A Commitment to Community

A Commitment to Community

Acts 2:43-45

So, I’m writing this sermon before we left on the work trip because the last thing that I want to do is come home on Friday night and have to write on Saturday.  I know that I’ll be too exhausted.  I know that my head will be buzzing with everything that’s happened.  I know that I will only be starting to make sense of all those moments.  That’s why I’m going to tell you the gist of what happened on work trip ahead of time…

Now, it’s not that I’m clairvoyant.  It’s just that I’ve been on 40 trips.  Every trip has been in a different location, working on different jobs, working with different crews.  We’ve had good weather and terrible weather.  We’ve worked with lovely people and people who were really tough.  We’ve had projects that came together like a charm and projects that have pushed us hard to learn new skills.  Here’s the thing, though, work trip just plain works, every time.  

What do I mean when I say that it works?  First, I mean that in a few days, people feel connected to each other, often people who had no prior connection, adults and young people, or young people from one strand of high school life and young people from another strand of high school life, or people from a place like Lake Bluff and a place like Tuscumbia, Missouri.  In a world where people feel so disconnected from one another, work trip is like super glue.

Second, work trip works because people discover the joy that happens when we commit to a common goal.  You can’t go “half in.”  The experience has a given time frame:  Sunday through Friday.  For that period of time, everyone makes sacrifices:  you travel in a van with a bunch of people to a place you would never otherwise go.  You sleep in a room with a whole lot of people.  Suddenly, your saying good night and good morning to people when the only thing you’ve said to them before was, “Nice coffee hour, huh?”  You work really hard and depend on the other people on your crew.  You share a sense that no one is leaving until we get this done.  You start to believe that there is probably someone in the group who knows how to do whatever we might need to do as long as we work together.  You grow to trust one another.  Everyone is here to help someone else, and wanting to help turns out to be contagious.

Of course, work trip isn’t everyone’s “cup of tea.”  I remember the advisor who was along for his first trip.  At the end of the week, he talked about how life-changing the trip was for him.  Then, he announced that he was never coming again.  That can happen.  I’d take him back in a heartbeat.  He was hugely helpful.  He was just being honest.

That honesty is what grows out of commitment and trust.  Work trip is an experience of community.  Because we are working together to help someone else, we have a sense of common purpose.  I’ve watched you work.  You’ve watched me work.  We’ve sweat together and made mistakes together and fixed those mistakes together.  We figured out our routines:  what we do when we get to the work site; what skills do we have; how do we finish a day.  We celebrate and laugh and get frustrated and get so hot that we’ve got to take a break but the key is that we do all those things together.

Again, this doesn’t work out for everyone all the time.  If you really don’t want to be there, you can refuse to join in.  You can just check your phone all the time.  You can have that conversation going in your head that no one really likes you.  In any number of ways, a person can refuse to dive in, even when there’s a whole crew of people saying to you, “Come on! Help us!” The truth is that community can be both powerful and fragile at the same time.  Just about everyone who has been sent on the work trip as “punishment” for some past “crime” or because it would be “good for them” has had to make a choice:  “I’m here. Am I in?” That choice—“Am I in” is a choice we make over and over again in life.

Here’s the other thing, though.  Work trip is an intensive experience of what it means to make a commitment, what it means to commit to a common goal, what it means to live in community.  All of those things require us to make some real sacrifices.  It costs you a lot of comfort and security to go and do something new.  It’s a risk to say, “We’re going to make this happen!”  If you do, though, the most shocking thing takes place:  people start to identify with this church as their church.

This ownership of the church is true for the youth.  I wish you could be there for evening worship to hear them lead us.  When worship grows out of what we’ve been doing all day, worship is different.  Let me say that a different way:  when worship is all of us reflecting together on what’s really happening right now, worship is powerful!  Worship becomes of blend of what we got done and what we struggled with and what we have yet to do. Worship is about being excited to share what we experienced and equally excited to hear from the other group about what went on for them.  The language is slightly “salty” and real. The laughter is genuine.  And when a question gets asked that invites people to see something deeper, something sacred, we catch a glimpse of God’s presence. 

The ownership of the church is true for the adults on the trip, too.  The crew of leaders that we have are mostly veterans now.  However, some of them were marginally connected to church until they went on a work trip. Then, something changed.  Church made more sense.  Men who only went to church with their wives dragging them started appearing at church…on their own.  Men who would never share a joy or a concern in worship, sit for an evening with a small group of people and speak from their hearts, in a real way about how good it feels to work together and of how proud they are of their crew…and how their bodies are aching after a hard day.

Step back…what I’ve said to you for a little while now is that the Holy Spirit is God’s way of being present in our lives.  Yes, God is the ground on which we stand:  there’s something, not nothing; the world is full of amazing gifts and so on.  Yes, God is the one who shows us how to live through Christ’s teachings and his life and death and resurrection.  However, while we are standing around and waiting for God to fix things in some Old Testament, intervening sort of way or while other’s are waiting for Jesus to come back, I believe that God, as the Spirit, is working to inspire us to do helpful things. God connects us to people whom we would otherwise never know. God empowers us to do things—together—that we would never be able to do on our own.

In other words, I believe that work trip is one of the most spiritual experiences of my life—spiritual but not religious.  We’re not pretending we’re someone else.  We come as we are.  We’re doing the work, not just writing a check for someone else to do the work for us.  We’re reflecting on what’s happening and using our own words.  If there’s any sacred music shared to help make the point it will be our sacred music that is played, not someone’s sacred music from 300 years ago.  It’s real.  It’s raw. It’s profoundly spiritual.  And…the only way that we’re ever going to do this work is if we work as hard as we can and work together and if, somehow, God has a hand in helping us get the job done.

Let me give you one of my classic examples of this experience.  Years ago, we worked with Wonderland Camp, a camp for mentally and physically challenged people.  The director, Allan Moore, was a dear friend. We asked him what he would really like.  He answered:  a chapel.  The chapel grew from the concept of a small place in the woods to a heated and air conditioned building with a sanctuary and a stained glass window—the biggest project we ever took on.  The high school students designed it.  A slew of people built it over the course of three weeks.

One of the biggest challenges was to build a staircase from the main floor to the basement that wouldn’t be awkward and in the way.  Jim, my fellow leader, and I were brainstorming.  Jim said, “What would be great is a spiral staircase.”  Then, we both laughed. Here’s the thing…within a few hours, he and I were driving across the countryside in pursuit of needed supplies.  On our right was a junk yard, full of scrapped cars.  In the back corner of that lot was a free-standing spiral staircase.  Jim wheeled the van into the parking lot.  We went inside and asked the owner about the staircase: 
“Is it for sale?”.  He said that if we’d get that stupid thing out of his yard, it was ours for free.  (Someone had custom ordered it and then never paid for it.)

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the challenge.  How are we going to get it to the camp?  How are we going to move it into place?  Let me just say that, in my humble opinion, it was no accident that the Missouri National Guard happened to be working in camp that week!  Those people, who never thought they’d be working with some church group from Chicago, helped us move that staircase that we never thought we would find into place and it fit like it was custom made.  We took risk after risk to build something bigger and better and every step of the way things came together. 

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Pentecost together.  We remembered the people who had no idea what was next but knew that they needed to be together.  They knew what we know:  that whatever is good will be better if we’re together and whatever is difficult and challenging will be less awful if we’re together.  Gathered together, they experienced the most amazing things:  a rush of a mighty wind; tongues of fire that blazed but did not burn; the sudden ability to speak languages that they had not been able to speak before.  This was the arrival of the Holy Spirit who empowers people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.  It turns out that speaking a new language wasn’t a magic trick.  It was how the Spirit empowered people to connect with others. 

In our text this morning, they still don’t really know what’s next, any more than any of us know what’s next, ourselves.  What they do know is that they still need to stay together.  What they’ve grasped for the first time, though, is that they also need to freely share everything with each other:  “And all the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person’s need was met.” Whatever gifts they have are gifts from God. God wants us to share those gifts with each other.

As we ask ourselves what it means to be the church in a lonely world that wants to be spiritual but is tired of religion, we ought to learn what the work trip teaches us.  If we don’t want to be lonely, we have to commit to community.  If we don’t want to live without purpose and meaning and joy, then we have to realize that those things most often arise out of hard, shared work.  If we want to discover God’s presence, then we have to be willing to take a risk, together.

The Spirit inspires us and empowers us to serve others.  It always has.  It always will.