of peace, justice, and reconciliation that will spread across the globe. Time and again in the story of Israel we have instances of the outward forms and ordinances of faith being observed to the neglect of love for one’s neighbor--the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the land. The Book of Kings is a classic, darkly comic, case. We see the pattern of a good King being raised up to call the people back to justice and love, the people taking heed and changing their behavior, and then eventually falling away from righteousness and going back to their old habits. Judgement ensues. The people recognize the error of their ways, repent and turn back to the Lord and the whole cycle begins again.

The prophet Isaiah, in a passage we normally hear during Lent puts his finger on this human-all-too-human pattern: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high (58:3-4).” Outward observance, without an inward conversion of heart, without a transformation of the systems of oppression that keep some people on top and others languishing on the bottom, is worse than nothing at all in the Lord’s eyes. What, then, is the real fast? A few verses later in Isaiah, the Lord says,

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard (58: 6-8).

The fast is not a matter of us individually ticking a few dietary boxes! That couldn’t be further from God’s ultimate purpose to create a community of character, a community of love, the beloved community where the dignity of each person is cherished and celebrated as created in the image and likeness of God. The true fast is a fast from exclusion, division, and fear. The true fast is the recognition, naming, and dismantling of all systems of oppression that prevent God’s children, all of God’s children, from living full, free, and abundant lives. The true fast is feeding the hungry, ensuring access to quality physical and mental health care,  sheltering those without homes. In the richest, most powerful, country in the history of the human race we have to acknowledge that there is room at the inn; we’ve just erected a No Vacancy sign on our collective hearts. Milk and honey is not to be hoarded up as private treasure. They are for all.

So the movement of God, the pressure of God’s love on God’s people, is always, always, always towards greater freedom, greater justice, greater reconciliation, greater peace, greater inclusion, greater care for God’s good creation. The question is whether we--individually and corporately--can cooperate with the trajectory of grace for the building up of the beloved community that this fragile earth our island home might come to more closely resemble the Kingdom of Heaven where there is no one left out of the banquet of Divine Love. That’s what it means to be a disciple of Christ, to follow Jesus down the way of love: that we might become partakers, participants, embodied agents, of His heavenly treasure and spread it with open hands wherever we go.

For Christians, whenever we encounter egregious failings of love our first step is to acknowledge the ways we’ve fallen short of manifesting the Kingdom here on earth and repent and return to the Lord. We look to Jesus. We strive to see him more clearly and follow him more nearly every day. Through daily dwelling on God’s word as revealed to us in Holy Scripture (particularly in the Gospels), through daily prayer, through living and giving sacrificially of our time talent and treasure, through worship in community (even online in these times of the pandemic), through lifting our voices with the prophets to witness to justice and peace, we gradually come in our broken, fragile, fickle human frames to resemble a little more the love we see fully revealed once-and-for-all in the person and work of Jesus. In this way, we could say that a failure of justice is a failure of discipleship, a failure to partake fully in the heavenly, world-transforming treasure that is life in Jesus. 

So the call is always to go deeper, to learn to bear the beams of love as William Blake says. The call is always to surrender more fully as Jesus surrendered to his Father’s will. The call is always to give ourselves over to transformative encounter with the living God and allow ourselves to be remade into a people whose hearts are always open, whose gates are never shut, transparent and pliable to God’s will in every situation. Faith is no mere intellectual assent to propositional truth, but relationship--relationship with Jesus and through Jesus in the Spirit with the Father. Everything hinges on that cultivation, on the openness and receptivity to the love of Jesus and letting that love be ground from which our compassionate action emerges. Apart from Him, we can do nothing.

That’s why we have that lovely reading from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians--a hymn from earliest days of the Church. In a few short verses we get a perfect image in miniature of the shape of Jesus’ life and the shape our lives, through participation in his life, are to take. It’s often referred to as the kenotic hymn, the hymn of self-emptying love. Through participation in the disciplines, practices, and holy habits of the Church handed down from warm hand to warm hand over centuries, we come to embody and enact in our lives the same self-emptying love we see in the person and work of Jesus. His life becomes ours to such a degree that we can say with Paul his Letter to the Galatians, “... [A]nd it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (2:20). The life with me at the center--my wants, my requirements, my agendas, my prejudices and preconceptions--is released, emptied, and surrendered that His life might live itself through me. 

When we uncenter ourselves from ourselves, from our egos, from our petty likes and dislikes, and surrender to the love of Christ, the fruit is always justice, inclusion, peace, stewardship of our planet and care for the last, the least, the lost, and left behind. The Beloved Community begins with touching and integrating our own belovedness on a daily basis and then being instruments of that belovedness for others. The Beloved Community begins as an inside job, but flowers into a community where no one is left out, where no one lives in fear of persecution because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation, where no one has to go without access to food, shelter, or quality health care. 

That’s the difference the Church makes in a time of fear, division, and exclusion. It reminds us that fear and division, scapegoating and violence are not the way forward or the final word. The Church reminds us that the only reality worthy of the name is love. But more than than, the Church provides us with a way, a path, a set of holy habits and dispositions towards making love a manifest reality. When the Church walks that path--individually and collectively--we become Moses’ staff striking the rock at Horeb. We strike the stone of fear, exclusion, racism, and scapegoating violence with the love of Jesus and become that water in the wilderness for a parched and thirsty world.  The way forward is clear. The path is laid out and well-trod by the likes of Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Catherine of Genoa all those in every generation who, burning with the Spirit’s power, show us how to be a people of hope, justice and love. 

Will we walk it? Will we journey this year into Becoming the Beloved Community and participate in God’s work of making all things new? Our “yes” leads us more deeply into God’s dream for the world. Our “no” leads to more of the same--not God’s dream, but to the human-constructed nightmare we see so often in a world on fire all about us.