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August 16, 2009 | 4:00 p.m.

Community Would Be Great
If It Weren’t for the People

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 36
Acts 15:1–35

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Due to some unavoidable scheduling conflicts, it’s happened that every time I’ve preached at 4:00 this summer, I’ve just returned from a youth mission trip. Back in June, I had returned from our junior high mission trip to the Illinois Special Olympics just two hours before the service began. In July I had just returned the day before from a ten-day trip to Belfast, Northern Ireland, with a big group of high school students and adult leaders. And yesterday I returned from a weeklong trip with another group of high school students, painting cabins at our Presbytery’s camp in Saugatuck, Michigan.

Beyond the exhaustion and truncated time for sermon prep that these trips leave me with, I’m always grateful for the opportunities that mission trips provide to experience and reflect upon the blessings and challenges of living together in intentional community. There’s nothing quite like sharing a small living space and the responsibilities of life together.

It always looks so good on paper before we leave on a trip. I divide the group into teams, each one responsible at various times for shopping, cooking, cleaning, and the service work we are called to do. Everything is shared. Everything is equal. It all looks so good on paper.

But when the plan becomes reality, there are always bumps in the road. Not all of the work or meal crews work so well together. Not everyone shares equally in the work we all need to do. Not everyone has the same vision of what we need to do and how we need to do it.

Add to all this that teenagers seem to be slobs by nature, so our living space inevitably ends up looking like every one of their bags exploded and the contents became mixed together in a tangled mess of dirty and clean clothes.

On these trips, teenagers also seem to act as if in their homes each one of them has a personal valet that follows behind them at all times to pick up garbage, dirty dishes, and personal belongings that are left wherever they were last touched. I’m pretty sure that these youth don’t each have such a valet, so I’m always amazed at this behavior and wonder what their homes are really like.

This past week, a young man (who is really quite bright) took off his shoes in the middle of a common space and emptied out a huge pile of sand, right there in the middle of the floor. When I asked in amazement what he was doing, why he didn’t do that outside, he responded with a perfectly straight face: “We have a broom!” I’m not sure he appreciated the logic of my counterargument that even though we have mops, we don’t use the restroom right in the middle of the floor. Of course, on the ride home a different kid used a bottle in the back of the van, so I’m not sure I’m winning any battles with these youth.

Living in community is hard. Being a community is hard. Even in the church. Perhaps especially in the church.

I say “especially in the church” because being in community is hard enough without thinking about God too. You see, in the church we’re all trying to do what is right because we believe that what we are doing is in service to God. So we think that worship has to be just such a way. We think that preaching has to be just such a way. We think that our community service has to be just such a way. We think that international missions have to be just such a way. We think that the makeup of our membership has to be just such a way. We think that social mores have to be just such a way. And we get pretty passionate about these ways, because we think they are the right way. We think they are God’s way.

Such was the case already in the early church. The situation in the story Mary shared with us from the Book of Acts is often referred to as the “Jerusalem Council.” Here was the problem: Jesus was an observant Jew, as were his original disciples and most of his early followers. But eventually, especially after the ministries of Peter and Paul, more and more Gentiles—or non-Jews—began to join the church as followers of Jesus. Some of the Jews who followed the way of Jesus thought that these new members of their community needed to convert to Judaism before they could fully follow Jesus. In other words, in order to be a disciple of Christ, you first had to become an observant Jew. That meant following the kosher food restrictions, and for men, it also meant being circumcised.

As you might imagine, not everyone was thrilled with this idea. The Gentiles liked their first-century equivalents of BBQ pork and cheeseburgers. And the men weren’t exactly lining up to be circumcised as adults. And at the same time, some of the Jewish followers of Jesus, like Paul, began to think that Gentiles could follow the ways of Jesus just fine without all the requirements of the Jewish laws. They thought that you could become a follower of Jesus without first converting to Judaism.

You can see the problem. There were two diametrically opposed views about how to be God’s people. Both of these views were championed by good, faithful people who were all trying to do the right thing. Both sides could claim that God was behind their way, that their way was God’s way and therefore the right way.

The solution to this problem was developed by Jesus’ brother, James, who was the leader of the Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. His solution boils down to this: the Jewish followers of Jesus would be allowed to do things their way, and the Gentile followers of Jesus would be allowed to do things their way. Everyone would be happy. Everyone would be given the blessing to go and follow God in the way they felt called to do.

On paper, this sounds pretty good. It sounds like a beautiful model of how to balance diversity and unity within a multicultural church. And I’ve often thought that the wisdom of this strategy would solve a lot of our problems in the church today. If you don’t like the way we worship, go somewhere else to worship the way you want to. If you don’t like the way we do mission, go somewhere else to do mission the way you want to. If you don’t want to accept gays and lesbians as full members of the church with full opportunities for leadership, go somewhere else and exclude whomever you want.

But the more I think about it, the more I question the wisdom of this model, because it creates a pattern of separation in the church that I don’t think is always healthy. It’s one thing to agree to disagree on something like worship—though that is certainly hard enough. But it’s a completely different thing to agree to disagree on something as profound as human sexuality. How can two churches claim to represent the will of God yet stand at opposite ends of this debate? Or how can one church maintain both views and still be one church? This is where I see a flaw in the solution of the Jerusalem Council.

Unless. Unless the separation is only provisional and always within a very broad understanding of the wider community. Perhaps there is a way to hold these opposing views in creative tension within the community until we can attain a clearer vision through the dialectical work of mutual discernment. Perhaps this is the value of maintaining unity in the midst of diversity.

Did the Jerusalem Council create two different churches or a single church with two very different expressions? And can we replicate that today? Can a denomination like the Presbyterian Church (USA) exist and maintain some sense of unity with such diversity on an issue like human sexuality? Can a 6,000-member congregation like Fourth Church create welcoming space for people of different backgrounds, outlooks, ages, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, physical limitations, and economic situations?

In many ways, this is what we are trying to do with this experiment of 4:00 worship—and it is an experiment. While there are many ways in this church in which we try to nurture diversity, at this 4:00 experiment we are trying to intentionally blend ancient, classical, and contemporary; premodern, modern, and postmodern; formal and casual; European and non-European; our core church communities, the communities of need that we serve, and communities of outreach that we don’t yet even know.

And it is hard. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it is awkward and sometimes it is beautiful. But we feel called to take those risks and see what God might do in our midst when we open ourselves to something new and something different. And maybe, just maybe, if we start with something small like this worship service, we can imagine even bigger things down the line.

Living in community is hard because we are all so different. To paraphrase an old joke, community would be great if it weren’t for the people. Yet this is what God calls us to be.

Looking back at that Jerusalem Council, the good news is this: God does change and so can we. The difficult news is this: working this out with people is hard. But perhaps we can find faith to trust that it will work out in the end.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church