THE CHURCH: COMMUNITY

THE CHURCH:  COMMUNITY

            I don’t remember how old I was – I was a young schoolboy – but I do remember the rainy, cold day.  I had walked from school to the beauty shop in the Cleburne Hotel on Cherry Street, where my mother worked as a beauty operator.  It was now time to walk home in the cold rain.  I bundled up, shivered and set out, wondering why I had to do this.  I crossed Cherry Street and looked up Porter Street, where my home was a mile away.  I was walking past Plaza Drugs when I heard a car honking at me, and I turned to hear and see Mrs. Lyda Kitchens roll down her window in the rain to ask me:  “Do you want a ride home?”  My heart leapt up, and I said “Yes, M’am,” and I ran to get into her back seat.  On the ride home I do not recall what she said, but I shall never forget the feelings of warmth and acceptance and gratitude that this woman had rescued me from a cold rain.  

            Lyda Kitchens was a wealthy white woman, and I was a poor white boy, but the church connected us – we were both part of First Presbyterian Church. Though class boundaries remained strong in my town, in my church, they were less clear.    Our Presbyterian church was a mixture of white society, and in this milieu, I didn’t really notice class as a harsh barrier.  When Mrs. Kitchens gave me a ride on that cold and rainy day (can I say it one more time?), my first thought was not: “OK, a rich white woman is picking me up!”  My first thought was gratitude that anyone with a car was picking me up!   The church had linked us together, and I was grateful, especially on this kind of day.

            It was this kind of community that Jesus sought to build in his ministry – rich aligned with poor, women sharing leadership, those who were healthy paired with those who were sick and frail.  In Mark 1, Jesus encounters a man with leprosy, and the man calls out to Jesus:  “Lord, you can heal me – IF YOU WANT TO.”  The person with leprosy not only wants healing for his body.  He also wants healing for his soul.  The words in Greek call him  “a leper,” an indication that he has been pushed to the margins.  His humanity has been taken, and his identity is now the disease which wreaks havoc on him.  He is asking Jesus to return his humanity to him.  “Jesus, you can heal me……if you want to……do you want to?  Or, are you simply like everyone else, who sees me as unclean and unworthy and inhuman?”  Jesus replies:  “I want to,” and he breaks the law by touching and healing this man whom society has deemed “unclean” and has pushed out of the community.

            The church can do this – it is our mission and our lifeblood.  We are called to be that body which can help break down the dividing walls between us and to build community.  We are privileged to offer the opportunity to all of us to recover our humanity, to help each of us hear that our primary definition is not whatever the world tells us, or even what we tell ourselves.  Our primary definition is that we are the daughters and sons of God.  I felt this in my church as a boy.  I believed this stuff – I believed that class was not important in the church.  I believed it because I experienced it.  At its best, the church can be a place like this, a place where each of us and all of us can find our home, can find our “true north.”  We, of course, have failed miserably in this calling as church, but I know that it can be done, because I experienced it as a boy and as a youth.  And, I experienced it as a pastor.  The church can be a powerful place to build community, to build the interdependence that it is at the heart of the gospel.

            My experience is a key component in this story, but it is not the only component.   Even as I experienced the gift of a warm ride in a cold rain, my imagination had not yet seen – nor was it allowed to see – that our vision was severely truncated.  Strong community that we were as church, we were very much afraid to engage an even larger barrier to community:  the power of race.  No people of African descent were allowed in worship or membership.  In that sense, the community of church that felt so warm to me was far shallower than I had imagined.  The corrective glasses that we as white people needed were the lens of justice.  To that we shall turn next week.