Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

Preached by Winton Boyd on September 16th, 2007
Text: Acts 5

One of our pleasures and sorrows as parents has been taking our oldest son to college. As Tammy and I took him up for his second year, it was fun to think back to his first year. Like many students, he did not know his roommate prior to arriving on campus as a freshman – a roommate he didn’t share much in common with. As we were driving up for year two, I couldn’t help but remember the line that late night comedian Conan O’Brien shared at a commencement speech a year ago - “Be warned, everyone (at college) has a weird roommate. If you don’t have a weird roommate, then you’re the weird roommate.”

Taking our son back for his sophomore year of college was different for one primary reason. As a freshman, he was moving into a dorm building. As a sophomore who had chosen a roommate and some floor mates – he was moving into a community. He was moving into a setting that he has chosen and with whom he has some history. In the vast sea of students that is a large public university, he is finding a group that will be his first real experience of community outside the family, church, and organizations of his youth. It is a great thing – and as many of us would attest from our own experience at college, in the military, or in another chosen settings, it will deeply impact his life for years to come.

A bit of a contrast with this brutal story from the book of Acts. I suggested it for as the text for a Stewardship theme – you know – that if you lie about your assets and hold your money from the group …. It has all sorts of potential for drama, guilt inducing one-liners, conflict, and judgment! For reasons I don’t fully understand, the mission team was a bit skittish!

No, it is not part of the lectionary texts. The most intriguing online commentary on this text came from the “Skeptics Annotated Bible: an unbelievers thoughts about the Bible. It is part of his/her list of the number of people God killed throughout the Bible. This is depressing, ugly stuff.

And yet, in the context of a reflection on the communities of our lives it may be re-reading.

You may remember this early community of Acts – a diverse and eclectic group of people – slaves and slave owners, wealthy widows and strong, opinionated young disciples –seeking to follow in the way of Jesus by the way they lived – sharing their resources, holding each other accountable, caring for one another, dividing up tasks and jobs based on ability and call (some teachers, some caregivers, some leaders, some worker bees). It appears that it was an inspiring, and intense, experiment in community.

There is increasing, independent, sociological evidence that it was this kind of community life, and the care that grew from it, that was a distinctive trait of the early church. It set them apart from the current culture, and on emboldened them to offer compassion and care to the sick, the dying and the lonely in ways that were quite striking and even risky.

And yet, in chapter 5 we see it wasn’t perfect, that it was broken in some ways too. Why did Ananias sell the land and then lie about its value? Why did his wife, Sapphira, follow his lead? Was it greed, fear, a legitimate concern in his own family that he didn’t feel free to share, mistrust in the leadership of the community, friction with his wife?

We don’t the reason or the specifics – but in fact, when we think about this story, we do know the pain. What we see in this story we know all too well – community life is fraught with danger, fraught with pain and frankly – fraught with people. Broken in ways that do cause death.

If award winning author M. Scott Peck was right, that, “in and through community lies the salvation of the world,” we know firsthand how difficult it is to find, develop or nurture life-giving communities in our lives. Like the early community of Acts, we know the pain of broken dreams, shattered promises, or mistrust.

Last week, I introduced the idea of “tragic gaps” in our lives. Today, the focus is on the tragic gaps in our experience and hopes around living in community. Living in the gap between what is and what could be.

What is, what we know from our experience, is broken community – neighborhoods that have rising crime, circles of friends that are ripped apart by gossip or the untimely sharing of secrets and confidences, relationships that fall apart because of the individual pain of each person and our inability to share that pain with our loved ones, or families that have complicated dysfunction (Maybe I could trade you my odd relative for your odd relative – just for a change of pace),

But on the other side of the tragic gap – on the side of what could be, what is possible, what we base our fondest hopes and dreams on – is a deep experience of community – if only in brief, fleeting moments. We know the deep bonds of family that transcend all others in times of crisis. We know the beauty of sharing communion with others who are seeking to live out their faith – even if in imperfect ways. We know the amazing connections we make in short term and intense community experiences. We know the deep peace of receiving a phone call or email from a long forgotten friend who knows our history and loves us nonetheless. We know that in the end, it is often the communities that have experienced brokenness that are the most authentic, the most forgiving, the most welcoming.

I remember sitting in a simple but inviting Palestinian house not too from the town of Nazareth in northern Galilee with a man named Elias Jabbour. Since 1978, Elias and his wife Heyam have been active in peacemaking efforts through an organization they founded called “the House of Hope.” Elias inherited this vocation from his father, a traditional Palestinian arbitrator schooled in the ancient practice of Sulha. If anyone is experienced in the practice of “standing in the gap” between what is and what could be, between difficult current realities and one’s deepest hopes and fondest dream – these two are. The longer I have paid attention to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, as with most international crisis, the more I have come to believe that what keeps any semblance of sanity in the region is the presence of these folks who know pain and hold out hope, who ground themselves in their faith in such a way that they defeat cynicism and avoid irrelevant idealism. They are, as Peck says, part of the salvation of the world by their very trust and belief in community.

What Elias and Heyem do in their small village, we are called to do various ways in our own lives. This dynamic hits us at all levels of our lives – but it is our call.

And yet, we also need times and places where we can simply name both sides of this gap – honor the brokenness, grief and loss; as well as the deep hopes and fond dreams and sense of connection that sustain our lives. We need the time to feel both the pain and the possibility – not just in our heads, but in our hearts and our bodies.

In a moment you will be invited to come forward to participate in a silent naming and a quiet recognition of the gaps of your life. You will be invited to come forward to first, touch a finger into the bowl of SALT WATER and bring it to your lips. This is to symbolize and acknowledge the tears and pain that we have known, and continue to know, in the communities of our lives. But secondly, you will be invited to light a candle – a promise always of light in the darkness, hope in the future. You may take as long as you would like – even staying at the table for prayer.

But before we move to that ritual, I want to share a poem with you, written by Wendell Berry about 10 years ago called “The Sycamore.” It is, on the one hand, a poem about a tree – but of course so much more. As I read it, I invite us to understand this poem as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit at work in our lives – giving us the strength to name our pain, express our hope, and live in that often confusing space between the two. If you want to follow along, the poem is in the order of worship.

The Sycamore

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white of the bark.
It bears the gnarls of its history healed over.
It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998