The Power of Community

Yesterday I celebrated at a Eucharist for a group of Episcopal women I am a member of, at the end of a three-day conference on empowering women for social justice work. I asked all the women (about 75 who were present) to come stand up at the altar with me during the prayer of consecration.

As I was praying, I felt like superwoman--a feeling of great power and a kind of empowerment beyond myself. The spirits of all those women ringing the altar were extraordinary. There were more than just my prayers being said at the altar, there were the prayers and power of all those women with me. I felt as if I were floating a little above the floor, that the words of prayer were being sent into God's own mind at that moment.

This is the most powerful and wonderful, and awe-filled moment I have had as a priest. The community surrounding the altar were truly the consecrators of the bread and wine.

I believe this is how Eucharist was meant to be--the community praying together to bring the Holy Spirit in our midst. We all were co-creators with God at that moment, we all made the bread and wine Christ's body and blood to us--we all as an entity, not our separateness, but our oneness, were conduits of the Holy Spirit.

May all of you reading this today be able to have this kind of community where you can go--a place of such love and power, of oneness in Christ.

Christian community

This week our lection from Acts gave us a model of the first Christians living in community.

They broke bread, shared in the apostles' teaching, fellowship and the prayers. They held all things in common. They rejoiced and brought many new members into their fold. The did signs and wonders.

How does this model look next to your community of faith? Where can you take a page from the first Christians' community to learn how to be in communion with your fellow Christians? Does your community of faith look anything like this?

Meeting the Risen Christ

As we continue to meet the risen Christ in our readings during Easter, be mindful of the risen Christ meeting you on the street, in your office, classroom, home. Wherever people are on the margins--the poor, the outcast, the homeless, those in the throes of addictions—all are the face of Christ crying out for the gospel that promises that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This “scandalous gospel of Jesus”, as it is termed by Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes in his latest book of this title, makes us uncomfortable because it challenges our own place at the table. It takes us out of our comfort zone, to reach out to those whom Christ cried for, healed, loved. Love is never diminished when given away, paradoxically, it grows. Jesus’s love for “the least" showed us the way. And his power over death made death nothing to fear, so now we have nothing to fear by giving away our love.

Encounter the risen Christ this week, live the scandalous gospel in your little corner of the world.

Richard of Chichester

On April 3, we commemorate Richard of Chichester, bishop, who died 1253.

You may remember the prayer attributed to him, basis for a song in the rock opera Godspell:

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly,
Day by day.

The Commandment to Love

A priest I knew once said some parishioners told him that their five year old little girl came home after church one Sunday and complained—“All the priest does is say the same thing over and over. Blah blah blah love, blah blah blah love.”
Well Maundy Thursday is the reason that preachers have sermons that harp on a single theme of love—the new commandment of Christ to the disciples, to love others as he has loved them.
To be servants to each other, to wash each others’ feet. To love not as masters but as slaves.
To love as Christ has loved us.
The immensity of Christ’s love for us makes us wonder whether we can even try to attain to such a thing—to make Christ’s model our own way of loving.
For Christ’s love was all verb.
While we want love to be poems, flowers and cards of sympathy, or the whispering of sweet nothings, Christ had no hearts and flowers and sentiment.
Christ’s love was rooted in his body.
His love was making mud on a blind man’s eyes;
Telling a woman at a well about her life;
Weeping with Mary and Martha;
commanding in a shout for Lazarus to live.

His love was dirty and defiled by disease, distemper, death. His love was measured in the number of dusty, dirty feet gently put under water. His love was eating and drinking with people we wouldn’t want to bring home to dinner.
His love is leaving our safe places behind.
I believe that our loving must be startled out of our reverie, away from our safe places and made clear to the world. Because, when we pay attention to all the ways the world is crying out for the acts of love shone to us in Christ, we begin to want to love our world as Christ loved it.
Coming out of complacency that nothing can be done, or that the world needs so much more love than we can give, we begin to see that unless we start where we are, the world will die without love.
Our nooks and crannies are our stating places, just like Jesus’s world of lepers and the lame and women coming to wells was his world. Jesus did not heal all people in his world but he made it possible that everywhere his followers went, love would be spread in a geometric progression. Each person loving in the small corners they inhabit, multiplied, become all the world receiving the love of Christ.
The arithmetic of Christ’s love is bigger than any one of us. It starts with small steps, with awareness of how to love in the minute I find myself, the place I find myself, with the people with whom I find myself.
The spread of divine love is not safe, it is risky. It is stepping into someone’s grief and loss, or away from the computer in face to face encounter. It can be as mundane as a beer with a young adult, or as exotic as a mission trip to a place that may give us malaria.
This kind of loving is always personal, as Christ was personal.
This kind of loving is imbued with divine power, as Christ was imbued with divine power.
This kind of loving is not a choice. Jesus did not say, maybe you will love if you want to be my follower, but you must love as I have loved you.
This kind of loving is the mark of Christians. By this they will know you are my disciples.
As we ponder the commandment to love as Christ has loved us, we know that we would not be given this work to do without God’s power behind it. We know we can love, because Christ loved us. We know we can start today because we are loved today. We know we can take our love to dark and lonely places because we have been loved in our own dark and lonely places. We know that all the people we are asked to love are merely our own selves, who have already been loved.
This knowledge of the love of Christ is what propels us to love the world. Christ so loved us that we can do no other than love in his holy name.
Living the love that Christ asked us to live.
Doing the loving that Christ lived.

We know we are living love like a verb when our lives are not just talk. When we are not just blah, blah, blah love, but doing love, love, love, love.