James 5:13-20
Eight years ago, Connie Culp, a mother of two, was shot in the face by her husband, who then turned the gun on himself. He survived and went to prison.
Culp also survived and went to her own prison — a prison of nightmarish proportion. She clung to life, but the attack completely demolished her face, shattering her nose and cheeks, the roof of her mouth and one eye. Shotgun pellets were embedded deep into her skull. It was awful. Neighborhood children thought she was a monster.
Culp endured 30 operations to repair what could be repaired. Then, in December 2008, in a 22-hour operation, a team of doctors at the Cleveland Clinic replaced her face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from a woman who had just died. In May 2009, she went public with her new face on Oprah as the first U.S. citizen to receive a face transplant.
It isn’t a perfect face, by any means, but Culp is delighted. A less-courageous person might not have been willing to go public.
Unless I’ve missed my guess, some of us have felt faceless at one time or another. We don’t know who we are. We’re confused and bewildered, and searching for God’s call on our lives. We’d like God to give us a face — a face that expresses peace, wholeness, love and joy; a face of connection and authentic community.
Everyone is looking for something real and worth dying for. Everyone is looking for a place where they can love God, love others and be loved for who they are. Everyone is looking for an authentic community. What does it look like? Would you know it if you saw it?
I’ve heard it said that authentic community occurs when the real you shows up and meets real needs for the right reason in the right way. One internet blogger shared that “authentic community only happens when we give each other permission to be honest without fear of rejection.
James describes authentic community as a singing, praying and healing community. A big part of our healing should include confession and prayer for one another. (James 5:16) Authentic community is a place where genuine friendships can be built and people are allowed to live transparent lives with one another.
We need places like these where people know our names, where they know what we like and what we don't like, a place where we can relax and just talk and share with people and not worry, that we're going to be rejected because we already know we're accepted. We're looking for a place where we know who to hang around with, we know who to call to come over when we have a problem, we know who's good with plumbing, we know who's good with babies, we know who's good at just listening, and we know who gives good advice. We need that. We all need that. We need it even more when we're separated from our families and our older friends. We long for that sort of community because we need it. This is how we were created to be.
My favorite rock n roll musician is Bruce Springsteen and my favorite group is the E Street Band. It started when I was about 12 years old. His songs drew me into the lives of people’s real struggles; into the larger world that lived all around me. I discovered parts of myself in his music as I struggled to find my own identity, my own place in this world, to discover where I belonged. I later realized that I was yearning. I was yearning for connection. I was craving authentic community.
One of my favorite songs is Born to Run. The lyrics tell the story of a young man and woman looking to escape their small town that they saw as a "death trap" that was holding them down. They needed to get out while they were still young because it was sucking the life out of them.
But it wasn't just about adolescent angst wanting freedom from the familiar. It's a song about yearning; yearning for something real, raw, untamed, wild and free. It's a song about yearning for connection, a yearning for a place to belong, a yearning for authentic community. He sings, "I gotta find out how it feels. I want to know if love is wild, I want to know if love is real." (add footnote) "Someday girl I don't know when we're gonna get to that place where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun." (add footnote) Do you hear the yearning? There is a longing to be free and at the same time a yearning to connect to something bigger; a community that is authentic and real.
While we are yearning, our society is dismantling the assumptions, the values and beliefs that have served as our foundation for living. We need a spirituality that is active, real and engaging in our age of countless distractions and interruptions. We need to tell it like it is. We can’t mince words. We must share the plain truth of the Gospel with a Connie Culp kind of courage knowing we are guided every step of the way by the Holy Spirit.
A tell-it-like-it-is spirituality is needed more than ever before in this culture of moral collapse. Ethicist Larry L. Rasmussen says that “our society currently lives from moral fragments and community fragments only, and both are being destroyed faster than they are being replenished....Ours is a season of moral sprawl and breakdown, moral homelessness and drift.”[1] We need an authentic community experience that connects and reconfigures these shattered fragments of our souls. Who can do that? God can if he chooses to do so.
Some of us also feel weak, not in soul, but in body — or perhaps in both. God can touch us in our bodies, too. How does this happen? Who can know? People with little faith have been healed. People with a truckload of faith remain unhealed — the apostle Paul, for one. God is God. God will do what he wants to do when he wants to do it. All we can do is be obedient. Are you sick? Then, in obedience to God’s word, let the elders pray for you, and leave everything else to God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian martyr of the 20th century, wrote several books about what real community is and can look like. He wrote, “I have community with others, and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.”[2] Jesus Christ is the starting point for building authentic community. With Jesus Christ in your heart, you are no longer faceless. You have the face of Christ. You are loved for who you were created to be, a child of God.
I would like to close with this story.
There was a Benedictine community to whom nobody came. As the monks grew old, they became more and more disheartened because they couldn't understand why their community was not attractive to other people. Now in the woods outside the monastery there lived an old rabbi. People came from all over to talk to him about the presence of Yahweh in creation. Years went by and finally the abbot himself went into the woods, leaving word with his monks, I have gone out to speak to the rabbi. (It was of course considered humiliating that a Christian community had to go back to the synagogue to find out what was wrong with them.)
When the abbot finally found the rabbi's hut in the woods, the rabbi welcomed him with open arms as if he had known that he was coming. They put their arms around each other and had a good cry. The abbot told the rabbi that his monks were good men but they spread not fire, and the community was dying. He asked the rabbi if he had any insight into the work of Yahweh in their lives. The rabbi replied, I have the secret and I will tell you once. You may tell the monks and then none of you is ever to repeat it to one another. The abbot declared that if they could have the secret, he was sure his monks would grow.
So the rabbi looked at him long and hard and said, the secret is that among you, in one of you is the Messiah! The abbot went back to this community and told his monks the secret. And lo! as they began to search for the Messiah in one another they grew, they loved, they became very strong, very prophetic. From that day on, the community saw Christ in one another and flourished![3]
As we yearn to build authentic community, let us start by searching for Christ in each other. And when we do this, we, too, will grow, and love, and flourish into the authentic community God wants for us. This is the Good News: see it, feel it and trust it. Amen.
[1] Larry L. Rasmussen, Moral Fragments and Moral Community: A Proposal for Church in Society
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 11.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1954), 25-26.
[3] Story told by Joan D. Chittister, OSB, Living the Rule Today: A Series of Conferences on the Rule of Benedict (Erie, Pa.: Benet Press, 1982), 98-99, as quoted on pp. 82-83 of Wolff-Walin
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