A Community Without Walls
Texts: Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35
We’ve listened to some wonderful words from the text of holy scripture this morning. Now I want to share some words from a different text. This was a message left on the church answering machine this week: “Good morning, reverend. This is a national call to prayer among Christians that our government will declare Christianity the official religion of the US; that the Christian religion will be taught in the public schools. Do not contact your congressman or senator on this issue; do not put this message in writing but pass it along only verbally. Pray unto the lord that he will do his perfect will. Have a good day.”
I don’t know why I get these calls. You would think an outgoing message that declares “You have reached Clarendon Presbyterian Church, a progressive, inclusive, diverse community …” would be enough to discourage such things.
Still, they come now and again, along with similar stuff in the mail. Most of the time I hit the delete key or take aim at the recycling bin, but this one stood in such perfect contrast to the message from scripture and what I was already planning to preach on that I had to stop and wonder, yet again, how it is that the message of Jesus gets so tangled up in the strangeness that calls itself religious conviction.
Those are my words, of course, but I bet Peter wondered something similar in his day as he was called to reconsider the deepest convictions of his own religious faith.
This might be a good moment for an etymological “time out” to consider the word religion. It has some fascinating, if tangled roots, relating back to a pair of Latin words: lige and lege. Lige, whose echo we can hear in our word, ligament, means “to bind or to tie.” If you trace religion back to that root you come to understand religion as “binding back,” as in being bound back to a particular tradition. On the other hand, lege, whose echo we can hear in legible, means “to read.” If you trace religion back to that root you come to understand it as “rereading.” Both are important and instructive, and both were at stake for Peter and the early Christian community.
They were bound back to their Jewish roots, to Torah and the tradition of the law of Moses. Yet they found themselves called into a broader, largely Gentile world that was not bound at all to the traditions of Israel. The more they welcomed that community, the more they would be rejected by their own tradition.
They faced a decisive early choice: be bound back to a tradition or reread its sacred texts. Remarkably, they chose a third way: a way of binding and rereading. In other words, they inaugurated a community marked by a particular story or tradition and by the constant rereading of that story such that the very boundaries or definitions of the community formed by an ancient story are constantly at stake and in question by the rereading of that story.
At its best, the Christian community today retains both impulses. At its worst, it rejects any rereading and attempts to impose its present reading on the world.
The dear sweet lady who left that message on my phone last week represent that impulse, which so easily gives itself over to imperial designs and manipulations.
It’s an impulse that says, in effect, “I know exactly what it means to be Christian, to be an insider, to be acceptable, and I’m building a wall around that to keep out anyone who doesn’t see things the same way that I do.” It’s an impulse far too common in our age, and there are walls going up around the world in evidence.
Here at Clarendon we are working to build a community without such walls. Just as Peter discovered in Acts, we have found God to be continuously revealing more of God’s self and intention in the world in our time. What God has made clean we do not try to make unclean, and what God has made clean is, precisely, humankind – human beings: men, women, young, old, straight, gay, rich, poor, of every race and tribe and nation. What God has pronounced good we will not label “outsider.” What God has called “beloved” we cannot reject.
The problem with a community without walls, though, comes in defining it. If it has no walls how do you know you are in it? Well, the community without walls is not a community without a center. Indeed, the center of the community is Jesus Christ, and the rule of the community – that which determines whether or not one is in it – comes in Jesus’ own words: “love one another just as I have loved you. By this they will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
That’s it. That’s the simple rule at the center of the community without walls. That’s how we are defined: by how we love. As was said of the first Christians in Acts, so may it be said of us, “see how they love one another.”
The challenge from the inside, interestingly enough, is the same as the one from the outside: there are no walls. That is to say, there are no walls on the love we are called to share with the world. There are no outsiders to this love. Just as the community without walls does not exclude anyone on account of any of the characteristics that have historically and continue to be in some cases used to exclude some from its membership, neither does the community without walls exclude anyone from the love it shares with the world.
In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer expresses it this way, in words that, despite their dated terms of reference, still ring powerfully:
the commandment of love for our neighbour also does not imply a law which restricts our responsibility solely to our neighbour in terms of space, to the man whom I encounter socially, professionally or in my family. My neighbour may well be one who is extremely remote from me, and one who is extremely remote from me may well be my neighbour. By a terrible miscarriage of justice in the United States in 1831 nine young negroes, whose guilt could not be proved, were sentenced to death for the rape of a white girle of doubtful reputation. There arose a storm of indignation which found expression in open letters from some of the most authoritative public figures in Europe. A Christian who was perturbed by this affair asked a prominent cleric in Germany whether he, too, ought not to raise his voice in this matter, and on the grounds of the “Lutheran” idea of vocation, that is to say, on the grounds of the limitation of his responsibility, the clergyman refused. In the event the protests which came in from all parts of the world led to a revision of the judgement. Here perhaps it is from the point of view of the call of Jesus Christ that we may understand the saying of Nietzsche: “My brothers, I do not counsel you to love your neighbour; I counsel you to love him who is furthest from you.” We do not say this in order to pass judgement in the particular case to which we have just referred. We say it in order to keep open the boundary.
It is always a question of boundaries, isn’t it? Who’s in; who’s out? To whom must we extend compassion and love? Whom may we pass by on the other side?
The boundaries are not fixed; there are no immutable rules. The community has no walls.
Nevertheless, at the center of the community stands one who commands, “love one another just as I have loved you.”
When that commands seems burdensome, we gather as a community, and as we gather there is a table set in our midst with the bread of life and the cup of salvation to strengthen us for love.
Come, then, from wherever you dwell – no matter how near or how distant you may feel at this moment from the one who stands in our midst calling. Come and be welcomed. Come and be fed. Come and be loved.
We’ve listened to some wonderful words from the text of holy scripture this morning. Now I want to share some words from a different text. This was a message left on the church answering machine this week: “Good morning, reverend. This is a national call to prayer among Christians that our government will declare Christianity the official religion of the US; that the Christian religion will be taught in the public schools. Do not contact your congressman or senator on this issue; do not put this message in writing but pass it along only verbally. Pray unto the lord that he will do his perfect will. Have a good day.”
I don’t know why I get these calls. You would think an outgoing message that declares “You have reached Clarendon Presbyterian Church, a progressive, inclusive, diverse community …” would be enough to discourage such things.
Still, they come now and again, along with similar stuff in the mail. Most of the time I hit the delete key or take aim at the recycling bin, but this one stood in such perfect contrast to the message from scripture and what I was already planning to preach on that I had to stop and wonder, yet again, how it is that the message of Jesus gets so tangled up in the strangeness that calls itself religious conviction.
Those are my words, of course, but I bet Peter wondered something similar in his day as he was called to reconsider the deepest convictions of his own religious faith.
This might be a good moment for an etymological “time out” to consider the word religion. It has some fascinating, if tangled roots, relating back to a pair of Latin words: lige and lege. Lige, whose echo we can hear in our word, ligament, means “to bind or to tie.” If you trace religion back to that root you come to understand religion as “binding back,” as in being bound back to a particular tradition. On the other hand, lege, whose echo we can hear in legible, means “to read.” If you trace religion back to that root you come to understand it as “rereading.” Both are important and instructive, and both were at stake for Peter and the early Christian community.
They were bound back to their Jewish roots, to Torah and the tradition of the law of Moses. Yet they found themselves called into a broader, largely Gentile world that was not bound at all to the traditions of Israel. The more they welcomed that community, the more they would be rejected by their own tradition.
They faced a decisive early choice: be bound back to a tradition or reread its sacred texts. Remarkably, they chose a third way: a way of binding and rereading. In other words, they inaugurated a community marked by a particular story or tradition and by the constant rereading of that story such that the very boundaries or definitions of the community formed by an ancient story are constantly at stake and in question by the rereading of that story.
At its best, the Christian community today retains both impulses. At its worst, it rejects any rereading and attempts to impose its present reading on the world.
The dear sweet lady who left that message on my phone last week represent that impulse, which so easily gives itself over to imperial designs and manipulations.
It’s an impulse that says, in effect, “I know exactly what it means to be Christian, to be an insider, to be acceptable, and I’m building a wall around that to keep out anyone who doesn’t see things the same way that I do.” It’s an impulse far too common in our age, and there are walls going up around the world in evidence.
Here at Clarendon we are working to build a community without such walls. Just as Peter discovered in Acts, we have found God to be continuously revealing more of God’s self and intention in the world in our time. What God has made clean we do not try to make unclean, and what God has made clean is, precisely, humankind – human beings: men, women, young, old, straight, gay, rich, poor, of every race and tribe and nation. What God has pronounced good we will not label “outsider.” What God has called “beloved” we cannot reject.
The problem with a community without walls, though, comes in defining it. If it has no walls how do you know you are in it? Well, the community without walls is not a community without a center. Indeed, the center of the community is Jesus Christ, and the rule of the community – that which determines whether or not one is in it – comes in Jesus’ own words: “love one another just as I have loved you. By this they will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
That’s it. That’s the simple rule at the center of the community without walls. That’s how we are defined: by how we love. As was said of the first Christians in Acts, so may it be said of us, “see how they love one another.”
The challenge from the inside, interestingly enough, is the same as the one from the outside: there are no walls. That is to say, there are no walls on the love we are called to share with the world. There are no outsiders to this love. Just as the community without walls does not exclude anyone on account of any of the characteristics that have historically and continue to be in some cases used to exclude some from its membership, neither does the community without walls exclude anyone from the love it shares with the world.
In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer expresses it this way, in words that, despite their dated terms of reference, still ring powerfully:
the commandment of love for our neighbour also does not imply a law which restricts our responsibility solely to our neighbour in terms of space, to the man whom I encounter socially, professionally or in my family. My neighbour may well be one who is extremely remote from me, and one who is extremely remote from me may well be my neighbour. By a terrible miscarriage of justice in the United States in 1831 nine young negroes, whose guilt could not be proved, were sentenced to death for the rape of a white girle of doubtful reputation. There arose a storm of indignation which found expression in open letters from some of the most authoritative public figures in Europe. A Christian who was perturbed by this affair asked a prominent cleric in Germany whether he, too, ought not to raise his voice in this matter, and on the grounds of the “Lutheran” idea of vocation, that is to say, on the grounds of the limitation of his responsibility, the clergyman refused. In the event the protests which came in from all parts of the world led to a revision of the judgement. Here perhaps it is from the point of view of the call of Jesus Christ that we may understand the saying of Nietzsche: “My brothers, I do not counsel you to love your neighbour; I counsel you to love him who is furthest from you.” We do not say this in order to pass judgement in the particular case to which we have just referred. We say it in order to keep open the boundary.
It is always a question of boundaries, isn’t it? Who’s in; who’s out? To whom must we extend compassion and love? Whom may we pass by on the other side?
The boundaries are not fixed; there are no immutable rules. The community has no walls.
Nevertheless, at the center of the community stands one who commands, “love one another just as I have loved you.”
When that commands seems burdensome, we gather as a community, and as we gather there is a table set in our midst with the bread of life and the cup of salvation to strengthen us for love.
Come, then, from wherever you dwell – no matter how near or how distant you may feel at this moment from the one who stands in our midst calling. Come and be welcomed. Come and be fed. Come and be loved.
posted by David Ensign at
7:28 AM
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