The longing for community is great today. Maybe there was a time when people felt confined to their villages and never left, but not anymore. Now we are free, and even encouraged, to leave home and chase our dreams. We move across the country, away from family and friends, to pursue our careers. Neighbors knew each other. Fifty years ago, no one spent the week in and out of airports. They spent all day, every day, in the same office, the same factory, with the same people. People at work were not our competitors but our colleagues. Ten years ago, no one looked for friends on the Internet. Now it is the easiest way for people who have no friends or dates to find them instantly. For better or worse, our friends used to be the people we knew. Now, today’s friend may be tomorrow’s acquaintance.

For quite some time now we have lived in a society that teaches us to define the individual apart from community. “Be yourself.” “Do your own thing.” “Follow your star.” The Army told us, “Be all you can be.” Oprah tells us to “find our spirit.” Never before has there been so much emphasis on improving yourself, loving yourself, and finding yourself. There’s only one problem: never before have so many people been so lonely. Just this week, I counseled two people who have contemplated suicide because they have absolutely no one in their lives they can love or who they believe love them. I spent more time listening to a woman whose lonely friend possibly committed suicide in his New Jersey apartment. Our cities are filled with people, our cell phones ring incessantly with calls, our email inboxes are full, our Instant Messenger buddy lists are long, and yet, we’ve never been lonelier.

I suppose that is why there is a lot of talk now about community. Robert Bellah’s book Habits of the Heart appeared in 1985, and he warned of the dangers of extreme spiritual and social individualism. He writes, “There are truths we do not see when we adopt the language of radical individualism. We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning.” For the last fifteen years, we seem to be rediscovering the importance of community.

Employees are turning down promotions that would cause them to move. People are abandoning long commutes from suburbs and returning to the cities in many parts of our country. There seems to be a greater sense of community and the importance of it's security after 9/11. TV shows keep coming at us that depict friendships, like NBC’s long-running “Friends,” because the hunger is so great. Starbucks has made a lot of money, not just selling coffee, but a place where you can have a conversation. Yet, the one place that people should find the most authentic community has not been the first place they have looked for it: the church.

The mega-churches that have sprang up all over our country, and particularly in southern California, have given people new experiences of faith and worship but left them without real relationships. In some places, the church is sectarian and divisive, and not a source of unity. Some churches more resemble a country club than a called community. Other churches have been so legalistic that people can’t find the gospel anywhere in those churches. For these reasons and more, there are a lot of people looking for Jesus, and looking for community, but they haven’t found what they are looking for at church. So, I hear it all the time from my friends: “I have no problem with Jesus, but I really have no time for the church.” Ironically, I wonder if many of us don’t really believe that too. If we don’t admit to believing it, the way we use our time manifests this underlying suspicion that there are more important things we can be doing than giving ourselves to a church.

Perhaps there are some unfortunate and very real reasons our society, and even us, have grown skeptical about church. But our skepticism and low church image, if you will, is quite far from the picture the author of Ephesians paints of the church. In his letter to the Ephesians, the author wrote that we can find the richest of blessings, all the things we truly desire, in this community called church. What is described is not a perfect church as we sometimes envision the first century church, it is not a white, clean cut, moral bunch like the ideal church of the 1950’s, nor was it a contemporary support group where we go to talk about the stress of leading our busy solitary lives. This author doesn’t even mention that you will find great friends at church. He doesn’t promise it will be a place where everybody knows your name. God has something more sacred and profound in mind for this community than to be your fraternity or tea club.

Ephesians claims that the real reason we long for community is because God has chosen us before the creation of the world to be part of the church where His blessings are discovered and experienced like no other place. God by His very nature is communal, existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit in perfect community and love. It’s no accident that in this great text on the riches of The Body of Christ we find references to God and The Father in verse 3, Jesus Christ in verses 4 and 5, and the Holy Spirit in verse 13. God wants to create the community that exists among The Trinity among us, and that is the deepest longing of the human heart.

Verses three to six of chapter one of Ephesians declares that you were chosen to be adopted by The Holy Spirit in The beloved Son’s relationship to The Father. There you were given every spiritual blessing heaven has to offer you. Now, let me ask for a show of hands. How many of you feel like you have received every blessing heaven wants to give? No one. But that is exactly what you have been given. God The Father “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” This doesn’t mean that you will get everything you want. It means that you were chosen to be brought into the family of God, and made an heir of God – joint heirs with Jesus Christ. In other words, everything Jesus has by rights, you have by adoption.

You were chosen. It’s better than being chosen for the team, better than being admitted to your choice college, better even than being picked a the American Idol. You were chosen by God like a parent who picks a child for adoption – you were not chosen because you are hot, or because you had lots of potential – you were chosen because Jesus died to love you. He has made a claim on you.

But couldn’t God choose us and adopt us without asking us to be part of a church? Well, stay tuned. Verse seven says, “In Him, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace that He lavished on us.” In the process of trying to find ourselves as individuals we have made a lot of mistakes, committed a lot of mistakes, hurt a lot of people, and damaged the image of God imprinted on our souls. We’ve even done things to cause our own loneliness. I think the thing we are ultimately searching for in community is a place to know we are ok if you will – a place to know we are forgiven. Grace. We have tried managing our sins, tried denying our sins, tried running from our sins. None of that has worked too well, has it? The only thing that will work is to be forgiven of our sin. And we can never know the reality of that forgiveness unless we hear it and experience it with each other.

There are some things that the individual can do alone with God, like pray, read the Bible, or meditate. But when it comes to hearing you are forgiven, we need to hear it and experience it from others. This is a critical role of the church – to announce that Jesus Christ has forgiven our sins. In the words of the early church father Athanasius, “The church is the place where access to The Father through The Son is grounded in space and time.” The church is our space and time where we hear from each other, both in worship and in life, “In Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” The church isn’t just an optional social experience because you might meet some neat people here. There will be other places, frankly, where you might meet people that you like better or have more in common with you. The church is vital in your life because God has chosen before creation that you will hear and experience His word of forgiveness when you worship and live with these people we have come to know as church.

I believe one of the reasons Jesus asks us to forgive each other is that He knew that in experiencing forgiveness from one we have hurt we would experience His love. That implies two things: First, that you can’t fully experience the forgiveness of God under a tree or on a lonely island. You need to experience being forgiven from other forgiven people. Second, that implies that the church is full of hypocritical and imperfect sinners who need to be forgiven and seek each other’s forgiveness. The world and the church are full of sinners. The church is unique, not in its perfection, but because here we hear a different story: that despite being sinners, we are forgiven, and we are on our best days willing to give that forgiveness to each other.

In verses nine and ten, the text says that in the church we are experiencing a great mystery, a great plan God has for the future, a plan to gather up all things in Jesus Christ. It’s all coming together. And where else is it all coming together but the church. We lose a lot of things along the way in life – sometimes it feels like we are losing everything. We try so hard to hold on to it all, and it all just keeps going away. Our jobs, our loved ones who die, our marriages, our health – all leave us with broken hearts and broken lives. But the mystery of God’s will is that He wants to restore all the brokenness in your life, and He wants to put it all back together in the church where broken people minister to broken people, and by God’s grace, find wholeness again.

But this plan of God is much bigger than just your brokenness. In the church, God is bringing all the division and chaos of the world and the cosmos to an end. God’s intent is to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under Christ. That’s the real story of your life and of the universe – that God is bringing all together in Christ – Jew and Gentile, slave and free, black, white and Hispanic, rich and poor, Iraqi and American, Muslim and Christian. And God intends this to happen in the church and by the proclamation of this good news by the church. Let me say it another way: at the center of the human story is the church. Do we know that? Do we believe it is all coming together with us? That is the mystery of God’s plan. That is why it isn’t enough to love Jesus and ignore the church.

Everything God is doing in the world He wants to do through the church. It is the place of His blessing, the place of forgiveness, the place where it is all coming together. Consequently, then, as one church I know states in its belief statement that the decisions that matter most and last longest on earth are made in churches like ours, not in the world’s financial institutions, or in a Hollywood screening room, or by governmental agencies, or corporate boardrooms. The church is the future.

Bringing all people together under Christ is the God-given mission of the church. As Isaiah 11:9 promises, one day the earth will be full of the knowledge of The Lord as the waters cover the sea. One day Christian, Muslim and Jew, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, will all bow down together before Christ as Philippians 2 promises. This won’t happen under a tree, or in your house, or even in your heart. This will happen in the church. I want to be there to see it. I want to be part of a community with that future, and that kind of mission.

Now, let me speak to the church for a minute: If the church is going to carry out its ministry of reconciliation, then it better quit dividing and discriminating. We better quit holding on to grudges from the past and start forgiving. This is the place where it is supposed to be coming together, not coming apart. When we do begin living together as a community who come together because we’re chosen, not because we qualify, then we will begin to live as the forgiven community of Christ in the world, Christ will be lifted up, and all people will be drawn to Christ in us.

But let me now speak to those who may be visiting with us, or who may be skeptical about the church: You can try to love Jesus without having to mess with the church, but it will never work. There are all the reasons we have mentioned today – the experience of forgiveness, the experience of being chosen by God, the experience of being where history is being made every day. But there’s one big reason – the church is where The ascended Jesus now resides through His Spirit. If you want to find Jesus somewhere besides His church, you’ll be on an endless and fruitless journey because the scandalous and mysterious will of God is that Jesus is found among these fragile, fallible people we call the church. He is present among us in The Holy Spirit as verse thirteen proclaims. Others here may not wish to ignore the church, but the church is just one of many experimental communities in their lives. The problem with that is that you will never belong anywhere.

As one author says in his book Bobos in Paradise, “The monk in the monastery does not lead an experimental life, but perhaps he is able to lead a profound one.” Finally, some of you may be looking for the church without hypocrites. If you’re waiting to find the perfect church, you’ll always be looking – there is no perfect church, only a perfect Savior who has called this crazy bunch together and made us one.

If you’re looking for community, you will never find it in a place you choose. That is because a place you choose will be a place others choose for their own selfish reasons too, and you’ll still end up lonely. You have to find community in a place where you are chosen. That’s the church – a place where those who have found forgiveness are freed up to bring together all things under Christ as they live lives of peace, service and reconciliation in the world. We’re not perfect, but we’re still the last best hope of God on earth, and in heaven. We are where it’s happening. We are the future. God has chosen you, Jesus has died for you, The Spirit has marked you, so you will know that the church is where you belong, so that you will know that this community is your true home.

In The Name of The Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.


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