Community, Part 8: Chosen

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     What’s all the fuss about community anyway? It seems all aspects of life are in reference to community. The Channel 5 weather guy can’t just say “Amelia” or “West Chester” or “Brookville” anymore, but “the Amelia community,” and so forth. It’s as if life has no meaning outside of community. Could that be true?

     Let’s ask Jesus, and find out how he did community on this dusty little planet. Not a fair comparison, you say? Well I don’t know about all that – seems to me, since he lived the perfect life, he would’ve had this part right as well.

     Have you ever noticed, reading through the Gospels, how small Jesus’s community was? Have you noticed, when it began to grow cumbersome, he would trim it to the bone? At the synagogue in Capernaum, having just stunned the thousands who assumed they were in community with him, he said to the apostles, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil” (John 6:70). Jesus didn’t go for the numbers; he went for quality of commitment.

     By the standard circulating now, the quality of one’s community is defined by the quantity of its members – strength in numbers, and all that jazz. My community is stronger than yours if there are more people in it. Joseph Stalin said something like, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” But that was Joe Stalin, for cryin’ out loud! I wouldn’t steer us that way.

     In this series of letters on community, I hope you’ve seen the overriding theme: Don’t go big. I hope the terms “global community” and “international community” have begun to sound, well, absurd. I hope we’ve all been urged to investigate the boundaries of whatever community (communities?) we lay claim to, seeing if they’re properly set, finding out what expectations we may or may not reasonably place on one another.

     For Paul and the Christians in Corinth, it came down to face time (and not the digital kind!). For all their want-to, they couldn’t pull of community to save their backsides without being together. It took being eye-to-eye, testing one another’s authenticity moment by moment, making sure they were committed to the same truth. Though you and I live twenty centuries hence, in the self-named Information Age, very little has changed. Two-out-of-three dimensions are not enough; two-out-of-six senses certainly will not do.

     “You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian.” I haven’t heard it said hundreds of times, but dozens wouldn’t be out of the question. More often these days than in days past, I’ll try to tune up that statement if someone speaks it directly to me: You don’t have to go to church to be saved. I was saved in a hospital room. I knew a man who was thoroughly saved in front of his TV, watching a televangelist. But to be Christian – to begin taking on the attributes of Christ on purpose, to cooperate with the Father in being conformed to the image of his Son – involved some immersion therapy.

     Not to say all of us at Cobblestone Community Church are in community with one another. I’m sure there are plenty of things we’ve yet to learn about what that means – and another eight weeks of letters on the same topic wouldn’t get us there. But we have a good start, I think. If we can look around with honest perspective and find out who’s committed to the same truth that both precedes and supersedes the community; who’s able to apply empathy without retreating into mere sympathy; who’s being authentic without straining; who’s willing to have expectations put on them and place expectations on others in return; who’s letting love do its great work – then we’ll have a clear picture of what community is.

     Granted, this definition is too long. Thanks, again, to those who sent me their 15-second versions at the outset of this series. I’m reluctant to try one of those myself, and so I’ll simply pray, for all of us who desire true community, that the Lord will lead us there and give witness in our spirits of having it.

     By the way, I like the Channel 5 weather guy; he’s my go-to forecaster. Plus, he has some unusual speech habits that tickle me. I hope to meet him sometime. Maybe we could be in community together.

     For all eternity, there was one community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three, who are one, invented a quirky thing called time – a hiccup in eternity – and determined to invite others into community with them through the long and arduous process of being born into sin yet saved by grace. When the hiccup has passed, there will again be one community, the membership of which no man will be able to quantify.

     Meanwhile – or “simultaneously at the same time,” as the Channel 5 weather guy would say – it’s OK to be choosy, like Jesus.

 

 Grace and Peace (to choose and be chosen),

 

John