“Love in Community” based on Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew…

There is a truly great Facebook group for “Young Clergy Women
International,” and this summer one of the members said, “Hey,
I’m single and live alone, and I’m really lonely in this pandemic.  I
know the grass is always greener, would those of you who live with
people tell me what is really annoying about that right now?”  Let
me say, there were A LOT of responses, including people living alone
saying it helped them to know and people living with others saying it
helped them not feel so bad about being annoyed.

A few years ago now, I came across a rather radical idea:  churches
are places of spiritual growth not IN SPITE OF disagreements,
pettiness, and annoyances with each other, but because of them.  Now,
every church I’ve ever met would prefer to be seen as made up
entirely of agreeable people who are never petty nor annoyed with
each other.  It feels like better advertising.  After all, churches
want to be expressions of God’s love in the world, and it seems like
it would be best to AT LEAST like each other.

And yet, and forgive me if you didn’t know this yet, sometimes people
are annoying.  To be fair, often the things other people do that
annoy us say a lot more about us than about them, but the point
remains – being in community means being in relationship with
people who will annoy you, people you will disagree with, and quite
often the work that people find important, you won’t.  This applies
to the people we live within the pandemic, and the people we go to
church with.  There is no perfect church.  They are all comprised of
people.

This radical idea, though, was this is the POINT.  Because if
spirituality is just about “God and me” it is really easy to
think you are doing well, growing, becoming sanctified.  However, if
you are active in faith community, then it becomes imperative that
you get better at loving REAL PEOPLE in order to know you are growing
spiritually.  If you aren’t occassionally annoyed, and getting
practice being loving about it, you aren’t growing (says this
theory.)

I love this idea.  It is in our humanity, our brokenness, our
disagreements, even our pettiness, that we grow – and this is the
POINT of community, not one of its weaknesses.

In the past year, the most spiritually helpful idea I’ve come across
came from Brené Brown
suggesting that we assume that “other people are doing their best.”
That is, this is the idea that has most helped me to be more loving,
more patient, and more kind.  This does NOT MEAN that someone else’s
best is OK – sometimes it is not, and cases of abuse are clearly in
this category – but in terms of my response to others, it is
helpful.  I’d also like to note here that while churches are full of
annoyances and disagreements by necessity, there are REAL harms done
by faith communities that need to be taken seriously.  Many of those
involve rejecting God’s beloveds, and/or functioning as an arm of the
status quo when it comes to racism, sexism, heterosexuality,
transphobia, ableism, and other hierarchies.  The work of the church
includes CHANGING so that those harms don’t keep happening.   Yet, it
also involves knowing that we are going to have to keep working on
each of those things, and never become complicit.

Paul suggests that we owe one another nothing but love, and I suspect
this is a far more radical idea that it appears at first.  The
Ancient Roman economy, just like ours, was based on debt.  People
made money by having money and loaning it out for interest.  People
who were poor lost money by being without money.  And much of the
world was motivated by trying to pay off debt.  

To step out of that system, to owe no one anything, kept the rich
from getting richer.  However, I think it also required the support
of community.  Because most people wouldn’t have been able to take
care of themselves without acquiring debt, unless the community was
working together.  So, that suggests that being debt-free meant
participating in the sort of the community that exemplified the
kindom – with people mutually caring for each other.

Then, it makes sense that all that is owed is “love to one another”
because such a community has to have deep bonds of love.  And the
reminders of what good community behavior look like follow in Paul’s
instructions.

The gospel lesson from Matthew comes to similar points – we need to
have ways of caring for our community in order to be well,
relationships matter, God based community looks different,  and we
grow in faith hand in hand with others.

Another way to think about this can be found in a quote by Ann
Voskamp, “Shame
dies when stories are told in safe places.”  Churches
are meant to be those safe places, and for now our Bridging the
Distance Groups are intentionally trying to create those spaces.  The
world uses our shame to control us, to get us to buy things, to
convince us to be or live certain ways.  But God is interested in our
full and abundant lives, free to be and to LOVE.  So God is
interested in making spaces for us to share our stories, and let go
of our shame.

Interestingly, like foregoing debt, foregoing shame requires
community support and enables kindom building.  It also tends to help
us be less petty and deal better with annoyance 😉

So, wherever two or three Jesus followers are gathered, may we learn
to make safe space.  And, in the meantime, may we learn to do it in
alternative ways 😉

Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 6, 2020