A BELOVED COMMUNITY Annual Meeting Sunday, January 25, 2015 Mark 1.14-20 Tim Phillips, Seattle First Baptist Church Mark 1.14-20 After John s arrest, Jesus appeared in Galilee proclaiming the Good News of God: This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at hand! Change your hearts and minds, and believe this Good News! While walking by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus saw the brothers Simon and Andrew casting nets into the sea, since they fished by trade. Jesus said to them Follow me; I will make you fish for people. They immediately abandoned their nets and followed Jesus. Proceeding a little further along, Jesus saw the brothers James and John Bar- Zebedee. Immediately Jesus called them, and they left their father Zebedee standing in the boat with the hired help, and went off in the company of Jesus. A Beloved Community Anthem: Would I have answered? R. Hopp First I want to say thank you to Geoffrey and Amy Boers who have led the choir while our Choral Director, Vicky Thomas, has been out of the country. Your leadership has been a gift to us and I hope you felt something of the kind of beloved community we are trying to be in this time you have been with us. I also want to say thank you to all those who stepped in during my absence last Sunday and the week before. The anthem this morning about answering a call is especially real to me. There are all kinds of calls. There are those internal calls that motivate us, specifically, to do something in the world. Those are the calls, Frederick Buechner and Parker Palmer say are, the place where your deep gladness meets the world s deep need. We joke about experiencing the call of nature or the call of the wild.
There are calls of the heart and calls of the body. And sometimes there is literally a call a phone call that changes your plans or changes your mind or changes your life. The most recent of those calls for me came on Monday night, January 12, at 7:47 p.m. It was a call, I have discovered, some of you have had perhaps a call some of you have made and one I would wish on no one. It was a life-in-the-balance kind of call. Suffice to say that the call came and all of a sudden the world shifted. And, in a moment, I found myself in this surreal experience of knowing exactly what I had to do and, at the same time,i had no clue what I was supposed to do knowing what to do and not knowing what to do crashing together in one big swell of confusion and fear. So those last lines the choir sang for us this morning are especially real to me: I only pray, that when you call, Come, follow, follow me! You ll give me strength beyond my own to follow faithfully. I m here to tell you this morning that some of the strength beyond my own is you. You are a reference point when I get disoriented. You point the way home when I m afraid I have lost my way. You are hope when the world seems hopeless. You are strength when I don t think I have enough of it on my own. You are light at the end of the tunnel. I wouldn t want this to go to your heads your hearts maybe but not your heads because we aren t perfect,individually or together. There is fun and not-so-fun. There are potlucks and problems. There are meetings and mountains out of mole hills. There are deficits and disasters, disagreements and disappointments. And there are budgets. But when the call came on Monday night at 7:47 p.m. this place was far more than a budget to me. This was beloved community the reference point for what matters, the home to remember and the hope to imagine, the strength I didn t have on my own and that little glimmer of light down that very long dark tunnel. On this Annual Meeting Sunday, let me be clear about who you are -- at least to me:you are beloved community.
Perhaps you recognize this as a reference to Dr. King s work. I ve always thought that this idea must have developed over the course of that work. But it turns out that this is where he started. Early in his career, fresh from the bus boycott and having survived two different bombing attempts, Dr. King said: we must remember as we boycott that a boycott is not an end within itself the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding good will that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men [and women]. A decade before the March on Washington or the I have a dream speech, Dr. King was talking about beloved community as a building block to change the world. That s important, I think, because when we try to imagine what kind of world we want to be, perhaps the place to start is right here. What we are doing here is a laboratory of the kind of future we are trying to imagine. If we imagine peace, we practice it here. If we imagine reconciliation, we practice it here. If we imagine love even the really challenging kind that loves the very people who rub us the wrong way we practice it here. Boycotts are fine, Dr. King says, beloved community is better. Michelle and Joel Levey, who will be with us as part of the Romney Lectures in October, sent me a quote a couple days ago from ThichNhatHanh that says the next Buddha may not take the form of an individual but of a community practicing loving kindness and mindful living. Of course, the meditation of an individual is important. The practice of community is essential. Psychiatrist and social activist, Scott Peck, goes so far as to say: In and through community lies the salvation of the world. And this seems to follow the same pattern we have in the Gospel of Mark. At the time, people may have thought that Messiah would be a powerful personality. Jesus seems to think it is a beloved community. And he goes around calling
people to join him in it. Come follow me, he says, and Andrew and Simon and the sons of Zebedee leave their nets and their families and they go off, in the company of Jesus. I love that, in the company of Jesus. We are a people traveling through our lives in the company of Jesus. There were some adjustments involved in this. What are you waiting for, Jesus says, The reign of God is right here; change your hearts and change your minds. Or, as Dr. King says: Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives. Beloved community depends on the quality of our souls and the capacity we have for the changes in life the ones we make and the ones that are forced on us. So what are those changes or those challenges that are the marks of this kind of community? I suppose it goes without saying that you can t have a beloved community without beloved-ness. Mark s story of Jesus begins with that voice from heaven: You are my beloved one. And I like to remind people that Jesus hasn t done anything yet. He hasn t accomplished anything. He hasn t preached a single sermon or healed any sick people. He hasn t written an Annual Report or established a financial plan. Beloved-ness isn t about productivity. It s about identity. What you are is beloved. And what you do flows out of that. When that call came on Monday night, the only way I could move through the confusion was to be reassured that, no matter what no matter what I could do or couldn t do, no matter what was going to happen next -- I was beloved. It seems to me that the first vocation the first call of a beloved community is to be that voice that keeps saying you are beloved ones and love matters and, if that s too sentimental for some of you, then we can talk about the kind of compassion that can change the world. And can change you.
There s a story going around on YouTube about a high school kid with a lisp and a little social awkwardness who left his small town school for the city. His mother hoped that a larger school might make it easier for her son to blend in. But Josh decided that he was tired of being no one. He was tired of being invisible. He wanted to be someone. So he started just opening doors for people at school. He would stand there in the morning greeting the students and holding doors for them. Of course there were jokes. It s high school after all. People started calling him the doorman. But Josh kept at it because sometimes opening a door for someone opens up more than a door, Josh says. And people started opening up their lives to him and to one another. And the culture of that school began to change. And now Josh goes around to other schools and helps teenagers open up about who they are and what really matters to them. Josh is practicing beloved-ness and that helps to shape a different kind of community. And we have to keep practicing beloved-ness because the temptation that s the next part of Mark s story is to be distracted from it; to settle for something less; to get so jaded by the news that we just stop believing that it s the truth about who we are and who you are. If our vocation our calling is beloved-ness and we stay aware of the temptation to be distracted from it, then beloved community moves from vocation through temptation to become invitation. One of our ushers said the other day that she was so glad to be an usher because it gave her the chance to be thankful for the welcome she has received and to extend that welcome to others. Beloved community never underestimates the power of opening doors. And here s the thing I find hopeful in this story in Mark. Mark 1.4 says that John the baptizer appeared in the desert proclaiming that the reign of God or this beloved community was here. Mark 1.14 says that when John had been arrested, Jesus appeared in Galilee proclaiming this same message.
The powers-that-be may keep trying to stamp it out but beloved community keeps popping up. The pressures of the world might shut it down in one place but it will show up somewhere else. What appeared in the desert, appears in Galilee. What appeared in Galilee, appears in Jerusalem. What appeared in Jerusalem, appears all over the world. What appeared all over the world, appeared in Montgomery and Memphis. What appeared in Montgomery and Memphis, appeared in Seattle. And here we are. The thing is, beloved community will happen somewhere. God helps us that it should happen here, because when the call came that Monday night and I knew and I didn t know what to do, the one thing I knew for sure was that I was not alone. It was tempting to be distracted by the circumstances but the practice of this community was this voice that kept repeating: You are a beloved one; you are a beloved one; you are a beloved one. And knowing that, meant I could be the voice to say that to someone else who needed to hear it and had perhaps stopped believing it. And today, if you hear that voice, do not harden your hearts. NOTES Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Jossey-Bass, 2000), p.16. Facing the Challenge of a New Age, by Dr. King (1957) in the collection I Have a Dream ed. James M. Washington (HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), p.22. Dr. King s quote about change of soul and change of life is from www.wearethebelovedcommunity.org. For the quote from ThichNhatHanh, see the Levey s website at www.wisdomatwork.com. M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (Simon & Schuster, 1987), p.17.