Sunday, March 7, 2021

In a lonelier and lonelier world, how do you find community? Here's how.

It’s back!  And I am so excited!  But hold on, a second.  Why am I so excited?  How many times can you see folks fight off zombies, and still stay interested?   And sure, each season, they run into some crazy new set of enemies, but you know one way or other, they’re going to beat them, so where’s the suspense in that?   Yet, The Walking Dead has returned, and I am pleased as punch.   And it looks, from the rankings that about 3million other folks are pleased with me.

So, why?  Why after now ten years do so many still love that show?  Well, they love it for the same reason millions binge watched the show The Office during the pandemic or fell in love with that Canadian comedy, Schitts Creek.  It’s the same reason shows like Friends or Seinfeld or Cheers became huge hits and are still streamed today.  What could a show about zombies have in common with not very happy office workers or for that matter a town in Canada with a terrible name.   Each one speaks to something every person yearns to have and yet struggles to find.  But in those shows we see folks who have found it.   And so, the shows capture our hearts.

But of course, these are all TV shows.  What they show us can’t really happen. But what if, in some way, it can?   What if they are showing in their own fantastical way something that is possible, something that in moments in our lives we might have even experienced in some way ourselves?   In these words, words shared with a group of people who did find what so many yearn for, Jesus shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what Jesus has to say. 

John 13:34-35

So, what do those hit shows that I mentioned have in common?  If you haven’t guessed from the scripture, what they all have is a beautiful picture of community.    They show you a group of friends who stand by each other, who do life together, who have found community together.   And when folks see that, they love it.   Heck, they even feel in some way connected to that make believe community.   They feel connected because they all yearn to have it.  Everyone yearns to have a place where, as the old Cheers theme song goes, everyone knows your name.   And who knows?   At times we might have had it, a group of friends in high school or college.  Or maybe it was folks we served with in the armed forces or in another place where we forged deep bonds around common challenges and even dangers.  And if we ever had, we yearn to find it again, to live in that sort of deep, powerful community.   But here’s the problem.   

That sort of community is disappearing.  One out of three Americans admit they have never ever even talked with their neighbors.   The average American has only one close friend. One in four have no close friends at all.   And the younger you go, the worst it gets.   And of course, that’s not good.   In fact, it’s deadly.  Loneliness has the same impact on your life expectancy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  The less social contact you have, the more quickly things like heart disease or Alzheimer’s hit you, not to mention the dangers of depression or suicide.   And no one wants that.  Do you know of anyone who yearns to be lonely, maybe alone at times yes, but lonely? 

Yet here’s the problem.   What people say they want doesn’t always reflect what they actually do.   We say we want community and then do all sorts of things to avoid it.  It’s why new houses have big decks in the backyard, and no porches on the front. And it’s also why Jesus gives this sort of strange command here.  

Think about it.  Jesus is talking to people who have spent the last three years in deep and intense community with one another.   Yet he feels compelled to command them, to command them to love each other.    And in that commandment, Jesus is telling you something crucial that folks can forget.   If you want community, it requires work, work that you can too easily shirk.  It requires intention that you can too easily ignore.   It requires vulnerability that you too often avoid.  So, in some of his very last words, Jesus makes it a command.  Love one another.  

It happened over 20 years ago, yet I still remember it clearly.  I was driving somewhere, bemoaning to God my sense of isolation, my lack of friends.   And then, God answered back.  God didn’t comfort me or even say yes.  No, God said.  Take care of what you already have.   In other words, God was saying to me.  Why should I give you more friends?   You don’t even take care of the ones you have.   And I knew.   God was telling me a painful truth.

Do you notice?  Jesus didn’t just give them the command to love.  No, Jesus described to them what those words meant.  He told them.   As I have loved you, you also should love one another.  And how did Jesus love them?  He spent time with them, lots of time with them.  He listened and talked with them.  He ate and shared with them.   And that’s of course what love looks like. It’s someone giving you the weight of the most valuable thing you have, your time and attention.   

It’s why in the 8 practices that make up the common rule, this set of habits that saved Justin Early’s sanity and life, he instituted two habits around friendships and time.  He instituted a habit of a daily meal together, and one hour of weekly conversation with a friend.   Now these two habits might require some modifications.  They certainly did once Covid hit.   But they speak to two things you must regularly do.   You must make regular time to talk with those you love, and, as this pandemic eases, to eat with them too.  

But do you see the irony of that habit of a daily meal together in Justin Earley’s life.  Justin Earley lived with a wife and two kids.  And yet, he wasn’t even having one meal a day with the very people with whom he lived.   And yet how easily that happens, with work or with just the temptation of the TV or our phones.  I remember going out with my wife and son to Benihana’s for her birthday, when you could do those things without threat of death.  Across the communal table we saw a family in which every member was on their phone.   And we wondered to ourselves. Why are you even here?      

Yet I can hardly talk.  What God told me about taking care of my friends, over 20 years. I still often don’t do.  Why? I don’t want to risk the vulnerability, the possible rejection.  And so, I avoid.  So, this week, I scrambled to live out this sermon.  I reached out to set up a lunch with my best friend.   I called my brother, who I speak with too rarely.  I even talked to an old friend, one who in almost two decades, I have hardly spoken with at all.   

But you don’t need to do this habit, not simply because Jesus commanded it or because it’s the “right thing” to do.   You need this habit because Jesus knows, you just need it.  I need it.  We all need it more desperately than we even know.

In some of the darkest days of the pandemic, I was feeling the absence of my family so deeply.  And that’s when it happened, when Melissa Dewey died.   I hadn’t seen Melissa Dewey in almost 20 years.  She had been a member of the church youth group I led on Long Island.   Yet, when I heard that she had been run over while trying to flag down help for her disabled car it wrecked me.  It felt so utterly, horribly random for her to die in such a senseless way.  

And then another member of that youth group put all of us together on Facebook Messenger.  And for three days, in a virtual yet profoundly real way, we grieved together.   We shared our pain and our memories.  We passed along pictures of our kids and oohed and aahed over their cuteness.  We came together once again in a community like the ones that those hit shows so tantalizingly portray.   And that group of friends from decades ago, teenagers then and now mostly parents with kids of their own got me through those very dark days.

You see, we need that love.  You need that love.   And no screen or make-believe TV show can ever take its place.    It’s why God came to us, not simply in words, but in skin and bone, in flesh and blood.  And there, in Jesus, he loved us and ate with us and laughed with us, and, in the end, died for us.   And before he died, he said.  Love each other like that, like I loved, like I still love you.  And as you love like that, they’ll see me.  They’ll see the God who yearns to be their friend, to welcome them into the never-ending circle of love that is God.     

So, come and live out the command.   Share the love.  Live in these habits of love.  Talk with a friend, really talk, every week, if not more.  Make time regularly to eat with someone, to break bread even as we do here, even if its virtually.   And know that in that love, in those friendships, you will discover more deeply the love of this God who binds us all together in a love that not even death will defeat.        

 

 

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