Life Together in Community, parts 3-5

Well, I just received a comment from my disgruntled father, er, um, I mean an inquisitive reader, who asked about the remaining installments of this thread. I apologize for the delay in posting them, but have been out of the office and on the road and trying to catch up when I'm not. I've had these done for a while for our bulletin at LOCC, but forgot to post them here. I apologize!

So, without further adieu...

Life Together, part 3: A “Storytelling” Community, cont…

In the last installment of this short series, we suggested that we are the actors on the stage, living out God’s drama, which takes its most concrete shape in the self-emptying story of Jesus (Phil 2:5-11). Empowered by the Spirit, it is the task of the church to keep God’s drama alive, to keep the play moving until God acts decisively to finish the drama at the return of Christ. We asked “How can we continue this important practice of helping each other narrate our stories according to the pattern of Jesus today? How can we help fit one another’s lives into God’s salvation drama?” I suggested three things: dwelling in Scripture (which we considered in part 2), imitation of others, and attentive participation in worship. Today we continue this discussion by thinking about the way that the imitation of others can empower us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ.

As we continue to consider Paul’s letter to the Philippian Christians, we hear something that might be rather striking to our modern ears. Paul admonishes the church to “join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example that you have in us” (3:17). What if we were to receive this letter today? How would we respond? I imagine that to most of us would think this call to “imitate me” sounded like arrogant self-promotion. For Paul, however, the recognition and imitation of exemplars is a crucial element in the life of discipleship.

Like any profession, trade, or skill, successfully living the Christian life requires imitating or apprenticing under others. This begins with the imitation of Christ, but we also need others, those who have already acquired and display the skills, disciplines, and habits of thinking, feeling, and acting that we see exemplified in the life of Jesus. We can only hope to progress and advance as we submit ourselves to the example of those who are more advanced in embodying the story of Jesus. For Paul, it is not the call to “imitate me” that is arrogant, but the insistence of those “so formed by the ethos of individualism that they think they can walk the path of discipleship without observing, learning from, and imitating those already farther down that path” (Fowl, 167).

We begin to grasp a better picture of what Paul is encouraging this church to practice if you read through Philippians 2 and 3. After setting out the story of Jesus as his master narrative in 2:6-11, Paul begins to give examples of others who are living out Jesus’ story as their own: Timothy (2:19-24); Epaphroditus (25-30); and Paul himself (3:4b-21). As you read through each account, you can see Paul shaping the stories to look very similar to Jesus’ story. As you read them, can you hear the echoes of 2:6-11? Somehow in our attempt to recover the life of the early church we’ve lost the important practice of telling our stories as a part of God’s story of salvation. By telling the stories of and modeling our lives after the living exemplars in our midst, we can learn to fit all of our lives into God’s story. As we seek to recover this practice today, how can we find living exemplars in our communities and tell their stories both to give God glory and to allow their faithfulness to serve as an example for others to imitate? How can we create space in our worship gatherings, our small groups, and our fellowship and common life to tell our stories and learn to imitate one another as we imitate Christ?

Next week we’ll finish up by thinking about the way attentive participation in worship can empower us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ, as well as the necessity of accountability in Christian friendships and community.

Life Together, part 4: A “Storytelling” Community, cont…

In the last installment of this short series, we suggested that we are Spirit empowered actors living out God’s drama, which takes its most concrete shape in the self-emptying story of Jesus (Phil 2:5-11). Empowered by the Spirit, it is the task of the church to keep God’s drama alive. I suggested three ways we can help each other narrate our stories according to the pattern of Jesus: dwelling in Scripture, imitation of others, and attentive participation in worship.

Today we finish this discussion by thinking about the way our attentive participation in worship empowers us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ. At their heart, the rituals and habits of worship tell God’s story and form the foundation for grounding our lives in faith. In worship we gather to hear the story of God proclaimed through the public reading of Scripture, through the preached Word, through testimony and song. This proclamation is experienced most significantly in the rituals of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are story telling at their most powerful. On the one hand, they tell a compressed and dramatic account of God’s story of the life and death of Jesus, reminding us of the drama we’ve accepted and made our own. But, as we celebrate them together, they become far more than just storytelling rituals; they are invitations to us from God and from one another to live out the story in our own lives today. This is why both baptism and the Lord’s Supper are public acts, not private transactions. As we are plunged into the baptismal waters and as we take and pass the body and blood of Christ, we both enact the story, participating in its movement, and we commit to the story, choosing to make it our way of life in the world. As we share the communion together weekly we recommit to God and to one another to live into the story we have claimed as our own, to live the baptized life. By carefully attending to and participating in these rituals of worship, we reaffirm God’s story and recommit to God and recovenant with one another to make it our own way of living in the world.

Life Together, part 5: A Community of Accountability

In American society we are trained and schooled in the habits of individualism. While we choose to be connected to others, we rarely, if ever, invite others to hold us accountable to any standard of living. Yet, as we see in Philippians, Paul believes that our shared connection and unity in Christ demands an extraordinary level of accountability. More boldly, Paul believes that the unity or communion of believers is intimately tied to our communion with God, to our salvation.

How is this the case? Paul and the Philippians can make demands on each other’s lives because he and they are in Christ. “Their common participation in the body of Christ sets them on a shared journey in which they can and must engage each other as fellow pilgrims, offering help when needed, making demands when called for, exhorting and praying for each other as they move into ever deeper communion with God” (Fowl 87).

Think about that for a while, what would it mean for us to become a counter cultural community that takes our connection in Christ seriously? How might we, through our shared accountability to one another, be challenged and inspired to grow more into the image of Christ? How might we be able to tell our stories as a part of God’s drama of salvation better if we shared more intimacy and accountability in our relationships?