Anchored to Community

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All right, you may be seated. Thank you. So we yeah, we might be doing a little bit more of that in the future.

Just let the scriptures be read over us as a church community. And and. That little statement, thanks be to God, is a traditional thing to do. We’re not always high liturgy here, but sometimes it’s refreshing. Hello everyone. If you’re tuning online, thanks for tuning in there. If you’re new or new-ish.

My name’s Aaron Borland. I’m one of the pastors here, and if that is you we have a place out in the lobby just for you. It’s the welcome wall there. It’s got a high table there and I’d encourage you to go check that out because if all you ever experienced of this church family is what we do in this room.

On a Sunday morning, then you’re missing out on a ton of what it means to be in community, in a local church family because in order to get all the benefits of that, you have to find environments where you’re known, where you’re valued, where you’re loved environments, where you get to use your gifts to participate in God’s kingdom, and really to live into everything you were made to be.

And so I’d encourage you to check that out and see if this might be a community that could be that for you. So I’m super excited today because we’re kicking off this series called Anchored. And I’m gonna actually scoot this over here a little bit so I can see it better when I turn around. But the anchored series, and I need to lay some groundwork for the series at the series level 30,000 foot view for us today before we dive into the passage that was just read for us this morning.

And so before we do that, I would like to just pray.

Maybe just take a moment, take a deep breath. Allow your soul to settle. We are in the presence of God. We’re sitting at the feet of his word, his scriptures that he gives us to help us know him, know his way, his heart.

Father, we sit here and stand here in anticipation to encounter you and your truth. Would you teach us? We pray it’s in your beautiful name. Amen. In the restless era of 17th century England, a young Oxford student was grappling with an wrestling with some of the traditional values of his government, of his nation.

Excuse, excuse me, and his university. He was raised by a father who actually fought in the Civil War in the of England against the king in favor of a representative democracy. And he was teethed on these ideas that maybe liberty and freedom of individuals was a better way of human thriving than the sort of like the kingship over the people that he was under.

And he was fascinated by this. Idea that maybe reason and logic and liberty could free humans up. And the times were changing the great, the the philosophies in the world were shifting. But a lot of those philosophies found a voice in a young John Locke pen when he wrote these words. And of course, I should turn this on first.

Maybe no one ought to harm another in his life health. Liberty or possessions, and this may not sound perfectly familiar to us right off the bat, but these words and this particular treatise on government that he wrote influenced some other young revolutionaries in America, one of which is named was Thomas Jefferson, who penned these words.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. They’re endowed by their creator with. Certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sound familiar? Yes. Many historians believe that these are the most influential words in American history and rightfully correct. This is the emancipation, or No, not the Emancipation Proclamation. This is the, yeah, there you go. So it was that. But these words made their way into Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address these words made their way into the famous Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous, I Have a Dream speech. Their powerful.

So Our Nation was founded on this idea that every single human being was given by God some rights. To freedom to liberty, and it’s deep in our DNA that we want autonomy and freedom and liberty. And it has been a beautiful thing. And I think that these ideas were deeply rooted in the teachings of Jesus.

These are uniquely Judeo-Christian Jesus kind of ideas. And these kinds of ideas have actually been at the forefront of some of the most important social justice movements in all of human history. But the question I have for us today is this,

can freedom go too far? Can freedom go too far? And before you answer that question yes, freedom and liberty and individual autonomy is a beautiful thing and it’s done a lot of good in the world. But before you answer the question may repost to you that the Apostle Paul thought that freedom could go to far.

Galatians five 13 says this, you, my brothers and sisters were called to be free. Yay. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh, rather serve one another humbly in love. And later on in one Corinthians, which is the book that we’re gonna spend our time in this morning, he says this he’s speaking on behalf of the church.

I have the right to do anything you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good. But the good of others. So the Apostle Paul believed that you could actually, there needs to be some boundaries around freedom.

Like we don’t just have maximal freedom. That’s not the goal of human experience. Margaret Schuster in her theological work on sin in the fall, wrote these words, it’s not the powers that we lack. It’s not the freedoms that we lack. But the powers that we have that do us in, we mustn’t do all we can.

Isn’t that interesting? As much as beauty and goodness that has come from human beings being lifted out from underneath oppression and heavy rulership of different oligarchs and dictators and these sorts of things. The scriptures seem to think that our freedom is not unlimited. We shouldn’t be free, and as good as all that freedom is, it’s actually whiplash on our culture.

It’s actually caused some unintentional brokenness in the systems that we live in and breathe in America. Emil Durkheim is a French sociologist and he studied in the 1890. In 1897, he released a study, a book. On suicide rise in his culture, in his day among young men. And what he found was that young men who did not find themselves in deep community, and especially in faith communities that limited their moral behaviors and limited their freedoms, were more likely to lose meaning in life and to choose suicide.

Barry Schwartz. I wrote this fascinating little book called The Paradox of Choice. The subtitle is this, how a Culture of Abundance robs Us of Satisfaction. Fascinating little book because he cites study after study that says our culture, which has the most abundance in. Human history, we have options. Our capitalists, society, you can choose this product or this product.

You have options galore and yet we’re less happy than we’ve ever been. Increased freedom, increased choice, decrease of satisfaction and happiness and contentment. There’s something wrong with the system. I remember in when I graduated Bible college at Moody, every student would receive this little book.

And after being offended for a second I read this as like this condescending to just do something like graduates. Just get out there and do something good. So after I read the subtitle, it made more sense, a liberating approach to Finding God’s Will. And I read this book in the case that Kevin Young de Young mates in this book is that several hundred years ago, if you were asked what do you want to be when you grow up?

People would’ve looked at you like. What are you talking about? What do you want to be when you grow up? My dad’s a farmer. I’m gonna be a farmer. My dad’s a mechanic. I’m gonna be a mechanic. This is how it worked. Like you just, there was very few options for the majority of human experiences on what you were gonna be when you grew up.

If you were a woman, you were gonna be a mom or a wife, or both, or a secretary, like only options you had. And yet. People were happier then than they are now. And this book was given to students at Moody because they saw a whole generation of graduates like Crippled by the options. Am I gonna be a missionary?

Am I gonna be a pastor? Which kind of pastor should I be? This kind of pastor, that kind of pastor, this kind of pastor, which church, which denomination like. And we just saw this whole generation failing to launch, failing to actually get into the Kingdom of God work. And this book just says, get out there, trust Jesus.

Start something. And it was freeing for me to read. The other fascinating thing about choice is this. You don’t even have the option to do everything you want. So look at this from Margaret Schuster again. The other thing is that paradoxically, we can’t do all we can. You can’t go to the ball game and the party at the same time.

Like we’re finite creatures. We can’t be in two places at once. We can’t choose to be something that we aren’t. When I was a kid, when I was asked what I wanted to be, when I grew up, I wanted to be an eagle, and I’m sure that was super cute for my parents, but I found out later that’s not one of the options.

Devastating. We can’t just choose to do anything. We’re finite. We’re bound to a specific location. We’re bound by our capacities, our mental capacities by the socioeconomic political system that we grew up in. We’re bound by the parents that we were raised by, and so much more. We have less freedom than we think we have.

So our whole culture is founded on this idea of that we have liberty, and yet that liberty is crippling us and we’re not even as free as we think we should be. Fleming r Put this way I’m laying this groundwork for this whole series, so hopefully this will benefit every week. And then we’ll get into the text.

No one is capable of being captain of his own soul, master of his own fate. Each of us is worked upon by unconscious impulses of which we are not even aware and over which we have little control. Think about that. Paul, unlike the typical American, does not think in terms of autonomous human beings.

Paul proudly identifies himself as a slave to Christ.

So healthy human beings have boundaries, and healthy Christians embrace the ultimate boundary, which is slavery. To Christ. So in an effort to make a thesis statement for the whole series, maybe this statement gets added a little bit and then we’ll dive into our passage. Liberty is a gift when it ends oppression, it’s good, it’s beautiful, like we need some measure of freedom.

We don’t need an oppressive hand upon us by evil rulers, but it’s a curse when it ends All restraint. We need to be anchored. Thus, the title of the series, we Need to Be Anchored to Thrive. Or maybe another way of saying it a little bit shorter is un anchored. Freedom is a different kind of bondage. So throughout this whole series, we’re gonna be trying to an ask this question, what are some anchors that help us to thrive?

Yeah, that’s each week we’re gonna explore one of the anchors that the scriptures offer to us, that anchor the soul, that allow us to give us appropriate boundaries around our how finite we are, about around our propensities and our brokenness is all these sorts of things, so that if we have these boundaries in place, we can truly thrive.

I did a ton of research and study about the history of people’s thoughts around autonomy and individualism and all this stuff, and I’m super fascinated by it. We don’t have time for that. That’s where the Red Couch Theology Podcast goes in. I’m gonna just stick it in that box, keep it there so that I can move forward.

If you want to check that out, you can, or ask questions, feel free. So we’re gonna dive into this text and the question, the question that we have for us to explore today is what is one of those anchors? And the anchor is found in this passage. So just a little bit of context this is one Corinthians 12 was written to the church in Corinth by the apostle Paul.

Paul planted this church, and then as he’s traveling around, he he goes and he hears some rumors that this church is just full of chaos. All sorts of wacky stuff is going on, right? And so he writes this letter back to them to help them figure out how to navigate life. Now I took this photo while we were in Corinth while my wife and I and the sugars were there leading worship for a conference.

And I give, show you this photo so that you think I’m cool because I’ve been to a biblical location. No, but this was a beautiful city and it was one of the most influential cities in. Ancient Rome because it sat at that sort of, it was a land bridge between two larger bodies of land, and it was this bri bridge, very short isus of land between two gulfs.

And so tons of trade went through there, tons of ideas, different religious backgrounds, different sort of thinking and philosophical backgrounds. And so it was just this hodgepodge of humanity. That landed here very wealthy. And Paul comes and he preaches the gospel there and he preaches this message of grace and they embrace the gospel in this little church forms.

But the message that Paul preached was so saturated in this beautiful grace that this church started to think things like. We can do whatever we want. Like grace is amazing. And so there was actually people who were still worshiping with temple prostitutes in the temples. There was, there’s a one guy who’s sleeping with his mother-in-law.

There’s there’s fights and people are getting drunk and worship services. It’s a little bit chaotic. And Paul writes this letter back to them, and he’s all, all by the way, all the time, all this time, all this chaos. They’re cel, some of them are celebrating. They’re exercising their freedom in Christ.

So Paul writes this letter to offer them some boundaries, and that’s where our passage lands today. But just as a little detour, this is for free. If the gospel you believe is saturated and isn’t saturated, that should be, isn’t saturated in grace enough to risk this kind of misunderstanding. It’s not the gospel.

Paul preached the. Their grace is so big and so beautiful that you might think that you can just do anything. That’s part of, there’s a tension here. There’s a beautiful freedom in Jesus in Christ, and yet there’s these boundaries. While we were in, in Athens, we concluded as a team that the biggest problem with Corinth was that they lacked coffee.

And so this is your, one of your elders. This is Dave Sugar. This coffee pot, this is what they would serve their coffee in. It was the size of an American coffee cup. There’s no wonder this church was falling apart. They had no coffee. Alright, that’s moving on. I need to move on. So the title of this series, or the title of today’s message is Anchored in Community.

This is the thing that we’re gonna talk about today. One of the anchors that God offers his church is community. We do not want to be free from that. You get me. This is one of the things that he says, do not be free from community. Alright, so how can we engage in community so that it becomes a life giving anchor for the soul?

I’m glad you asked. We finally made it to the text. Let’s look at this together in this first section here, chapter 12 verse 12, just as one body. Though one has many parts, but all its many parts from one body. So it is with Christ for we are all baptized by one spirit, so as to form one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, slaves are free and we are all given one spirit to drink even so the body is not made up of one part, but of many parts.

This is a fascinating study in the Greek here translators struggle over these is is the spirit doing the baptizing? Is the are we baptized in the spirit? Is the spirit, the water what’s going on here with this language? But when it, when we don’t have time to get into the theological debate there, but the, it’s a word picture that he’s trying to explain, like the spirit, if you imagine the spirit is like this body of water.

And we’re all in the same pool, like there’s no other body of water like we are baptized. There’s an image of sort of the spirit washing over his people. There’s one spirit, each one of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus has this same spirit. How many of you have heard of. The y’all Bible. So to illustrate this idea of oneness, I think this y’all Bible is fascinating to me.

I just found about this in my seminary class. Did you know that the, a ton of the times in the New Testament and in the Old Testament where it says you, it doesn’t mean you or you, it means y’all. It’s a plural statement, and I think this has massive theological implications for how we think about things.

One of the ones that is most fascinating to me is this, look at the passage a little bit earlier in Corinthians, in the y’all Bible. Don’t y’all know that y’all are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwells in Y’all? Fascinating, isn’t it? Now think about this. I was told as a kid that the spirit of God lives in me.

That’s not what this text says, the spirit dwells in y’all. That’s a shift, is it not? What’s that mean? What’s that even mean for us? It’s the same idea that we find in this passage. We are baptized into one spirit. There is no Holy Spirit in dwelling you individually without a y’all. Like they, he is in you, but his power is unleashed inside of a y’all.

All this is the theological, unified voice of the New Testament, and we miss it all the time. If you’re wondering why maybe the spirit isn’t alive in you as much as you wish he was, maybe it’s because you’re not participating fully in a, y’all. The Holy Spirit functions in a y’all not in a you.

So the first thing that we learned from this passage about how do we show up in community in such a way that it becomes an anchor for the soul as this embraced unity rather than autonomy. Embrace unity rather than autonomy. Now, before I go further I’m sure maybe some of you, I’m gonna cut you off at the past.

Maybe you have some questions. What about individual spiritual formation? Am I not supposed to? Is that not a thing? Absolutely. Individual spiritual formation is powerful, but it’s meant to help you show up and do soul work in such a way that you can show up inside of a y’all well and contribute well.

To the community, the spirit is unleashed inside of a community of believers, not inside of autonomy. Embrace unity. So lemme put it this way, individual spiritual formation is powerful, but only when it leads to healthy participation in community. So embrace unity over autonomy. So what else can we learn from this passage about how do we engage community in such a way that it becomes life giving to us?

I wanna look now at verse 15 and following. Now, if the foot should say, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, I would not for that reason, stop being part of the body and if the ears should say, because I’m not an eye, I do not belong to the body. It would not for that reason, stop being part of the body.

If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be if the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? And so on and so forth. And then down here, just as we, just as he wanted them to be, if they were all one part, where would the body be? So the second thing we learn about how to engage in community is this, we have to embrace dignity.

Over inferiority, and I don’t know about you, but maybe you’re out there and you’re thinking, I don’t have anything to offer. Who am I? I’m a mess. I lived this jacked up life. I’m terrified that if people knew who I really was, they couldn’t stand even being in my presence this morning. If that’s who you think you are, you might actually be a part of the body.

And you are rejecting that reality. Embrace dignity. God has gifted you and South Fellowship Church, if you call this place home, cannot be South Fellowship Church without, you can’t do it. We are sub South Fellowship without your gifts. So embrace dignity over inferiority. I’m reminded of these characters, the boy with the loaves and the fish, if we’ve ever heard that story in, in the New Testament, Jesus, like he has this little boy, he just offers his fish and his loaves, and then God feeds the masses.

Or Moses in the burning bush. He’s who am I? I’ve nothing to offer. Or how about today? It’s Father’s Day. Happy Father’s Day for you out there. But I also just wanna point out that for fathers, like many of you have fathers and. That were pretty quiet or tired at the evenings and these sorts of things.

But what we’ve learned from psychology and from sociology is that the influence of just a tiny word from a father can actually transform the future of their kids. One little voice that either acknowledges or demeans the child can shatter or uphold a life. Every single person is valuable. Embrace dignity over infor inferiority.

So if you’re sitting right there and you’re like, nah, not me. Yes you, we need you to be us. What else can we learn from this passage? And I wanna jump down to verse let’s see, where are we at 21. The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you. Now this is a different tone of voice in just a moment or just in the passage before it says, because I’m not a hand, I’m not useful.

This one is a different voice. The eye cannot say to the hand, I don’t need you, and the head cannot say to the feet, I don’t need you. On the contrary, those parts of the body, they that seem to be weaker, are indispensable. By the way, just as a little rabbit trail. God loves using the weaker things. To bring glory to his name.

He does it all throughout the scriptures. It’s the second born child. It’s the woman who’s a gentile, who’s a prostitute. He uses all these people who are unexpected. It’s his favorite game to use, the weaker things to bring himself glory. But if we say, I don’t need you, we’re just incorrect. So the second thing, or the third thing we can learn is embrace dependence over arrogance.

You have to embrace dependence on the community over your autonomy and your arrogance. Now, I was a little hesitant to use that word arrogance, but arrogance shows up in some interesting ways, doesn’t it? We’ll talk about that in just a moment. But look at this passage. But God has put the body together given a greater honor of the weaker parts, so that there should be no division in the body.

Let’s jump down to verse 26. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it, could it be potentially, perhaps that this isn’t just a statement about how things should be? What if? What if this idea that when one part suffers, all the other parts should suffer?

Like they should feel that they should try and feel that suffering. And if one part thrives, they should try and feel the joy. What if that’s not how it is? Not what if it’s not how it should be, but just how things are potentially your thriving is actually wrapped up in the thriving of your neighbor.

And we know from brain science now that there are greater, there’s greater scientific evidence that’s actually true at a neurological level. Can you believe that? That our wellbeing as human beings is wrapped up in the thriving of the human being that sits next to us? There are no second class members of the church, and there are no first class ones either.

So in his, in their famous. Song, Simon and Garfunkel. Oh. Yeah, this is the last line, sorry, Simon. In the song, I Am a Rock. I’m gonna just read these lyrics to you. This is the last line. What up here is the last line of the song, A Winter’s Day in a deep and dark December. I’m alone gazing from my window to the streets below.

I’m fresh, a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow. I’m a rock. I’m an island. I’ve built walls of fortress, deep and mighty that none may penetrate. I have no need of friendship, friends. Cause friendship causes pain. It’s laughter and living and loving. I disdain, stain. I am a rock. I’m an island. Don’t talk of love.

I’ve heard the word before. It’s sleeping in my memory. I won’t disturb a slumber of feelings that have died. I if I never loved, I never would’ve cried. I’m a rock. I’m an island. I have my books and my poetry to protect me. I’m shielded in my armor, hiding in my room safe within my womb. I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock. I’m an island and a rock feels no pain and an island. Never cries.

So I, I use the language of embrace dependency rather than arrogance. But arrogance is actually a shield for wounded soul, is it not? Oftentimes behind the most arrogance is a wounded soul. It’s someone who tried to open up their soul, they were hurt and they were damaged, and they said never again.

So my invitation to you this morning is to open up, take the risk, and there’s behind that fear is actually an arrogance to think that you could be a rock and you could be an island.

What else can we learn? Jump down to verse 25. So that there should be no division in the body. If you look at this section here, keep that line in mind. The eye cannot say the hand, I don’t need you. There’s that going on in this verse. On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem weaker in dispensable on the parts that we think are less honorable, we treat with special honor and so on and so forth.

This is a sort of chaotic situation. There’s people, there’s tension in this church. Can you imagine the first, the church in Corinth. They’re fighting, they’re getting drunk in their services. Some people are going hungry and other people are feasting at communion time. All this stuff. And the irony of this and that Paul doesn’t write them a letter to teach them how to separate into a.

Contemporary service and a classical service. He doesn’t write them to teach them. Why don’t you plant a church over here and you plant a church over here? He doesn’t write that kind of letter. Instead he says, dig in because there should be no division in the body. This is not how it should work. So here’s the invitation I think we have for us, and how we can show up in community.

Embrace the struggle as formative in the tech world. There’s this idea, I think it started in Microsoft. If your tech folks out there, you’ll probably recognize this. The struggle is a feature. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s not a bug. Like you don’t want to stamp this out because it is formative.

It’s powerful for transforming us when things get heated in a struggle, if you stay and wrestle through it. On the other side of the wrestling is goodness and beauty, and a unified church that has navigated the murky waters of our brokenness together. Stick it out. What if the struggle was part of the point?

What if transformation comes through the struggle? Embrace the struggle as formation. It’s formative. And so when you boil all this down, here’s the invitation with the question of like, how do we show up in community in such a way that it becomes life giving to us and actually helps us? This is the bottom line.

You can’t be you until you’re anchored in a we or in a y’all. You can’t be you unless you’re anchored in a y’all. Did you know that? God designed you to not function. You’re short circuiting without a y’all like you might be killing it in so many fronts and society thinks you’re a rock star, but you cannot thrive as a human being without community.

It just isn’t an option. It’s like me wanting to be an eagle. It just isn’t an option. So how do we engage this? What are some practical things you can do? To invest in community. Here’s just a short list for you. Notice the absence, so it’s summertime. There’s a ton of our community that are traveling and on vacations.

Notice when they’re gone, send ’em a text, an encouraging word, just a little thing that anchors them back to this church family Reminds them that they’re noticed, that they’re missing. See the overlooked. Maybe today there’s someone in the community here that just has this powerful gift that they don’t think is that useful, and no one really pays attention to it.

They’re not standing on this platform or whatever it is that feels more glamorous and you just call it out in them. Be that voice for them. Text ’em, send ’em a note. Thank you for showing up with this gift. Show up for your community. Maybe as a part of Rule of Life that we talked about during the Jesus Way series A while back, you might just, you might decide, you know what?

As a church family, I’m not gonna miss certain things. I’m not gonna miss my life group. I’m gonna try and prioritize that as a top priority. I’m gonna try to only miss gathering to worship with my church community five or six times a year. As a rule. Why? ’cause I need that boundary. ’cause I will wander.

I will go play in the mountains every weekend if I could. That’s a soul that is unor to the beauty and the gift that it is to be part of a community. I’m not saying it’s evil, I’m not saying it’s bad. This is your choice. That God gives us so much freedom that we can do almost anything we want, but not everything’s beneficial.

Friedrich Biner. I’m gonna actually read a larger quote from this this book that he wrote as we can come to a conclusion, if I can find it here. Lemme read this for you and just listen. And then there’s hunger. The literal hunger of people in the world and our own literal hunger or figurative hunger.

What did we hunger for today? Was I fed today? Did I feed anybody? Today? We all have hidden hungers. We starve without knowing. It’s for each other, for silence, for beauty, for holiness, for God or something. It’s the kind of hunger that you didn’t recognize until it was fed. And then you think, oh golly, I was hungry for that.

I was so hungry for that. Then he goes on and then there’s homelessness. We’re all by and large, comparatively speaking, rich people, and perhaps we may even have more than one home. And yet the question is, are we really at home anywhere? Are we really at home in any of our home, our own homes? Because it seems to me that to be at home somewhere means to be at peace somewhere, and I have a feeling at some deep level there can really be no real peace for any of us individually.

No real home for any of us until there some measure of real peace for all of us until everybody has a home. We are wrapped up in each other’s lives. Whether you believe it or not, you are. That sense of dissatisfaction was meant to find its termination in a relationship with the living God and in community with his people.

So when we see the brokenness in the world, our souls are crying out. I don’t feel at home. I don’t feel at home. I don’t feel at home even though I have a home. What if it’s because? People like OSI Jones Johnson didn’t have a home or a place to go to school. OSI was a HIV positive boy in South Africa.

And in oops. And in 1997, his story sort of came to light. Because he was rejected from his local school because of his condition. His mom had died not too long after the story from HIV and aids, and it hit the headlines and eventually they overturned and they let him to school, but it blew up in the nation.

The story just went viral and there’s this. Moment where he stands on a stage of thousands of people in an HIV conference, because in the country no one would talk about this issue. They would just suppress HIV positive people and relegate them outside of the community. They wouldn’t engage it.

And he stood on the stage and he said this. Care for us, accept us. We’re all human beings. We’re normal. We have hands, we have feet. We can walk, we can talk. We have needs just like everyone else. Don’t be afraid of us. We’re all the same. And this little speech in front of thousands of people shifted the entire nation in South Africa and how they dealt with aids.

So much so that he made the news again. He died about a year after making this statement. He made the news again at the 10 year anniversary. And they shared stories of all of these homes trying to help people and all this stuff, and they were talking about it openly. Maybe just maybe we’re not fully at home because of little guys like this,

and we need to engage in community and feel each other’s pain.

I have a feeling at some deep level that there can really be no real peace for any of us. No real home for any of us, until there’s some measure of real peace for everybody until everybody has a home. Maybe the dissonance in your soul, maybe the thing that’s lacking your life is the fact that you’re not fully inside of community, and I get it.

It’s hard, it’s painful. The story from one Corinthians is not like this. Glamorous story of how this great church was fully unified. No, not at all. But the struggle is a bug. It’s not a feature. The struggle is part of the point, and if you’re willing to engage into it deeply and invest in it, it might just transform you and you might become fully you when you’re anchored in a we.

I wanna invite Hannah up and we’re gonna worship corporately together for just a moment as we conclude. I’m gonna sing this song, and as we lift our voices, one of the things I’ve learned is scientists say that when we sing together, we actually unite neurologically. Something takes play in your place, in your brain when you sing in a group of people.

We’re wired for community all the way down to our very physiology. So we’re gonna sing together and we’re gonna ask God to help us figure out how to be fully us. Inside of a we community. I invite you, put down roots, be anchored. Would you stand with me? Let’s worship.