Can We Be Christians Alone?
Where One is Gathered in My Name
by Pastoral Intern Jennie Valentine
For the season of Lent, we will be exploring questions that you have always wanted to ask God. Now first let me say that even though your questions to God are being answered by Nicole and by me, we are under no illusion that we are God or that we have more access to these answers than any of you. And our responses to these questions are just one way in which we might think about these questions. We hope that this sermon series will invite more questions, conversation, inquiry and reflection from each and every one of you.
Our question for today’s sermon is Can We Be Christians Alone? Ironically, we’ll explore that thought together.But first, let’s pray.
God, where two or three are gathered you are there too. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts help us to feel your presence here with us now, and be acceptable to you, for you are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Can We Be Christians Alone? Let’s see. As an experiment, let’s do the sermon alone today. Everybody begin the sermon. If we were to do that, we would all be talking at once, or there might be complete silence.
Last week’s Call to Worship was such a holy moment for me. Remember it? Rabbi Lieberman and Reverend Nicole singing with such richness about Holy Holiness. The hair on my arms stood up! And when we were rehearsing, I experienced the same feeling. I looked around, and while there were several people there for the rehearsal, and over 100 people in worship participated in the experience, I had a realization. Once I left this building, there would be nobody in my daily living who understood the depth of the feelings that hovered around me because they weren’t part of it. Those emotions would blow away like a balloon that’s string had been unhanded. My hand was the only one holding on to it. It would float away on the winds of time because those in my daily living sphere weren’t there to hold it with me. My eyes filled with tears, and I felt alone. And I have to admit, some of the holiness of the moment was lost to me because I knew effects of it would fade without the shared experience of it.
So can we be Christians alone? Here’s my answer: No. God created us in God’s image, right? And God is Three-in-One, the Trinity; God is a community in God’s self. And since we are God’s image, we must be community too. In the book of Genesis, God said “It is not good for man to be alone.” so God created a companion for Adam. God created us to be family, not spiritual orphans. The end. What? That’s not enough to convince you?
In my Christian history class last week we read about a guy named Antony. He was a desert father, a monk who heard the call to sell everything he had, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus. So he did, but since Jesus had been dead for 300 years, he chose to follow by getting away from civilization so that he could hear God more clearly. The people heard about him and all came to see what this guy was doing off in the desert by himself. They followed him into the desert and he preached and taught them, and they were touched by him – his words healed them, and he even healed people physically, just like Jesus. And like Jesus, the people wouldn’t leave him alone, so he kept moving further and further away, deeper and deeper into the desert, eventually ending in the remote mountains. And people could no longer benefit from him or be touched by his interpretations of God. And all this got me thinking about being alone, and what would happen if we all went rogue.
We are the body of Christ. Ephesians tells us that we each have unique gifts that should be used to “build up the body of Christ”. Building the body of Christ is hard to do if there’s only one person. From a scientific standpoint, we can’t make any more Christians without two people to procreate. And there’s always the age-old question, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a noise? If the body of Christ is missing an ear, can the body hear God? If the body of Christ is missing the tongue, how will one speak so others hear?
God sent and continues to send prophets, the tongues of God, to share the Word with all of us. Like Antony, the desert father, Jesus was one of those. In our scripture today he puts himself in the prophetic class as he travels to Jerusalem with the phrase, “Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Jerusalem was a city where many prophets had been challenged and killed – Uriah was a prophet who was ordered to be killed during the time of Jeremiah. He ran away, and the King sent his guards to find him in Egypt and bring him back. They did and he was killed. What if Jesus had known what he knew and still run away from the world – stayed in the desert for more than the forty days that we commemorate with Lent? What if he didn’t interpret God for all of the ancients, or what if he was alone and had noone to share with? How would we understand all the beautiful ways that God wants us to live? We need to be with each other so that we can hear and tell of the many ways that God has touched our lives.
We are building the body of Christ. And if we each have a unique tool, trying to do that alone is like trying to build a house with just a hammer. Ephesians 4 also reads As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love. Building the body of Christ. We need the hammer, the saw, and the chisel. The trinity of tools.
It is important to know our own unique tools and who we are, so that we are able to contribute to the body. We need a way to figure out who we really are. But in order to accurately determine that, we need a sounding board that will help us find out who we are. Like Proverb 27 says: As iron sharpens iron, a friend sharpens a friend. Our friends become our sounding board to push back and challenge our own self-deception. James urges us this way: Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. We need a mirror that will deflect our own deceptions and reflect our own truths. There must be an “other” for that to happen. You can’t be alone.
Being a Christian can be hard work. It’s not easy to reach out to and love those that are different from us. The homeless person on the street who enters rehab because many people pulled strings to get them a bed at the facility, only to be discharged and run back to the drugs. The teenager who constantly ignores your requests to pick up the junk they left in the doorway when they entered the house. Those whose political philosophies differ from our own and just seem not to “get it”. This list could go on and on. Being a Christian is hard work and we need people to help us carry the tool box, and hand us the screwdriver when we are dangling from the top of the ladder.
Being a Christian can be hard work. We are all tempted to do things that might not be in our best interest or the best interest of the community. That’s wrong thinking or wrong living. Wrong thinking, wrong living is like a predator that attempts to overcome us. Like the Psalmist from our reading today prays, “…lead me in the straight path…do not turn me over to the desires of my foes.” God, the mothering hen, spreads her feathers out to protect us from the predator or foe. But if we reject that protection and our behavior takes a wrong turn on the path, we must be held accountable for our actions, and I use this “must” the same way that Jesus did in our scripture saying that he “must” be on his way. He had no choice – it was not fate; it was God’s will. In the same way, we “must” care for each other and ourselves by living with integrity, making choices that are in the best interest of all, especially of God. The best way to do that is having someone walking that path with us to be sure that we don’t stray. We need each other to make sure we don’t lose our way and that we stay on the path. We need someone to whom we are accountable to look us in the eye or point us in the right living direction.
This is not to say that we don’t need time away. We all need a break from the world, to worship, clear our minds and hearts, open the pathways of communication with God, a time away from work. Jesus did too. He spent time away from people. He went off into the wilderness; like Antony, he climbed into the hills to get away from the massive crowds that followed him. He needed time and space to recharge, but when he did that, he told his disciples where he was going and that he would return. We all need Sabbath – a time to rest, cease, embrace the Holy, and feast on the bounties of life. Otherwise we won’t have the energy we need to continue the construction project, building the body of Christ. Without adequate rest we can’t be the board that reflects truth and deflects the untruths. Without time set apart, we cannot be the scaffolding for others to hold them up or guide their path.
And we cannot use that Sabbath as an escape, because God will gather us like a mother hen gathers her chicks, reminding us to snuggle in close, wing to wing, to create one large close-knit family of God, that works together to build the body of Christ into a shelter for us all.
My friend, Donna, recently posted this status on her Facebook page: I am grateful that we are not islands, and we need each other. It has been my experience when I am feeling alone, I am only seeing myself with all my gifts and flaws. However, when I take the time to count my blessings, they all happen to be the people who surround me with love, support and encouragement. Donna knows that we need other people to reflect the truth of who we are, and that being a Christian can sometimes be a lonely place if we don’t have others to hold us accountable, keep us on the path, and help us do what we cannot do alone. May we all remember that we cannot run away from the world because we won’t be able to finish the job if we go rogue. We need each other; God wants us to be together and with God; and in the words of Paul, And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another…(Hebrews) Amen.