"The Caring Community"
part 3 in a four-part series on marks of the church

Prayer:
By your call to discipleship, by your Word of truth, by your Spirit of love, mold us into the community Christ gave his all to create,
we pray, O God.. AMEN

Sisters and brothers in Christ:

That's an unaccustomed greeting isn't it.
The scriptures teach us that those who bear the name of Christ can indeed regard each other as sisters and brothers.
Not just fellow human beings - but siblings - sisters and brothers with Christ in God's household of faith.

Such a greeting is a far cry from what Annie Dillard of Tinker Creek fame once said about people coming to their congregation:
She said: instead of handing people hymn books and orders of service as they arrive for Sunday worship, the ushers ought to hand people crash helmets.
I can imagine it already: all of us coming to worship with our bicycle or football helmets, hockey or ski helmets on!
A pretty sight indeed!

Crash helmets might have been useful though in Corinth. That's what we get from reading between the lines in our passage from Paul's letter to the congregation in that Greek port city.
We hear that Corinth was a seething pool of conflict.
Different visions for the church. Lots of factions.
Some identifying with Paul - I am a follower of Paul, as if Paul was interested in establishing the Pauline party.
Others saying: I'm with Apollos, who was interested in keeping the church closer to Jewish faith understandings;
others were in Peter's or Cephas' party - as a follower of Christ, we are not as ready to adopt gentile ways making us forget our Jewish practices.

Paul says: all this factionalism is senseless.
All this polarizing leads to is fragmentation and conflict. So stop your bickering, your arguments - focus instead on the Christ vision and the Way of Christ - then you won't need crash helmets!

Says Paul: Choose to be companions of Christ - and his way of self-giving, the way of the cross and resurrection is our fundamental shared identity. The cross tells you what being with Christ is really about .

Looking at our Gospel reading - we hear Jesus calling people from their various vocations to accompany him - to become his disciples.
Women, Luke tells us, and men are called to journey with him.
He calls them away from being self-centred citizens to be transformed into disciples ready & eager to be bearers of Good News for a needy world.

We know that even in Jesus company, there wasn't always peace, light and good cheer.
Remember the times of conflict:
when Jesus told Peter to "get behind me, you, Satan" for trying to advise Jesus to just go with the flow and take the easy way out.
Or when the disciples would quarrel about who had the higher position in the group, and Jesus would despair at their self-centred ways.
Those early followers too often were thinking about how much they might benefit from being in Jesus' band.
Jesus keeps pushing them to remember they are now in a community where God reigns - where God's leading determines how our lives unfold.

So if you think that being a companion of Christ -
a participant in the Christian community - involves only good cheer and light and being nice, think again.
We pray and hope for the gift of harmony, and for much, much more.
But conflict happens in the church - just as it happens in our families.
So indeed in congregational life there are times when a crash helmet would serve us well.

But actually Annie Dillard wasn't talking about conflict as much as she was about the way God works in a congregation.
When Christians gather for Sunday worship, she says, you never know how God may shake you up by noon.
We may come just to be confirmed in our comfortable ways, but in the congregation we can get shaken up and know God is calling us to make a sharp 180 degree turn around:
Perhaps we come to be confirmed in our prejudice about how insensitive those other people are;
Or perhaps we would just like to be justified in nursing a grudge;
Or perhaps we would like to get the ok to stay with the trivial and avoid the challenging & profound; whatever….
When we encounter the living God - when our lives are in communion with God, we can't just talk about standing pat or learning to be nice.
God is always calling us to more deeply rooted - into more faithful ways of being sisters and brothers in Christ.
The Spirit keeps shaking us up, disturbing our pet ways; converting us to new ways of relating as sisters and brothers.

So because our relationship with God is often like a roller coaster ride, perhaps beside those crash helmets, the church should provide seat belts for these discomforting pews.

You must know by now that today the theme is the "CARING" community.
In this series on the marks of the church, we have already discussed the community that reaches out - how we face outward to the public world beyond us, and,
we've spoke of the learning community - how we mature in wisdom and grow in knowledge of God.
Next Sunday when we celebrate communion our focus will be: the celebrating / worshipping community.

But today "CARING" is the focus. Today we face inward.
So looking at ourselves - our internal community life, what signs do we see of Shaughnessy Heights congregation as a caring congregation.
You will have your own list.

Let me indicate a few of the many signs of a caring community, I have discovered over the past 19 months since I've come among you:
- Newcomers - strangers are welcomed. There's a fine balance between neglecting newcomers and swarming them - but I think we do a pretty good job of making newcomers feel welcome in this place while not overwhelming them.
As individuals and through the work of the Congregational Life committee, we help newcomers to experience this as a welcoming community. This is true on Sundays, but also during the week when several hundred people come to this facility for meetings, daycare, language classes, music rehearsals, and other events.

- The joys and sorrows of participants are acknowledged with compassion and a real desire to be helpful. Not a few of you have had tragedies in your lives, and I sense that many have felt the prayerful support and practical help of other congregants, often with the support of the Pastoral Care Team helping us to be Christ for one another.
I cherish too the care and attention offered to those unable to gather in this place any longer because of frailty or poor health. We do not and we may not break our covenant with them.
We are not perfect in our caring, especially when the information isn't shared, but there is clear desire to remain in communion with one another.

- I see a growing desire to share limited resources so that we can experience abundance together. When we all share our gifts - talents, time, energy and money - we create abundance in the congregation. When we offer our skills to be helpful to each other we bear one another's burdens - finance people with advice; good listeners just hearing our joys or pain; accountants helping with tax returns; grandparents with child care; people with green thumbs in the gardens; gracious people hosting memorial teas; and so on - we communicate Christ's caring to each other.
Inviting people to dinner in our homes, we share our bounty and make friends.
The Caring & Sharing Fund helps us to respond to financial need in the congregation. The healing touch group makes their skills available to all who want to experience healing in the Spirit. They are helping us to believe that we can expect healing to be part of our life of faith together. By sharing of ourselves, we experience God's abundance as a community.

- I sense that we are recovering our sense of joy and our willingness to talk with each other about how the congregation with God's help will grow and thrive. The planning retreat last January and the Town Talk gathering next month, the congregational retreat last September, the extended family potluck suppers, happy events like the Open House in October, the Hanging of the Greens and Pancake Tuesday supper, all these special occasions suggest to me that there is a willingness and perhaps a thirst for encountering each other and valuing the wisdom and experience each of us brings to the congregation.
Finally,
- I sense that we are committed to avoiding co-dependency, and instead nurturing healthy participation in community - where the gifts of each are welcomed. I sense us working toward a community where no one is burdened with too much and all can share in leadership that is accountable and appreciated.

I see these good things and am happy to welcome the Spirit of Christ moving among us.
There is lots of room for learning to do things better, and for growth in the areas of caring. All that will be part of the Town Hall gathering on Feb. 9th . But we are by no means starting at zero - we have after all 75 years of experience at making a difference in people's lives in the Spirit of Christ.
That will serve us well, as God calls us to fuller ways of being a caring community.

You may ask:
Why is it important for us to be a caring congregation? The obvious answer, of course, is that it feels better to be in a place where we feel at home.
Loren Mead, an American Episcopalian observer of congregational life offers this additional, germane thought:
"Congregations are laboratories that can prepare us for public living and service. In congregations citizens can be generated as provocateurs of grace within a society shaped by law." [Transforming Congregations for the Future, p. 47]
Christ calls those simple fishing folk at the Sea of Galilee to become a laboratory community unveiling God's reign of love and justice in the world.
They were at their worst when Jesus was arrested and tried and executed.
But they were at their best when the Spirit transformed them into the learning, serving, celebrating and caring community we read about in the book of Acts.

Well today, Christ calls us to be a community of the Spirit where the joy and compassion, the healing and sharing, the care and friendship we experience here in the congregation - all these blessings
become the agenda for life in our society and world.
What WE treasure here as sisters and brothers in Christ, we covet for all of God's people in the world to experience and share.
The community that cares, reaches out as Christ did to give birth to God's dream of a world where people really care for each other.

May it be so. Thanks be to God. AMEN