A Community called by God's Spirit
Followers of Jesus Christ understand that we don't live our Christian life in a vacuum, all by ourselves, without any significant interaction with others. No, we understand that the Christian walk must be lived out in the context of community, a community called together by God's Spirit.

Our understanding of community is shaped by the witness of the early Christian church. For them the reality of Christ's presence, and the truthfulness of the testimony of Jesus, was known within the reality of the gathered and visible body of Christ. To be saved, to be Christian, was to join in with a community which commonly acknowledged and proclaimed loyalty to Jesus.

This is something more than just a private experience of welcoming Jesus into one's heart, and then joining a church. It's within the fellowship of brothers and sisters who have given their allegiance to Jesus that the Spirit of God is present. Within the community we experience the fruits of the Spirit, the sweet nectar of love, joy, peace, and more.

Community has long been a big word in our circles. Today we want to underscore that we can think about community at many different levels. We think most immediately about this particular community, our FMC community. We might break that down to smaller circles within our church. Sunday School classes, prayer groups, quilters, etc. We might expand our vision of community to our district conference, our denomination, and to the world-wide family of Anabaptist believers, represented by the Mennonite World Conference.

All this is just thinking in a very Mennonite context. We could also contemplate the meaning of community within our town, with fellow Christians. Or we could think in an inter-faith way, and beyond, to what we share in common as fellow human beings. But this morning I'm thinking about community as we understand it in an Anabaptist way.

The Mennonite World Conference shared conviction on community says that as a community the Spirit calls us to turn from sin, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord, to receive baptism, and to follow Christ in life. In my own words I'd rephrase it like this. We are a community who God calls to welcome all, to remind ourselves again and again to whom (Jesus) we are loyal, to turn our hearts towards the ``least,'' to think ethically, to speak prophetically, and to care for each other.

The notion of the church as a genuine community, stitched together by the Spirit, has deep roots in Mennonite/Anabaptist thought. The Christian church for centuries, through the medieval age and into the Reformation preserved the idea of the church as massively large, including everyone in the society, from birth to the grave. The Anabaptist movement, at the tail-end of the Reformation differed sharply in this regard from other earlier reformers. They believed in a voluntary church set apart by, as Harold S. Bender put it in his memorable The Anabaptist Visi on (1944), ``rue conversion and involving a commitment to holy living and discipleship `` In other words, the true community was a called out people, distinctive and separate from the broader culture.

The witness of the early church
What does the early church have to teach us? What were the practices of the early Christian community?

I think that verse 42 in Acts 2 provides our best summation. Here it says:
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the break of bread and to prayers.

They rooted themselves in word and teaching, to the ongoing exploration of the implications and applications of the gospel message they had seen and heard. They took time to grow reflective, not just relying on periodic emotional highs.

They practiced a deep form of fellowship. It was more than just warm-hearted friendliness, a nice slap-on-the-back, and a once a week ``how are you?'' The life among the believers led to ``signs and wonders,'' and a phenomenal practice of sharing what they had in common. They seemed to practice, in a regular and practical way, sharing what they had with each other. What is mine is yours, they seemed to agree.

We might read a lot into the early church's practice of breaking bread together. The table is a place today where social distinctions are observed, where a kind of de facto segregation is maintained. Yet the table can be a time of forging unity, of expressing solidarity with others, if only we sit with them. We have that opportunity all the time at our church, every time we sit around one of those round tables in our Fellowship Hall. We have opportunity to break bread across the lines, visible and invisible, that exist in our own congregation.

For the early church the practice of prayer anchored them in the long religious tradition that preceded the coming of Jesus. The early church of Acts 2 was devoutly Jewish and maintained links to the past.

The early church formed its own Spirit-shaped, distinct identity within their environment with the hallmarks of teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, and prayer. Maybe the question for us is, what does it look like to be a distinctive Spirit-formed community in our own time? What does it look like for us, and for the broader Mennonite Church?

Practicing community
In his commentary on the book of Acts former Duke Divinity dean and professor William Willimon offers this somewhat sarcastic commentary on modern day efforts at Christian community. He says that we moderns too easily substitute ``socialization...for the gospel,'' and ``warm-hearted busyness is being offered in lieu of Spirit-empowered community.''

I cringe inside just reading that. Maybe that's because I sense there is at least some element of truth in Willimon's critique of Christian churches generally. Are we all fluff and light-hearted banter that we pass off as doing church? Is the line between ``warm-hearted busyness'' and ``Spirit-empowered community'' actually a fuzzy one?

A deeper, ``Spirit-empowered,'' expression of community involves some intentional involvement, and more time, with others in the community. To me it implies more sharing of oneself and your ideas, more sharing of one's joys and sorrows, with each other. It means an increased willingness to be accountable to each other. More community means that we dare to open up more about our private thoughts. We get a taste of that whenever we have sharing time in church. It's obviously not a controlled time in our church worship service. It can make us uneasy. It's true that some things are best shared in smaller circles of the community. But I believe that if we are going to take an Anabaptist understanding of community seriously we have to grow in trust and grace so that we can both share and listen.

But we face serious obstacles to more genuinely living and practicing community. I think that our private, individualistic culture works against community. We are socialized to go to church and go home without saying much of anything to anybody. When we get home we can spout off to a family member as we slump into the easy chair in front of the television set. Such practice causes us to erect barriers that allow us, I fear, over time to grow hard and cold. We develop a shallow invulnerability. But actually we need each other. We need the testing, the challenge, and the affirmation that comes with deeper, sustained involvement with our community.

There are other obstacles which stand in the way. It may be fear. We fear that others may reject us if they actually knew what I think. Another obstacle can be wealth. Wealth allows us to just go our own way. We can try to buy happiness and we can try to buy our way through our problems. We don't need the interaction with our community. Education can be another obstacle. It's this huge barrier, related to culture and class that works against genuine community. And time is yet another one. A deeper practice of community is necessarily going to take more time.

I wonder what an independent sociologist might say, visiting our church today, on Mother's Day….

I think there is increased interest in community among Mennonite young adults…community gardens…

Again we remind ourselves of the witness of the early Christians, and the stories out of our own peoplehood. They seemed to have this insatiable joy and desire to be together, to learn and explore together, to fellowship and to play together, to give themselves to the Jesus way, together.

Strong community runs the risk of looking odd, over-the-top, maybe even fanatical. It can look arrogant, like ``we are better than the rest of you.'' I don't like those accusations. I want to be respectable, well thought of. But plenty of others who have gone before us threw respectability out the window and were so intentional about community that it drew the anger of the authorities. They became too threatening to the status quo.

I believe that as a particular Mennonite community, both locally and globally, we are called to walk a narrow path. It's a path that underscores and is unashamed of our distinctiveness. It takes the risk of looking arrogant. But at the same time it has to be invitational. It's saying, yes we are distinctive, but we aren't jealous about it, like it's only for us, we want more people to jump on the train. Come on, jump on board.

And finally what makes this community of the Spirit both distinctive yet invitational is the overwhelming evidence that love, the ``more excellent way'' Paul writes about, that this love saturates everything that goes on. Love's obvious presence in the teaching and the fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers, makes the community compelling.

May God strengthen us to be that kind of community. Amen.

--May 10, 2009
--2009.22/ First Mennonite Church, Reedley