Today we
celebrate the communio sanctorum,
the Communion of All Saints.
This isn’t
just about an All Star list of solo heroes.
It’s about
their communion, their relationship.
We celebrate
their relationship with each other in Christ.
We join that
relational network each Eucharist
when we sing the Sanctus.
According to
Isaiah and Revelation, in heaven
the saints and angels are perpetually singing
the music of
the spheres, “Holy, Holy, Holy.”
So we say,
“Therefore we join our voices with angels and archangels
and all company of heaven.”
The
Communion of All Saints is the spiritual unity
of everyone who believes in the Lord
Jesus.
But within
that unity there is tremendous diversity,
and diversity can be hard to manage.
Take the 4th
Century saints, Augustine and Jerome.
They did not
get on at all.
Augustine
hated Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible,
and accused him of “ruining the
faith.”
In Galatians
Paul speaks of Peter whom he calls Cephas.
Paul says,
“When Cephas came to Antioch
I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned.”
No one ever
wrote more beautifully of divine and human love
than Peter Abelard and St. Bernard
of Clairvaux
in 12th
Century France.
But they
despised each other.
For years,
Bernard devoted himself single-mindedly
to destroying Abelard’s academic career.
The hard
historic fact is that the saints
have not always seen eye to eye.
If the world
is supposed “to know we are Christians by our love,”
no wonder the world is confused.
So is this
talk of the Communion of All Saints pious rubbish?
It may be.
It may well be rubbish.
Or it may be
the very miracle that gives us hope
in this era of ideological
fragmentation, political polarization,
social silo living, and spiritual
alienation.
It may be
that there is a miracle of grace
running like the Jordan River down
through this barren land
of rocky relationships.
It may be
that God is at work in our conflicts,
using our stumbling, messy
relationships
to sanctify our souls
and make us agents of his mission
to unite heaven and
earth.
Maybe God
does not choose to live
in a commune of blissed out airheads,
but rather in a community of flesh and red-blooded people
with all our
faults and foibles that make us human.
If that is
true,
then our relationships in the Church
may be difficult
but they are all the
more important for that.
Our
relationships are the context of our Christian practice.
In case that
is true,
I want to offer a few thoughts on
how we go about
this curious project of
being Church today.
To really
become the Church,
we have to change both our expectations and our behavior.
On the
expectations front,
we can learn something from
community organizing.
I have been
eager for you to participate
in Nevadans for the Common Good,
not just because we need to improve
life in Las Vegas,
but because that’s where we can
learn how to be Church.
A lot of us
are lonely so we come to church
expecting to find soul mates,
intimate personal friends.
Maybe we
find a few. Maybe we don’t.
But most of
the people in a congregation are not going
to fit for us in that close personal
way.
We cannot
all be that to each other.
What we can
offer each other is public friendship.
Public
friends may not be people we want to have a beer with.
Public
friends are not people we tell our secrets.
But public
friends are people we can work with.
They share a
common mission we want to join.
We are
willing to get to know their story,
to understand where they are coming
from,
to find out what they have at stake
in a situation.
They are
people we can trust to be honest with us
because we are honest with them.
When Jesus
commands us to love one another,
the word we translate as “love”
means something far closer
to public friendship than personal
friendship.
Yes, we form
some personal friendships in the Church.
But they are
not what the Church is for.
In fact, St.
Aelred had to write a treatise in the 12th Century
to argue that those personal friendships are even ok.
They are not
just ok. They are blessings.
But the
proving ground of our faith is those other relationships
with the people who are not our
personal friends.
If we are
going to establish a network of public friendship
for the good of God’s mission in
Nevada,
there are
three basic steps:
First we
have to familiarize ourselves with the Church’s mission.
I don’t
mean: do a mission statement exercise.
The Church
already has a mission.
It’s in the
Catechism. Our mission is:
“to reconcile all people to each other and God in Christ.”
In case
that’s too broad, we have already spelled out the specifics
in the Five Marks of Mission.
It is
essential that every member of the Church know
the Five Marks of Mission so we are
all clear
on the project that brings us
together.
If you don’t
already know them, just Google “Five Marks of Mission.”
They’re
right there on the web.
Write them
on your doorposts.
Post-It note
them on your refrigerator.
Tattoo them
on your arm.
Know our
common mission.
Second, we
need to work out the ground rules for our relationships.
A small town
congregation in a neighboring state
was declining, aging, and torn by perpetual conflict.
So they
worked out a behavioral covenant.
They made
their expectations explicit, put it them writing.
Today, seven
years later, they are the largest Episcopal Church in the state.
There’s an
outline for how to do this from the Alban Institute.
It doesn’t
matter how we do it, but it is essential that we do it
if we are really here for the
mission,
if we truly want to change the world
to match God’s vision.
The third
step is to take on the spiritual discipline
of surrendering our wills and our
preferences
to the gospel mission through
intentional relationship practices.
To list
those practices would take a 6-week course, not a sermon.
It includes
praying for each other, looking at each other,
smiling at each other whether we
feel like it or not,
speaking to someone we don’t know each Sunday
and learning something
about them.
It includes
trusting the leadership to be wise and honest,
forgiving each other when we
stumble,
subordinating our own favorite
projects to the common good
of the whole Church.
Community
doesn’t just happen.
It has to be
built brick by brick thorugh relational actions.
This isn’t
easy stuff.
It takes
intentional persistent effort fueled by God’s grace.
That’s what
we will commit ourselves to
when we renew our Baptismal Vows.
Why would we
undertake such an arduous task?
Because it
will grow our souls.
It will make
our lives larger.
It will
expand our capacity for joy and appreciation.
It will be
our pathway to heaven, not just in the world to come,
but now in this life, in this place,
in this time.
And it will,
with God’s help,
change our world into the godly home
our Creator
earnestly and
desperately wants to give us all.
