Doing Life Together – What Makes A True Community – Sermon – Pastor Dave Page

Now I’ve shared a part of this with you already a few weeks ago when we introduced the idea of kicking off the church ministry year with Bonhoeffer’s book as a foundation for us looking at our own community. This morning and for the next 4 weeks, we want to dig a little deeper into that with you. Let me start with a statement this morning that may cause you to take pause as we think about Community. It’s where Bonhoeffer himself starts.

Would you accept that Community, particularly a faith community is a by-product experience rather than the most important experience?

You see, if you think about this, community is usually the outcome of what you get when you are focusing on something else. It’s a by-product of some other focus. Community is the result of living together. The Psalmist begins in verse 1 with a statement that seems too obvious to mention:

“How good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity!”  

Well, duh David, who doesn’t believe that? But the Psalm writer isn’t telling us this because he thinks we aren’t aware of this fact. He is telling us because he knows that we know that it’s true. This is a statement of affirmation not information. In this affirmation David also provides us with a basic definition of community. The notion of unity comes from the phrase, “God’s people living together” – with particular stress on the word “together.” Community is a result of doing life together.

In one of his songs, John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” In the same way, community is what happens when you’re focusing on something else. Community is a byproduct of life together, not an end in itself. Maybe that’s why our efforts to create community so often fail. We focus on community instead of on our purpose and calling. Or rather, we focus on our personal experience of community instead of concentrating on the basics doing life together. In this book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns of the danger of confusing Christian community with an ideal of “some extraordinary social experience” not to be found elsewhere. Community, even Christian Community is not the goal. In fact, can I suggest that a desire to create Christian community for that purpose alone is in fact dangerous. Instead of creating true Christian community, this kind of idealism actually puts up barriers to the attempt, because it is usually an imaginary fabrication. It results in a model of Christian community that is based on mostly wishful thinking, nostalgia or even rhetoric. God, on the other hand, has designed the Christian community to function in the real world. To do life together in here and now. That means that before we can experience it, God sometimes has to shatter and reform our illusions.

Bonhoeffer writes about this:

“The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realize it,” . “But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

So what is the ideal Christian Community then? Well let me tell you what it’s not. First of all, it’s not some ideal out there to which we yearn, but instead, it is the experience we are having right here, right now, in the weeks and months ahead. It is our life in pilgrimage. Life together. This place. These people. Perhaps that’s why David uses the metaphor of family in this verse. At first glance, it may seem a little surprising, especially in view of David’s own family history. David didn’t always get along with his own brothers. The tension is palpable in the exchange between David and Eliab as David tries to find out what Saul will do to reward the man who defeats Goliath.

First Samuel 17:28-29 says, 

“When Eliab, David’s oldest brother, heard him speaking with the men, he burned with anger at him and asked, ‘Why have you come down here? And with whom did you leave those few sheep in the desert? I know how conceited you are and how wicked your heart is; you came down only to watch the battle.’ ‘Now what have I done?” said David. ‘Can’t I even speak?'” 

David’s relationship with his sons was hardly an improvement. Families provide us with a sense of belonging, but our families – at least most of the families I know – are not like the ones I see in the Hallmark Christmas movies. They are more like those described in the Bible – an unruly bunch that doesn’t always seem to know how to behave.

The same is true of the church, which is often more like our real families than we care to admit. But that really is the essence of community, isn’t it? Not just a place “where everybody knows your name,” but that place where “when you go there, they have to take you in,” to quote a Robert Frost poem. You can’t choose your family as they say. A family is the place where you belong and the people who, like it or not, belong to you. For many of us, this probably comes as something of a disappointment, because frankly, we were hoping for something better. That’s why it’s important to notice the second claim David makes about community.

Community is a Blessed experience.

There is something remarkable about the community of God’s people. As messy as the experience of community can be, there is something holy about it. The Psalmist underscores this in verse 2 when he says:

“It is like precious oil poured on the head running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes.”

In our culture we don’t usually pour olive oil on someone’s head, but in biblical times it was a common practice. In everyday life perfumed oil was used for cosmetic purposes, similar to the way we use cologne today.

Oil was especially important in religious life, where the practice of anointing priests and kings signified consecration to God and to special service. But the oil David speaks of in this verse was especially sacred, because it was used to anoint the High Priest – Aaron. This oil was not to be used for ordinary purposes, nor was it to be duplicated. In fact, it was so sacred that anyone who copied it or used it for common purposes was to be put to death. The elements used to make this sacred anointing oil were common elements – they might be used everyday for other purposes – but when you put them together this way for this purpose, they took on a sacred character.

One lesson we can learn from this comparison is that in this common experience of community there is something uncommon going on. On the one hand, the experience of Christian community is much like the kind of community we experience in other settings – on the job, at the gym, sharing a meal at a restaurant, talking over the fence in your backyard. The kind of people we meet with and the conversations we have are not all that different from those we have in church. They sound the same and often feel the same. And I suppose a case could be made for arguing that our fellowship is too common; certainly, there ought to be something besides yesterday’s game or the weather that focuses our attention when we gather together as God’s people. But I think we need to be on our guard otherwise we slip into the kind of idealizing of Christian community that Bonhoeffer warns about.

It is not unusual today  to use the analogy of the Trinity to describe Christian community. In the Trinity you have a unity of three persons in constant fellowship with one another. But I think there is another analogy we could use: the analogy of the union of Jesus Christ’s human and divine nature. Christian doctrine teaches that in the person of Christ, there is a union of two natures – divine and human. The divine does not make the human less human, and the human doesn’t detract from the divine. Jesus Christ is fully God; he is also fully human.

In the same way, there is a union between the blessed and the ordinary in our experience of Christian community. Christian community is “blessed” not because we adopt a different persona when we walk through the church doors. Christian community isn’t “blessed” because we leave our secular experiences and everyday interests behind us when we come into the sanctuary. The thing that makes Christian community “blessed” is not even the fact that we all like each other, or because we always treat one another the way Christians ought to treat each other. The truth is that we don’t usually treat one other the way we are called to.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer cautions about this,

“There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of Genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no claim upon such experiences and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them.”

I think this begs an obvious question. Is Bonhoeffer really saying that what we experience of community is irrelevant to the life of the church? Is it really true that the best advice we have to offer to those who have been disillusioned with their experience of life together in the church is “Lower your expectations?” That doesn’t seem to be the Psalmist’s perspective. In fact, his point is quite clear: the secret to real community is not a matter of methodology; it’s a matter of God. Recall that we talked about this just a few weeks ago.

Community is a God given experience.

David is clear about the source of this experience. and offers a theological explanation in verse 3: “It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.” He does not ascribe this experience to the forces of gravity or to methodology; he ascribes the experience to God. More specifically, he ascribes it to a shared experience of eternal life. Literally, the text says the Lord “commands the blessing.” but, it’s not community that’s “the blessing.” Life forevermore is the blessing. Community is the byproduct.  Here, then, is our problem: we commonly reverse the order. We thought the problem was that we didn’t know how to experience community. We thought the secret to finding community was to perfect our methodology – perfect the music we used for worship, perfect the way we organize ourselves, perfect the food. But the real difficulty is something entirely different. To many churches set community as the primary focus, rather than the Lord himself.

Christ is the key to community.

The thing that makes a group of Christians a community is the mutual bond we share in Jesus Christ. That is really the only explanation for our life together as the people of God. We are a community not because we share the same tastes and interests outside the church. We are a community because we have had a common experience of an uncommon grace. It is the blood of Christ shed on the cross that binds us together.