“What Does It Mean to be MCC: New Community—New Love” 4-28-13

“What Does It Mean to be MCC: New Community—New Love”  4-28-13

God, your teachings show us that without love, our actions gain nothing.  Pour your blessed gift of love into our hearts, so that as we are made alive by your Spirit, we may know goodness and peace.  Grant us the gift of sharing your love with all your children in the world.  Speak to us and speak through me, today and always.   Amen.

                As you know, we are now only months away from the 2013 General Conference.  You will be well represented and if there are others of you still in deciding mode—let me remind you that you have only two days to register at the early bird rate.  So, as we prepare for the General Conference; and, because we have many new and old members and friends for whom MCC is a new experience, I thought it a good time to review or introduce what it means to be MCC.  MCC has four core values, Inclusion, Community, Spiritual Transformation and Social Action, and we will spend the next four weeks looking at each of those.  Then we will explore some of the other aspects of MCC beliefs as they relate to us as individuals and as a church.  These sermons will continue right up to the time of General Conference and should give us quite a good foundation for participating in and understanding all that is going on at the Conference. 

                As I looked at the scripture passages chosen for today, I was immediately drawn to the Core Value of—“Community” defined by MCC as “offering a safe and open community for people to worship, learn and grow in their faith…. We are committed to equipping ourselves and each other to do the work that God has called us to do in the world”.  This core value fits perfectly with Jesus’ words to his disciples.  Jesus, after washing the feet of the disciples and identifying Judas as his betrayer, gives these words to those disciples who are gathered around him.   “Since both I and God have been glorified, I will not be with you much longer.  You cannot go with me where I am going.  So, I am giving you a brand new commandment which will define you as my disciples.  Just as I have loved you, you must also love one another.  This is the way people will know you belong to me.” 

                This is no easy love—no romantic love—and no tough love—eye for an eye kind of love.  This is a love your enemies love, a love even those who hate you love, and a love that is as strong as the God from whom we receive the ability to love in the first place.  In this modern culture, we throw the word “love” around to the point to where we have no true sense of the profundity of the love to which Jesus is calling us.  Rarely, do we even get close to loving with this kind of intensity or completeness; but, when we do, miracles happen.  Since we, as Jesus’ disciples are about the call to love one another, we create communities and we create a sense of community. 

                Now, it is important to differentiate between the two.  As purely a sociological term, a community itself may engender no sense of community at all.  It may be just a section of town or country that is somehow distinguished from another section.  These communities may be defined or described in positive or negative ways.  There was a time when everyone raised in the South knew exactly what it meant to be from the “wrong side of the tracks.”  New Yorkers have lots of communities—the “Upper West Side, SOHO, the Village, etc.”  The Villages may take the concept of “communities” to the extreme—people more often than not describing themselves as from a particular village or north or south of 466.  Jesus is not speaking of this kind of community; although, throughout history, communities of like-minded folks have often grown up around a sense of Christian discipleship.

                Jesus is describing a sense of community that is defined by a love so extreme that it mirrors the love that Jesus has for us.  This love brings with it a challenge that is not found in our casual, cultural definitions of love.  This challenge, according to Episcopal priest, Rev. Suzanne Gutherie is the “call to ever widening ever expansive circles of love”, the call “to live and die for love” and the call to love “embodying the equalities of gentleness and generosity”. We will know that we are maturing in love, according to Gutherie, because “our love and our actions have no boundaries.” Jesus, when he called it a “new” commandment was emphasizing the radical difference between this kind of love and the kind of love we usually experience in the world.

                Here is where we connect with the UFMCC Core Value of “Community”.  If the primary purpose of the value of community is to offer a safe and open place (physical, emotional, and spiritual) for people to worship, learn, and grow in their faith”, we must courageously ask ourselves how to do that.  We need look no further than Rev. Troy Perry’s experience in the very first days of MCC.   After it became clear that there was not only a need but also a desire to begin to add some organization to this blossoming new church effort, Rev. Troy says, “We decided upon such standard procedures as the one for communion. It would always be an open communion. We would always state that it was. We would extend an invitation for all to come to the Lord's table. We would prepare ourselves by an open act

of confession. We would ask for absolution, and it would be granted. We would then participate in the act of supping at the Lord's table, by taking bread dipped in wine. We utilized the books of worship from the Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches as well as those that members of the congregation wanted considered. We experimented and we accommodated. Ours was a working church, an active, growing church. We knew that the worship of God comes from the heart. We felt that the diversity and the freedom and the real sincerity of worship would bring us together in unity. It has.”  This is, in its truest sense a description of how MCC would live into Jesus’ call to love one another. 

                We note what was most important to those pioneer MCC’ers.  The first, and it remains so for us as well, is that communion is to be freely available to all.  Every week you hear me say that there are no rules or regulations to which you must first adhere in order to be welcome. And every week I wonder if there are those of you who struggle to believe that it is so. Notice that the books of worship that were  utilized by those early worshippers were taken from many traditions. They “experimented” and then, in an act of love, they “accommodated”.   The “diversity”, “freedom” and “sincerity of worship” resulted in unity.  We, forty-something hears later, would do well to think on these things in the context of the community mandated by Jesus.

                Scott Peck, noted author of The Road Less Travelled, calls us to think about the phases of building community.  Community, he notes, is a set of conscious actions.  Peck gives us four stages of building community which I think apply to Open Circle and help us describe and analyze the growth TOWARD community by any young church or in any church when a sense of community has died and needs to be jump-started once more.  In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, Peck  lists 4 stages.  It would be interesting to take a poll and discover where each of you would place Open Circle. 

                Stage One, he calls “Pseudocommunity”.  This beginning stage is “when people first come together, where  people try to be nice, and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics”.  We might, just might, be a little beyond that stage.  The second stage occurs when “people move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves”.  He calls this phase “Chaos” because it is a difficult stage to live through. 

                The Third Stage he calls “Emptiness”.  Moving beyond all those harried and hurried attempts to fix, heal, or change the chaos stage, this stage is visible “when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to us all as human beings”.  It is out of this emptiness that True Community evolves.  Listen to his description of the fourth stage:  “True community [is] the process of deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community”.   Peck describes this stage as “glory” and  it “reflects a deep yearning in every human soul for compassionate understanding from one's fellows”.

                As we express that yearning in our souls and embrace the yearning in others’ souls for “compassionate understanding” we become more truly the church that Jesus calls us to be.  A church built on the love that Christ calls us to embrace will not only be open and safe for all, it will be free from judgment and self-righteous refusal to embrace all who enter the sacred circle of faith we call Open.  As we learn more and more about the Metropolitan Community Church, may we use these experiences to also learn more about ourselves and our relationship with the love of our gracious and all-embracing God.  Beloved, love and let yourself be loved.  Amen and Amen.