Sermon – July 21-2019 – Community

In my public-school days, my family lived in Rexdale in north Etobicoke.  We lived in a bungalow on a quiet crescent, just around the corner from the school I attended. It was a new subdivision, so there were many other families with young children, just like my parents.  On our crescent, there were about 25 children ranging in age from 5 to 12 years old and we all played together.  In the summer, we’d play until 9pm! Sometimes the boys played street hockey, while the girls played hopscotch or double Dutch. Other times we played Simon Says, or tag, but our favourite game was hide-and-seek. We’d play that almost every evening. In the winter, we’d create hills to toboggan down or patches of ice to slide on. There was lots of fun and support. This was my first experience of ‘community’. And within that community, there were other smaller communities. Some children went to the catholic school, other members of the group were in my church Sunday school class. Because all the kids knew each other, many of the parents knew each other too. It was a great place to be and I still remember the wonderful sense of belonging. It was a connected neighbourhood. Of course, it wasn’t always perfect harmony. Sometimes, kids would form different groups, or they’d grow out of the games, or they’d be at odds with another kid. But that’s normal in human interaction and it usually settled down after a while, and if we were lucky, we would learn to navigate the conflict. From those experiences, we learned some pretty important life skills.

Community, in anthropological terms, is a social unit, a group of living things, either large or small that has something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity, or some combination of those.  A community often shares a sense of place, situated in a geographical area, which is fundamental to their identity.[i] Take for instance our native people in North America, who have lived in their communities for thousands of years or the Bush people of the Kalahari desert, who have lived on and tended their ancestral lands for thousands of years, to the point that being separated from their land would cause some of these people to die. Communities, no matter what they are, physical or ideological, share four elements: a feeling of belonging; making a difference to the group; integration and fulfillment of needs; and shared emotional connection.[ii] In the development of the internet and social media, communities for specific causes and ideologies can also exist on a virtual platform, possessing the same four elements.

Even before scripture reinforced the idea of community, living in community had been a way of living since the birth of life on the planet. Humans have always been social, meaning they survive by being together. God always intended that humans should live in community. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon talks about ‘two’, but it could be applied to a larger number. He points out that working together brings greater reward and fosters cooperation. If there is an accident while working together, there would be someone there to help. On a cold night, one is much more likely to stay warm in a group of people than all alone. And, a group is more likely to be able to fend off an attacker.[iii]

In Corinthians, Paul uses the analogy of the body to explain the need for community living. In Paul’s definition, it is not only working together and supporting each other, it emphasizes the emotional connection which exists in community. When one of the community is in trouble, the whole community suffers with the one in trouble. If a person in a community is successful and achieves their goals, the whole community turns out to celebrate with that person. This way of living, for Paul, is the way to be like Christ.[iv]

Today’s world seems to be a pretty fractured place and the notion of community has become even more complex than it was. We talk about society not helping people anymore, people going out on their own and ignoring ‘society’ and the community it provides, saying they don’t need a community. They can do whatever they have to do to survive on their own. But our feeling of self-sufficiency and independence can only exist because a community structure exists as support. We may not recognize that because modern society has always been there. Because we think we can do things on our own, we have unwittingly begun to disrespect and indeed destroy existing communities, human and plant based.

Look at some of the ways humans have contributed to these destructions: the governing bodies of the time decided that they knew better than the aboriginal people who lived everywhere in the world. These people were stripped of their rights and relocated to places that were deemed better for them: our own native people in North America, the Aborigines of Australia, the Bush people of the Kalahari, in Botswana, Africa, to name only a few. In Botswana, the government discovered diamonds on the Bush People’s land, and evicted them and moved them to other areas of Africa, so that diamonds could be mined in Botswana[v].

Look at the plant life and eco-systems which have been destroyed by our not working together, our not respecting everything’s right to belong and live: for instance logging in rainforests, drilling for oil, allowing our oceans, lakes and rivers to be contaminated by chemical effluent or hijacked by profiteering companies.

The reality is that it’s a gradual process. No one wakes up one day and says “today, I’m going to destroy and ecosystem. It’s a lot of littles things that we do, perhaps because we feel secure, and we’re in the middle of it before we know it. Once humans start down this track, it’s pretty hard to stop, to reverse the process and so, just like the people in the Old and New testaments, we still need the reminder, that two is better than one, that when one is in trouble, we all suffer.

Even though it may look bleak for community living, especially in large urban areas, I still have hope because there are lots of people who are quietly working together to address the issues in communities and creation, that Jesus calls us to address. These kinds of things never get reported because they don’t sell the news. Like the organization 4Ocean, which is a United States company that sells bracelets, apparel and water bottles, made from recycled materials. The company uses a portion of the profits to remove one pound of trash from the ocean and coastlines for each bracelet that is sold to clean up plastic pollution in oceans.[vi] [vii] This has inspired other people to go out in groups to pick up garbage in parkland and on beaches. Another initiative is about people helping indigenous bees thrive, by planting native plants, grasses and native flowers, which are left to grow long and wild.[viii] A group, called Survival, hired lawyers to fight for the Bush People[ix] to get their land and water rights back. They’ve made headway, but it was slow.

I also notice a difference in small rural communities, like my sister’s, where you can see the community working together.  My sister, being a city slicker, has been amazed at how much help and support she’s received since she has moved there.  I’ve told you about her neighbour, Bob, who has done many fix-it jobs for her, but other people she works with, have planted her vegetable garden, and taken care of the animals when she’s not there.

The truth is that we need each other, whether we want to admit it or not. This is why God tells us that she is always there, that we are not alone, that all we have to do is ask. And how does God do this, but to have us live in community, so that she can work through people to ensure we are taken care of.

I came across a popular song, by a modern musician, Mark Scibilia, called How Bad We Need Each Other[x], and it resonated with the message for this week. Whether the musician wrote it with community in mind, I don’t know, but that’s what it said to me. (We will hear this song played as we leave today).  It speaks of how bad we need each other, but also how there is hope, that “Life is too far to walk alone, that we can’t do it on our own, but that people are going to be OK, because storms don’t come to stay.”[xi]

We mustn’t forget the four elements of community because God wants us to belong, to make a difference, to take care of each other and to share emotional connection. In that way, our spirits will be whole, and we will have hope for a better world.

M. Simpson

[i] Wikipedia: Community, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12, Holy Bible, Good News Translation (GNT)

[iv] 1Corinthians 12: 25-27, Holy Bible, Good News Translation (GNT)

[v] The Bushmen, Survival, www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen

[vi] Wikipedia: 4Ocean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4Ocean

[vii] www.4Ocean.com

[viii] Alamenciak, Tim, Why roof top beehives are bad for native bees, https//www.TVO.org, June 26, 2018

[ix] The Bushmen, Survival, www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen

[x] Scibilia, Mark, How Bad We Need Each Other, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THLI9N7w970

[xi] Ibid