Holy Week and The Hard Work of Community

We are almost 15 years out from the publishing of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. You may remember this book. Back in 2000 this national best seller spoke prophetically about the decline of ‘social capital’ – the drop in personal interconnectedness, mutual support, and cooperation amongst America’s public. The book’s famous illustration is that while more Americans are bowling than ever before, they are bowling alone. Bowling leagues (along with all sorts of groups, clubs, and associations, not to mention churches) have seen their membership plummet in today's American society.

Today many seekers who come through church doors, including St. Peter’s, are longing for the kind community our society has lost. Yet there is a significant difference between what they are after and what we use to have. Today’s seekers want organic, not institutional community. They want belonging and acceptance, not membership and procedures. They are after true-to-heart conversations, not bureaucratic exchanges dominated by agendas and Roberts Rules of Order.

Today’s seekers are also finding out the hard truth about community. Community is the fruit of arduous work and tough struggles. Knowing others and being known also means exposure to the faults, vices, and shortcomings of others. Perhaps more painful is facing our own faults when others have borne the brunt of them. It means confrontation, vulnerability, making mistakes, and asking for and accepting forgiveness. Given the pain of honest connection it is no wonder false decorum, various social rituals, and bureaucratic social systems exist! They may hide authenticity now, but originally their purpose was to soften the collisions of our personalities!

The Disciples (right) abandon Jesus 
Jesus was no stranger to the desire for and difficulties of community. Jesus wanted community. The Gospels show him gathering a community and binding them in love to each other and his Father. And Jesus knew the difficulties of community. When the going gets tough, the ‘tough’ were nowhere to be found! The 12 closest Disciples of Jesus abandon him. (Only the women disciples are to be found.) But the Gospels tell us Jesus already knew he would be abandoned (Matthew 26:31). He knew yet still celebrated the Last Supper, a celebration of community, in a most loving and intimate way. And then Jesus gave his life up for his betrayer, his denier, his failed disciples, for strangers, and not the least, his enemies also.

Christ knew that Christian community is a hard won fruit of the Gospel. It requires vulnerability, great sacrifice, and a death of our selfishness for the love of God and others. (Matthew 16:24-26)

Risen Jesus gathering again his disciples,
here shown on the Road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-25)
But that is not where the story ends.  Jesus is resurrected to life, and appearing many times to his followers, he begins putting the community back together. Apparently Christian community is not just worth dying for, it is worth living for.

So begins our story, the story of disparate, bowling-alone people being made into God’s people. The story of people who, by their own power, cannot find community with one another and with God, now find it through Christ. It is a community mystically bound in the sacraments and Holy Spirit-ual experience, and tangibly bound together in worship, mutual care, and the Gospel mission of love for the world. Most of all, it is bound by its failings and its forgiveness for each other through Christ.


Are you looking for community? Then come journey with Christ’s disciples through Holy Week and Easter. Experience God’s call and power to be the Community of Christ, the as-yet-imperfect-but-already-Divine Family of God.  

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