Healing the World

Sunday 5/29/2016 7:32 AM

I live in a culture obsessed with individualism. Individual rights and freedoms are protected and cherished while any idea suggesting a responsibility to our community that involves the giving up of individual rights for the good of others results in accusations of one being a socialist a communist, or a Marxist. This idea has also crept into the church. One’s faith is considered to be a private affair between oneself and God. It is believed that one can worship God by oneself at home and still be a good Christian. Any suggestion of being responsible to a larger community of faith or that of being subject to the discipline of a church body is met with resistance, the church often being accused of simply wanting to exert their power or of wanting the money of their parishioners.

Jesus summarized the law by saying we are to love God above all and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. James emphasizes the importance of works of mercy accompanying our faith. It is one thing to say we love God but he suggests that a litmus test for our love of God is to see if we are showing love for our neighbor through concrete acts of mercy, of giving of ourselves for the good of others.

Today I read a quote by Kent Groff, from his book, Journeyman. He writes, “Without the discipline of community, solitude degenerates into self-absorption and isolation; without the discipline of solitude, community degenerates into codependency and enmeshment. … The community of faith is where we learn the language of love. And the church uses two kinds of language – the verbal language of liturgy, scripture, and sermon, and the body language of sacraments, gestures, and social outreach. … Being a part of a life-giving faith community is like a healthy foot getting directional signals from the rest of the body. A life-giving church is one where human brokenness is lifted up like bread and wine to be held, and touched, and blessed – to heal the world.”

Sometimes I feel as if the church stresses solitude to the detriment of community. We have become self-absorbed and isolated from the community in which we live. We build both literal and figurative walls around our church to protect ourselves from what we consider to be the evil world around us. We isolate ourselves from the brokenness around us, rationalizing to ourselves that the problems are too big for us to solve alone. We huddle in groups of like-minded people while we drink our coffee after worship while a visitor that is different from us stands alone, observing us.

I believe we need to have more stress on our responsibility to our community, to show the love of God and the richness of his mercy through our actions to those who are not like us. We need to have the courage to reach out to touch the brokenness that is so evident in our world and, as Groff suggests, to lift it up “like bread and wine to be held, and touched, and blessed – to heal the world.”