{"id":4591,"date":"2020-09-06T12:58:09","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T12:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/06\/love-in-community-based-on-romans-138-14-and\/"},"modified":"2020-09-06T12:58:09","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T12:58:09","slug":"love-in-community-based-on-romans-138-14-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/06\/love-in-community-based-on-romans-138-14-and\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLove in Community\u201d based on Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew 18:15-20"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

There is a truly great Facebook group for \u201cYoung Clergy Women
\nInternational,\u201d and this summer one of the members said, \u201cHey,
\nI’m single and live alone, and I’m really lonely in this pandemic. \u00a0I
\nknow the grass is always greener, would those of you who live with
\npeople tell me what is really annoying about that right now?\u201d \u00a0Let
\nme say, there were A LOT of responses, including people living alone
\nsaying it helped them to know and people living with others saying it
\nhelped them not feel so bad about being annoyed.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nA few years ago now, I came across a rather radical idea: \u00a0churches
\nare places of spiritual growth not IN SPITE OF disagreements,
\npettiness, and annoyances with each other, but because of them. \u00a0Now,
\nevery church I’ve ever met would prefer to be seen as made up
\nentirely of agreeable people who are never petty nor annoyed with
\neach other. \u00a0It feels like better advertising. \u00a0After all, churches
\nwant to be expressions of God’s love in the world, and it seems like
\nit would be best to AT LEAST like each other.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd yet, and forgive me if you didn’t know this yet, sometimes people
\nare annoying. \u00a0To be fair, often the things other people do that
\nannoy us say a lot more about us than about them, but the point
\nremains \u2013 being in community means being in relationship with
\npeople who will annoy you, people you will disagree with, and quite
\noften the work that people find important, you won’t. \u00a0This applies
\nto the people we live within the pandemic, and the people we go to
\nchurch with. \u00a0There is no perfect church. \u00a0They are all comprised of
\npeople.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nThis radical idea, though, was this is the POINT. \u00a0Because if
\nspirituality is just about \u201cGod and me\u201d it is really easy to
\nthink you are doing well, growing, becoming sanctified. \u00a0However, if
\nyou are active in faith community, then it becomes imperative that
\nyou get better at loving REAL PEOPLE in order to know you are growing
\nspiritually. \u00a0If you aren’t occassionally annoyed, and getting
\npractice being loving about it, you aren’t growing (says this
\ntheory.)<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nI love this idea. \u00a0It is in our humanity, our brokenness, our
\ndisagreements, even our pettiness, that we grow \u2013 and this is the
\nPOINT of community, not one of its weaknesses.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nIn the past year, the most spiritually helpful idea I’ve come across
\ncame from Bren\u00e9 Brown
\nsuggesting that we assume that \u201cother people are doing their best.\u201d
\n That is, this is the idea that has most helped me to be more loving,
\nmore patient, and more kind. \u00a0This does NOT MEAN that someone else’s
\nbest is OK \u2013 sometimes it is not, and cases of abuse are clearly in
\nthis category \u2013 but in terms of my response to others, it is
\nhelpful. \u00a0I’d also like to note here that while churches are full of
\nannoyances and disagreements by necessity, there are REAL harms done
\nby faith communities that need to be taken seriously. \u00a0Many of those
\ninvolve rejecting God’s beloveds, and\/or functioning as an arm of the
\nstatus quo when it comes to racism, sexism, heterosexuality,
\ntransphobia, ableism, and other hierarchies. \u00a0The work of the church
\nincludes CHANGING so that those harms don’t keep happening. \u00a0 Yet, it
\nalso involves knowing that we are going to have to keep working on
\neach of those things, and never become complicit.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nPaul suggests that we owe one another nothing but love, and I suspect
\nthis is a far more radical idea that it appears at first. \u00a0The
\nAncient Roman economy, just like ours, was based on debt. \u00a0People
\nmade money by having money and loaning it out for interest. \u00a0People
\nwho were poor lost money by being without money. \u00a0And much of the
\nworld was motivated by trying to pay off debt. \u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nTo step out of that system, to owe no one anything, kept the rich
\nfrom getting richer. \u00a0However, I think it also required the support
\nof community. \u00a0Because most people wouldn’t have been able to take
\ncare of themselves without acquiring debt, unless the community was
\nworking together. \u00a0So, that suggests that being debt-free meant
\nparticipating in the sort of the community that exemplified the
\nkindom \u2013 with people mutually caring for each other.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nThen, it makes sense that all that is owed is \u201clove to one another\u201d
\nbecause such a community has to have deep bonds of love. \u00a0And the
\nreminders of what good community behavior look like follow in Paul’s
\ninstructions.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nThe gospel lesson from Matthew comes to similar points \u2013 we need to
\nhave ways of caring for our community in order to be well,
\nrelationships matter, God based community looks different, \u00a0and we
\ngrow in faith hand in hand with others.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nAnother way to think about this can be found in a quote by Ann
\nVoskamp, \u201cShame
\ndies when stories are told in safe places.\u201d \u00a0<\/b>Churches
\nare meant to be those safe places, and for now our Bridging the
\nDistance Groups are intentionally trying to create those spaces. \u00a0The
\nworld uses our shame to control us, to get us to buy things, to
\nconvince us to be or live certain ways. \u00a0But God is interested in our
\nfull and abundant lives, free to be and to LOVE. \u00a0So God is
\ninterested in making spaces for us to share our stories, and let go
\nof our shame.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nInterestingly, like foregoing debt, foregoing shame requires
\ncommunity support and enables kindom building. \u00a0It also tends to help
\nus be less petty and deal better with annoyance \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nSo, wherever two or three Jesus followers are gathered, may we learn
\nto make safe space. \u00a0And, in the meantime, may we learn to do it in
\nalternative ways \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nAmen\n<\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/FUMCSchenectady<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

September 6, 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a truly great Facebook group for \u201cYoung Clergy Women International,\u201d and this summer one of the members said, … Continue reading \u201cLove in Community\u201d based on Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew 18:15-20<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,38,28,39,33,1921,1922,1920,56,1919,1666,1923],"class_list":["post-4591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fumc-schenectady","tag-progressive-christianity","tag-rev-sara-e-baron","tag-thinking-church","tag-umc","tag-imho","tag-love-in-community","tag-pauls-letter-to-the-romans-is-the-best-of-his-letters","tag-schenectady","tag-sorry-about-the-umc-we-are-working-on-it","tag-vulnerability","tag-where-two-or-three-are-gathered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}