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An Embodied Community

  • The last couple weeks I've been busy watching the season finales of some of my favorite shows that started at the beginning of year.
    • What's been interesting is so many of them have landed somewhere on a similar theme, even if they're radically different shows.

      • Star Trek: Picard - the series finale of the third season follows the final journey of the Star Trek Enterprise team, and ultimately leads to a reminder that it is the community that has been with us that is a family.

      • The Mandalorian ended its season with a reminder that even if it's a tiny 50 year old baby alien or a part of a community torn apart my difference, it is the community we form that creates a family.

      • Perry Mason ended its second season this year with a similar theme: that family and community are what keep us going, even when we have to ask hard questions of each other.

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It's not that the concept of family in media is all that new, but these shows draw a striking difference to the family shows of my youth

    • Take for instance the golden era TV family sitcoms. Full House. Family Matters. Step by Step. Roseanne. And other shows like Perfect Strangers, or even the Cosby Show.

    • I could even include later shows like Arrested Development or Modern Family there as well.

    • In each of those, it gave this family unit as a given. It wasn't so much about finding one, but rather that were invited INTO a family to see how it functioned, often time poignantly or hilariously. The family unit was a given.

  • So if art imitates life, it seems that something has happened in the last few years. Our sense of community is no longer a given to us. Instead, in the era of the glut of superhero movies and fantasy, we see this collection of people now as something to hope for on a screen. We're lifted away to witness that supernatural characters are finding what we felt a generation ago was just a given to very normal, very imperfect people - a sense of finding community.

  • This has implications to way we read Acts today, which is where I want to primarily preach from.

    • We might then envision this as one of our favorite TGIF shows - a Full House church.
      • I was thinking of the Full House theme song: "What ever happened to predictability? / The milkman, the paperboy, evening TV. / Everywhere you look (everywhere you go) / There's a heart (there's a heart) / A hand to hold onto. / Everywhere you look (everywhere you go) / There's a face / Of somebody who needs you. / When you're lost out there and you're all alone, / A light is waiting to carry you home, / Everywhere you look."
      • So even in this recognition of the world not being what we expect, there was a still a reality of community.
      • They were drawn to focus on the needs of the whole, they found ways to be unified, they met their needs, and I'm sure had a couple fine jokes along the way.

      • So Acts 2 in Full House world still happens! Maybe more so, it has to happen for the good of the world that might be changing a little more than we expect.
      • But, even still, as much as I love the nostalgia of those shows, we all realize how unrealistic they were. As much as we'd like, we can't resolve every petty issue within 20 minutes with breaks.
      • And perhaps the closest to reality we ever really get to family situations that don't resolve immediately is something like Arrested Development, but even in order to allow it to live in a greater fantasy, it went with hyperbolic stories to make things seem so absurd they can't actually be possible.
  • However, in my more modern lens, we swing the pendulum the other direction.

    • How often can our minds be drawn to "and they sold everything and gave to whoever had need" and not instantly think SOCIALISM.
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And who, seriously, can come together with a sense of unity for 10 minutes, let alone an actual period of time?

    • However, I wonder if all of those critiques are really just meant to keep this kind of community at arms length. If we can find every reason in the world to find it to be unattainable, then we can look at it as the realm only of superhero believers, reflecting the power of pentecost and living a magical world of happiness and unity.
  • So this leaves us with a bind, doesn't it?
    • At one point, we want to believe that true community is real, but it we don't want to lull ourselves into a belief that it's nothing but a saccharine, episodic event staged for our enjoyment.
 That feels too cheap.
    • But at the same time, the idea of a beloved community be the achievement of superheroes only to be lived through vicariously on a screen is gross as well. Especially if you consider that apparently the only way to achieve it is through violence - and should we fail, we lose it altogether. This is a type of existential dread in something so necessary and intimate as being with one another that it shakes us to our core.
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I believe there are many people who in the depth of there souls continue to ask when is God going to show up and show out in their homes, their neighborhoods, their cities.

  • But I wonder if the way through is as simple as the newsletter you hold in front of you.
    • Because here, community isn't a Full House type of situation. If it was, I'm sure we wouldn't have typos in the newsletter (which, unfortunately, I found after they were all printed), nor would we have a deficit in our budget. Things aren't perfect here. Do you know, for instance, how many times we had to flip the breakers for the pancake brunch?
    • But there is a lot of really beautiful things here, showing love and care and joy with very imperfect, normal, loving people. And even these issues, well, they're endearing. The imperfections we see are an expression of the natural beauty of our community and not meant to be interpreted as defects.
    • And, interestingly enough, if you flip through the pages, you start to see this church's 2023 looks a bit like Acts 2
      • We devoted ourselves to teaching and fellowship, breaking bread and prayers
      • We've been together with a common set of things to believe in.
      • We have given of our possessions and given them away to those who had need
      • And not only have we spent time in this space, but we also did in our homes. And you know, we really have eaten food together with glad and generous hearts.
  • The difference here, is that in this little newsletter, we've embodied the community and lived it out.
    • The tricky thing about community is that it has to be enacted.
    • It's never enough to just watch it from afar. And while we may enjoy watching others enact it, we're always left with something lacking.
    • And I will stand by the fact that an imperfect community in which we're present is always better than the perfect community we watch.
    • And, with Jesus with us, it's a reminder that the community we're with - even imperfect as it may seem - is a protection. At its best, it provides abundance.