Rock ‘n Roll
August 24, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: 1 Peter 2:4-10; Romans 12:1-18
Less discouragement, more determination; less distraction, more presence; less me, more we. It sounds like that could be a description of life in Christian community – but it’s actually an ad for Toyota. It’s been running during the Olympics – I’ve been on vacation, so I’ve been able to watch a lot of the Olympics. I’ve noticed that the commercials seem different to me this year – they aren’t so much about achievement and competition as about relationship, family and community. Ad after ad…and there have been plenty of them…talks about how we are connected to one another. From VISA to Hilton, from Toyota to Lockheed Martin, this season the advertising community seems to recognize that our deepest hungers are for relationships and connection.
This is pretty interesting to me – after all, the advertising profession spends a great deal of time and money to learn how to connect with us. Are these needs new? I would argue Yes and. No. Starting with the latter – human needs are pretty basic. People are people, and we are created to live in community, with God and with each other. Jesus, in one episode, boiled down all the teachings of Scripture to love God, love one another. The Bible tells us that God IS love – relationality is of the essence of God, and of us as well, who are made in the image of God. So no, our deep hunger for relationships and connection is not new.
What IS new is the extent to which that hunger is unsatisfied. We are living in a time when, at least in America, people feel less and less connected to each other. Political scientist Robert Putnam documents this loss of connection in his well-known book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In the book, Putnam describes the weakening of community bonds in recent decades, noting that in 1987, 53% of baby boomers (people my age, born between 1945-65) “…thought that their parents’ generation was better in terms of ‘being a concerned citizen, involved in helping others in the community….’ while 77% said the nation was worse off because of ‘less involvement in community activities.’ In 1992 three-quarters of the U.S. workforce said that ‘the breakdown of community’ and ‘selfishness’ were ‘serious’ or ‘extremely serious’ problems in America….In several surveys in 1999, two-thirds of Americans said that America’s civil life had weakened in recent years, that social and moral values were higher when they were growing up, and that our society was focused more on the individual than the community. More than 80 percent said there should be more emphasis on community, even if that put more demands on individuals.”
He summarizes: “…across a very wide range of activities, the last several decades have witnessed a strong diminution of regular contacts with our friends and neighbors. We spend less time in conversation over meals, we exchange visits less, we engage less frequently in leisure activities that encourage casual social interaction, we spend more time watching…and less time doing. We know neighbors less well and we see old friends less often.” We are less connected than we used to be, and we are hungry for connection. And I’m thinking that buying a Toyota, or staying at the Hilton, or using our VISA cards are not going to satisfy this deeply human need for connection.
Communities not only connect us with each other – they connect us with ourselves. Community life is a source of identity, tradition and ethics. Community life connects us not only with others in the present moment, but strengthens our sense of connection to history. And the bonds we create within communities help to give us the confidence and the context from which to reach out to others outside the community. In the community of the church, we think of that as mission. Our community life helps communities to network, and builds a culture of interlocking connectionalism.
So here we are in the first decade of the twenty-first century, most of us very busy, and whatever it is that we’re busy with is interfering with one of our most essential needs: to be significantly connected with each other and with God. The Bible argues for these connections – even in the era when it was written, a time of more connection and greater social and tribal identity, the kind of community envisioned in the Bible was a radical community of mutuality, of deep caring for and about one another. Jesus said to his disciples, “they will know you are my disciples by the way you love one another.” And in fact one of the startling dimensions of the early Church was the development of communities of mutual affection and care, communities of sharing, of breaking bread together, worshiping together, and caring deeply for one another. These communities did not come naturally – even then, they were counter-cultural.
Paul, in his letter to the Romans, describes life in community. He opens this paragraph by reminding the Romans, that being radically connected to one another takes sacrifice, and is part of how we worship God. And he underscores that (even in his time) this kind of connection is not the way everyone else lives. We usually take these first two verses as individual advice – the second verse was one of the first I ever memorized, and it does work on an individual level: do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you might prove what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect. But, Paul was talking to a community, and as we read on, it is clear that this advice is about how we live together. Here are the first five verses again:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.
“We are members one of another.” That implies a very different kind of membership than people often consider. When people become members of an organization – like a country club, or a professional association, even a union – generally we assume that we pay our dues and then are entitled to certain benefits. But that’s not what membership in the church is about at all. The church really isn’t a membership organization in that sense – it is a radical community of Christian disciples. We join it because we want to be formed as disciples, people who (in the words of the prophet Micah) “…seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” Church folks aren’t in it to GET something, we’re in it to GIVE something. We give ourselves, to each other, to God, and for God’s sake to the world. And we are members one of another – we are radically connected to one another, the way body parts are connected. If we’re doing it right, our fates are inextricably bound up together.
And a great deal of instruction throughout the whole Bible, especially the New Testament, is teaching us how to live together…because it’s not easy. Although it meets our deepest human need, it requires making choices that are hard sometimes – we choose what’s best for someone else instead of what we want – that’s what Jesus meant when he spoke of dying to self.
The marvelous passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that describes love was not written about marriage, although we most often hear it read at weddings. And no wonder – it is a beautiful description of love. But Paul wrote this passage to help the Corinthians learn to live together in community.
Christian community is a radical enterprise – it requires a lot from us, but ironically, gives back more. There’s a new book out this month, by Dick Meyer of National Public Radio, called Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millenium. In it, he discusses Christopher Lasch’s book Culture of Narcissism saying, “The epic myth, the big lie, of modern American, Lasch argued, is that deep character and a core identity can be intentionally made in near isolation. They can’t. Culture has transformed a sensible concept of ‘the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.’ [Meyer continues:] The double irony it that indulging your self now trumps doing for others in our culture. But the surest path to your self, to pride and contentment, is through others.” We are members one of another.
Paul is not the only New Testament writer who talks about community. Peter, in the portion of his letter we read, equates being in relationship with God to being in relationship with one another: Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Peter also speaks in his letter about being living stones, built into a spiritual house. My brother and sister-in-law have a horse ranch in Arizona. For a number of years they had a ranch hand named Alfredo. Most of Alfredo’s work was the most basic physical labor of ranching: mucking the stalls, washing the horses. But Alfredo also had a real gift – he built stone walls. He would gather stones from the ranch property, and meticulously gather them into a wall. He didn’t use mortar, he just fit the stones together – looking for the right stone for a given space. The stones fit together, each one different, yet something strong and beautiful together. Each stone right for its spot. They are members one of another. On the cover of the bulletin this morning is a photograph of one of the stone walls from the ranch – you can see a horse pen in the background.
I think life in the church is a lot like Alfredo’s stone walls – we are stronger when we connect to one another – none of us needs to be the whole wall, because we are in it together. PCUSA Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons makes the same point in the letter he wrote to the whole church, included in today’s bulletin, where he concludes, “We are the stuff God is putting together to build God’s church.” We connect in relationships, and we connect to get the work of the church done. Each of us has a role to play, and each person’s contributions are essential.
The marvelous thing is that we don’t just form the community – the community forms us. We are different when we share our lives with others, when we find our lives with each other. But it doesn’t just happen. As Dick Meyer concludes in Why We Hate Us, “It takes effort to keep a group together. It is easy to let go of group activities that take effort and patience in the shuffle of a busy life.”
The books I’ve referred to this morning, are (other than the Bible) written by a social scientist and a news editor – but even they recognize the crucial role of religious communities. Meyer speaks frequently of the importance of his own Jewish identity. Putnam is even clearer, and writes “Faith-based communities remain such a crucial reservoir of social capital in American that it is hard to see how we could redress the erosion of the last several decades without a major religious contribution…. So I challenge America’s clergy, lay leaders, theologians, and ordinary worshipers: Let us spur a new, pluralistic, socially-responsible ‘great awakening’ so that by 2010 Americans will be more deeply engaged than we are today in one or another spiritual community of meaning, while at the same time becoming more tolerant of the faiths and practices of other Americans.”
Most folks at Frame are pretty good at tolerating other faiths, but in recent years like the rest of busy America, we have lost some of the vitality of community living that Frame used to practice. I’ve heard folks talk about ways they used to connect. Let’s take the time – let’s make the time to connect with one another again. Over the last year, we’ve started small: we had some kind of brunch or other fellowship event almost every month. Let’s keep doing that, but let’s do more – let’s find ways to connect with one another, to share our lives with one another. I wrote about this in the August and September newsletters – and in the September newsletter there are a few ideas for getting together. If you have an idea, for a breakfast group or a mission project or getting together once a quarter to hike the Ice Age Trail – don’t wait for me to get it organized. I’m happy to be helpful, but we are members one of another.
And community life can do more than just give us time together – communities can actually become places of healing. John Dominic Crossan, in his book God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now which the Men’s Group is reading, argues for a distinction between curing and healing. He says that disease refers to the biological problem, while illness describes the psycho-social results of disease – the way we become isolated, or stigmatized, or depressed because of our disease. He writes: “Thus, diseases are cured, while illnesses are healed. Sometimes a disease can be cured, but very often the best that can be done is to heal the illness that surrounds it.” Yet many people, either because of their temperament or the circumstances of life, or the particulars of disease, find themselves profoundly alone during a health crisis. Crossan argues that communities can mitigate this, and so can become agents of healing. He says, “Healing is what happens within a community of concern, support, and assistance, and that is a sociosomatic [happening through social processes] and not just a psychosomatic reality.” In other words, communities heal illness – by mitigating the isolation and stigmatization of disease, and by supporting people through times of disease, life in community can heal illness – the negative conditions connected to disease.
Relationships aren’t just a great ad-pitch during the Olympics. Community living is life-giving – it can provide identity, heal illness, and enable us to reach beyond our own community to others. It’s how we are meant to live. May it be so – may we be so. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: 1 Peter 2:4-10; Romans 12:1-18
Less discouragement, more determination; less distraction, more presence; less me, more we. It sounds like that could be a description of life in Christian community – but it’s actually an ad for Toyota. It’s been running during the Olympics – I’ve been on vacation, so I’ve been able to watch a lot of the Olympics. I’ve noticed that the commercials seem different to me this year – they aren’t so much about achievement and competition as about relationship, family and community. Ad after ad…and there have been plenty of them…talks about how we are connected to one another. From VISA to Hilton, from Toyota to Lockheed Martin, this season the advertising community seems to recognize that our deepest hungers are for relationships and connection.
This is pretty interesting to me – after all, the advertising profession spends a great deal of time and money to learn how to connect with us. Are these needs new? I would argue Yes and. No. Starting with the latter – human needs are pretty basic. People are people, and we are created to live in community, with God and with each other. Jesus, in one episode, boiled down all the teachings of Scripture to love God, love one another. The Bible tells us that God IS love – relationality is of the essence of God, and of us as well, who are made in the image of God. So no, our deep hunger for relationships and connection is not new.
What IS new is the extent to which that hunger is unsatisfied. We are living in a time when, at least in America, people feel less and less connected to each other. Political scientist Robert Putnam documents this loss of connection in his well-known book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In the book, Putnam describes the weakening of community bonds in recent decades, noting that in 1987, 53% of baby boomers (people my age, born between 1945-65) “…thought that their parents’ generation was better in terms of ‘being a concerned citizen, involved in helping others in the community….’ while 77% said the nation was worse off because of ‘less involvement in community activities.’ In 1992 three-quarters of the U.S. workforce said that ‘the breakdown of community’ and ‘selfishness’ were ‘serious’ or ‘extremely serious’ problems in America….In several surveys in 1999, two-thirds of Americans said that America’s civil life had weakened in recent years, that social and moral values were higher when they were growing up, and that our society was focused more on the individual than the community. More than 80 percent said there should be more emphasis on community, even if that put more demands on individuals.”
He summarizes: “…across a very wide range of activities, the last several decades have witnessed a strong diminution of regular contacts with our friends and neighbors. We spend less time in conversation over meals, we exchange visits less, we engage less frequently in leisure activities that encourage casual social interaction, we spend more time watching…and less time doing. We know neighbors less well and we see old friends less often.” We are less connected than we used to be, and we are hungry for connection. And I’m thinking that buying a Toyota, or staying at the Hilton, or using our VISA cards are not going to satisfy this deeply human need for connection.
Communities not only connect us with each other – they connect us with ourselves. Community life is a source of identity, tradition and ethics. Community life connects us not only with others in the present moment, but strengthens our sense of connection to history. And the bonds we create within communities help to give us the confidence and the context from which to reach out to others outside the community. In the community of the church, we think of that as mission. Our community life helps communities to network, and builds a culture of interlocking connectionalism.
So here we are in the first decade of the twenty-first century, most of us very busy, and whatever it is that we’re busy with is interfering with one of our most essential needs: to be significantly connected with each other and with God. The Bible argues for these connections – even in the era when it was written, a time of more connection and greater social and tribal identity, the kind of community envisioned in the Bible was a radical community of mutuality, of deep caring for and about one another. Jesus said to his disciples, “they will know you are my disciples by the way you love one another.” And in fact one of the startling dimensions of the early Church was the development of communities of mutual affection and care, communities of sharing, of breaking bread together, worshiping together, and caring deeply for one another. These communities did not come naturally – even then, they were counter-cultural.
Paul, in his letter to the Romans, describes life in community. He opens this paragraph by reminding the Romans, that being radically connected to one another takes sacrifice, and is part of how we worship God. And he underscores that (even in his time) this kind of connection is not the way everyone else lives. We usually take these first two verses as individual advice – the second verse was one of the first I ever memorized, and it does work on an individual level: do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you might prove what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect. But, Paul was talking to a community, and as we read on, it is clear that this advice is about how we live together. Here are the first five verses again:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.
“We are members one of another.” That implies a very different kind of membership than people often consider. When people become members of an organization – like a country club, or a professional association, even a union – generally we assume that we pay our dues and then are entitled to certain benefits. But that’s not what membership in the church is about at all. The church really isn’t a membership organization in that sense – it is a radical community of Christian disciples. We join it because we want to be formed as disciples, people who (in the words of the prophet Micah) “…seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” Church folks aren’t in it to GET something, we’re in it to GIVE something. We give ourselves, to each other, to God, and for God’s sake to the world. And we are members one of another – we are radically connected to one another, the way body parts are connected. If we’re doing it right, our fates are inextricably bound up together.
And a great deal of instruction throughout the whole Bible, especially the New Testament, is teaching us how to live together…because it’s not easy. Although it meets our deepest human need, it requires making choices that are hard sometimes – we choose what’s best for someone else instead of what we want – that’s what Jesus meant when he spoke of dying to self.
The marvelous passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that describes love was not written about marriage, although we most often hear it read at weddings. And no wonder – it is a beautiful description of love. But Paul wrote this passage to help the Corinthians learn to live together in community.
Christian community is a radical enterprise – it requires a lot from us, but ironically, gives back more. There’s a new book out this month, by Dick Meyer of National Public Radio, called Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millenium. In it, he discusses Christopher Lasch’s book Culture of Narcissism saying, “The epic myth, the big lie, of modern American, Lasch argued, is that deep character and a core identity can be intentionally made in near isolation. They can’t. Culture has transformed a sensible concept of ‘the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.’ [Meyer continues:] The double irony it that indulging your self now trumps doing for others in our culture. But the surest path to your self, to pride and contentment, is through others.” We are members one of another.
Paul is not the only New Testament writer who talks about community. Peter, in the portion of his letter we read, equates being in relationship with God to being in relationship with one another: Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Peter also speaks in his letter about being living stones, built into a spiritual house. My brother and sister-in-law have a horse ranch in Arizona. For a number of years they had a ranch hand named Alfredo. Most of Alfredo’s work was the most basic physical labor of ranching: mucking the stalls, washing the horses. But Alfredo also had a real gift – he built stone walls. He would gather stones from the ranch property, and meticulously gather them into a wall. He didn’t use mortar, he just fit the stones together – looking for the right stone for a given space. The stones fit together, each one different, yet something strong and beautiful together. Each stone right for its spot. They are members one of another. On the cover of the bulletin this morning is a photograph of one of the stone walls from the ranch – you can see a horse pen in the background.
I think life in the church is a lot like Alfredo’s stone walls – we are stronger when we connect to one another – none of us needs to be the whole wall, because we are in it together. PCUSA Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons makes the same point in the letter he wrote to the whole church, included in today’s bulletin, where he concludes, “We are the stuff God is putting together to build God’s church.” We connect in relationships, and we connect to get the work of the church done. Each of us has a role to play, and each person’s contributions are essential.
The marvelous thing is that we don’t just form the community – the community forms us. We are different when we share our lives with others, when we find our lives with each other. But it doesn’t just happen. As Dick Meyer concludes in Why We Hate Us, “It takes effort to keep a group together. It is easy to let go of group activities that take effort and patience in the shuffle of a busy life.”
The books I’ve referred to this morning, are (other than the Bible) written by a social scientist and a news editor – but even they recognize the crucial role of religious communities. Meyer speaks frequently of the importance of his own Jewish identity. Putnam is even clearer, and writes “Faith-based communities remain such a crucial reservoir of social capital in American that it is hard to see how we could redress the erosion of the last several decades without a major religious contribution…. So I challenge America’s clergy, lay leaders, theologians, and ordinary worshipers: Let us spur a new, pluralistic, socially-responsible ‘great awakening’ so that by 2010 Americans will be more deeply engaged than we are today in one or another spiritual community of meaning, while at the same time becoming more tolerant of the faiths and practices of other Americans.”
Most folks at Frame are pretty good at tolerating other faiths, but in recent years like the rest of busy America, we have lost some of the vitality of community living that Frame used to practice. I’ve heard folks talk about ways they used to connect. Let’s take the time – let’s make the time to connect with one another again. Over the last year, we’ve started small: we had some kind of brunch or other fellowship event almost every month. Let’s keep doing that, but let’s do more – let’s find ways to connect with one another, to share our lives with one another. I wrote about this in the August and September newsletters – and in the September newsletter there are a few ideas for getting together. If you have an idea, for a breakfast group or a mission project or getting together once a quarter to hike the Ice Age Trail – don’t wait for me to get it organized. I’m happy to be helpful, but we are members one of another.
And community life can do more than just give us time together – communities can actually become places of healing. John Dominic Crossan, in his book God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now which the Men’s Group is reading, argues for a distinction between curing and healing. He says that disease refers to the biological problem, while illness describes the psycho-social results of disease – the way we become isolated, or stigmatized, or depressed because of our disease. He writes: “Thus, diseases are cured, while illnesses are healed. Sometimes a disease can be cured, but very often the best that can be done is to heal the illness that surrounds it.” Yet many people, either because of their temperament or the circumstances of life, or the particulars of disease, find themselves profoundly alone during a health crisis. Crossan argues that communities can mitigate this, and so can become agents of healing. He says, “Healing is what happens within a community of concern, support, and assistance, and that is a sociosomatic [happening through social processes] and not just a psychosomatic reality.” In other words, communities heal illness – by mitigating the isolation and stigmatization of disease, and by supporting people through times of disease, life in community can heal illness – the negative conditions connected to disease.
Relationships aren’t just a great ad-pitch during the Olympics. Community living is life-giving – it can provide identity, heal illness, and enable us to reach beyond our own community to others. It’s how we are meant to live. May it be so – may we be so. Amen.