In the 15th chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus attempts to prepare his earliest disciples for their future. Knowing that he will soon be leaving them, Jesus instructs his disciples on what it will mean for them to be an authentic faith community into their future.
The Church of the Saviour is moving into a new millennium. How have we been prepared to be authentic into that new millennium? What have we learned from the Church of the Saviour's 50-year history, rooted in our much longer biblical history, that is essential to our being faithful into our future? I'd like to name four areas in which I think we have been prepared to move toward deeper faithfulness, if we choose to do so.
The first is in the area of being authentic community. Gordon and Mary Cosby have given the last 50 years of their lives to building church, to nurturing authentic communities of faith. People come from all over the world to visit the various ministries that have grown out of these authentic faith communities over the years.
People come to see Jubilee Housing, Samaritan Inns, Christ House, Joseph's House, Good Shepherd, Columbia Road Health Services, the Servant Leadership School, and all of the rest that are the fruit of authentic communities of faith. These are the fruit of branches deeply connected to the vine.
Having experienced such fruitfulness, the temptation is to invest all of our time and energy into maintaining and nurturing the fruit and, in so doing, neglect the source of the fruit's life—neglect nurturing a deep connection to the vine. Jesus doesn't mince words concerning the fate of branches that become disconnected from the vine. They wither. They lose eternal value. They become dead wood for the fire.
If there is anything our history would teach us, it is that as branches our primary commitment needs to be to an ever deepening connection to the vine. Our primary call is to move together from fear and individualism into an ever deepening trust relationship with the nonviolent, self-giving, reconciling Jesus and with one another.
It is in this context of authentic community that we become our most authentic selves. However, becoming our truest selves is not an end in itself. Community is not about our own personal evolution or individuation. Our "becoming" in the context of a community of faith is a means to an end. We become our truest selves as a means toward the end of total surrender, toward the end of being able to give our lives away for the sake of the whole.
The second area in which we have been prepared to move toward deeper faithfulness is the area of our spiritual disciplines. For example, members of the Lazarus House faith community commit to spending an hour a day in prayer and meditation on scripture; to sharing financial resources with the poor, beginning with 10 percent of one's income; to weekly participation in a small "mission group" in which members experience spiritual intimacy and accountability and respond relationally to some genuine need in the world; to gathering weekly for worship; to making annual silent retreats; and to practicing nonviolence in all our affairs.
Most of us struggle from time to time with at least one of the disciplines. Some feel they are not rigorous enough, others feel they are too rigorous to be welcoming and can result in "exclusivity." However, it is the disciplines that help keep us "connected to the vine." They root us in the transforming power of divine love, a love that bids us to include the entire world.
Walter Wink, in the December 1996 issue of The Witness, writes:
Each day, 35,000 children 5 years and younger die of starvation, malnutrition, and related diseases....A war with casualties as high as 35,000 a day would be denounced as genocidal. But these deaths go on, inexorably, day after day, and the public is silent....
During wartime it wouldn't make sense for soldiers to resist the training they must undergo or the disciplines they must practice to prepare them for battle. We face a holocaust against the poor. Spiritual disciplines help to keep us connected to the source of the only hope we have of confronting the violence and greed rampant in our world. These disciplines help to keep us open to the grace that can heal us of the fear, violence, and greed within our own hearts.
Even when we can't see the point, when our prayer life seems dry, like absolutely nothing is happening, the disciplines keep us connected to the source of life where exciting, creative responses and new visions are given on behalf of the whole human family. Perhaps it would be helpful for us to pray that our hunger for God will grow deeper than our resistance to God.
THE THIRD AREA in which our history has prepared us to move toward deeper faithfulness is in truly embracing as brothers and sisters the suffering and excluded of our world, and beginning to live out that relatedness. A couple of years ago some of us participated in an act of nonviolent, civil disobedience in the Capitol Rotunda in protest of the dismantling of welfare before there was any alternative plan for caring for the most vulnerable in our society. While we were being processed after the arrest, I shared with Gordon Cosby my reservations concerning the action.
"Gordon," I confessed, "I believe with all my heart that this welfare reform bill will be devastating to the most vulnerable in our society, and I know we cannot remain silent. Still, I feel a little hypocritical about our protesting the bill without presenting an alternative." Gordon responded, "Killian, that is what the church is supposed to be."
Authentic faith communities are supposed to be the alternative; the church is supposed to embody and model for Congress and the rest of the world an alternative to the unjust systems we are opposing. The church is supposed to give leadership to the dominant culture at the point of what it means to "love one's neighbor as oneself" and pour out one's life and creativity as an expression of that kind of love.
But how do we as faith communities even dare to imagine embodying an alternative to systems that exclude and oppress when we ourselves are so complicit in such structures and systems? Simply purchasing a pair of running shoes made in foreign factories by workers whose wages are not adequate for them to eat each day makes us complicit with an oppressive system.
So how do we allow a counterstory to be told through our lives? How do we begin to claim and live out our relatedness to every member of the human family? How do we begin to put our weight down with at least one group of our brothers and sisters who are suffering in ways beyond what we can imagine?
In truth, it is only as we begin to claim and live out our relatedness to those who are being crushed and broken by oppressive systems that we will begin to find our way toward disentanglement. Only then will we become more free—free to take risks, free to allow our old assumptions to be challenged, free to let go of calcified structures of the past that are no longer life-giving, free to participate in the costly and sometimes painful birthing of the new.
I don't think we can wait until we are "good," or "pure," or completely disentangled from systems that oppress to begin living out our relatedness to brothers and sisters. Oskar Schindler did not wait until he considered himself good or totally disentangled from oppressive systems in Nazi Germany before he began to claim his relatedness to those being crushed by them. In Raising Abel, theologian James Alison points out that the initial purpose of Schindler's business was to profit from the war. And yet his complicity with evil did not prevent him from beginning to respond creatively to the suffering of his brothers and sisters, a response which bore fruit that has inspired people throughout the world.
This leads to the fourth area of our history of preparation for faithfulness. Just before his death, Jesus warned his disciples, "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you" (John 15:18-19). As we claim our relatedness to those who are victims of systems that exclude and oppress, we will find ourselves exposing the darkness of those systems.
One night recently in our Lazarus House worship service, which is modeled after programmed Quaker meetings, we were working with these questions: How do we prepare ourselves to expose the darkness of oppressive structures? How do we prepare to be hated by groups that are not committed to nonviolence?
One woman who was visiting shared her belief that when we are following our "call" we will have protection from the darkness. I found her words momentarily comforting. I, too, seek God's protection from the darkness. I, too, pray for the protection of all those working in our Jubilee ministries and throughout the world who seek to be light in very dark places.
But I believe our hope has to be rooted in something deeper than what James Alison calls a "rescuer-God," meaning the notion that God will always rescue us from the darkness we encounter and expose. God didn't choose to rescue Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer as they, seeking to be faithful to the light, exposed the darkness of the oppressive systems they encountered. And God didn't choose to rescue Jesus.
Our hope must be rooted in the deeper reality that it is in giving our lives away for the sake of the kingdom of love, whatever form that may take, that we, in fact, find life. For what does it profit a man, or a woman, or a community of faith "if we gain the whole world and lose our very soul"?
Kathy Killian Noe was a founding member of the Lazarus House faith community when this article appeared. It was adapted from a sermon given at the ecumenical service of Church of the Saviour.
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