Our theme scripture for the month of November is Ephesians 4: 1-6. Let’s read it together.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4There is one body and one Spirit-- just as you were called to one hope when you were called-- 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Our theme for the month is Community, “Living together in Community.”

I did a quick scan of my old Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and confirmed that the prefix, “com” means “with.”  So the word “community” means “with unity.” So community is the practical and concrete way that we live out the biblical instruction to “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit.”  The way that we keep the unity of the Spirit is through community.

As you know, we have been moving towards the establishment of a new outreach that will include another worship service. As we have moved forward, we have been exploring the ministries of a group of churches that refer to themselves as “Emergent Churches.”  Corey has been providing us with reading materials and this is the one thing that they all have in common – they focus on community, on the quality of relationships. One of the side effects of our new high-tech world is that we have deprived ourselves of quality relationships and our neighborhoods are marked by a persistent sense of loneliness or aloneness.  Living “with unity” or living in community is a desperate yearning among many of our neighbors.

Do you remember the days before we built the new Christian Community Life Center?  We surveyed 150 households and asked about the dominant needs of our community. The response that came back more than any other was this, “We need a sense of community.”

We are still working on it and discovering that it is harder than it first appears. We’ve learned again what the Bible has always known. Wanting community and knowing how to live in community are two different things. We want it but we are not willing to do the things that are necessary for community to thrive.

The Bible sometimes teaches us through straightforward instruction and positive example and sometimes the Bible teaches us through bad example.

Let’s look first at a straightforward instruction. Notice that humility and gentleness and unity all seem to go together in this paragraph.  He writes, “Be completely humble and gentle….” Paul understood and taught that without humility and gentleness, there can be no community.

Humility, what is it?

In the famous hymn in Philippians, the Apostle writes this about Jesus,

Who being in the very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant…. (Philippians 2: 6-7)

Jesus was clear that the greatest in God’s Kingdom are the servants, those who use the gifts that God gives in order to enhance the lives of those who live in their community.

So, what might it look like, humility?  It looks like the father of the Prodigal Son who swallows his pride and gets over his hurt feelings in order to welcome his wayward son home.

It looks like a Samaritan, who is despised and hated by the Jewish community, who sees a Jewish man laying on the side of the road and he goes to him and he binds his wounds and he takes him to an inn and pays for his stay so that he will have time to heal. In Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan had to get over it; get over a lifetime of insults and belittlement and degradation, get over a profound difference in religion, get over racial epithets, get over a lifetime of enmity and give himself in service to the enemy of a life time.  (It’s in the book.)

Humility looks like Jesus saying to God in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.”

Without humility, without a sense of the needs of the neighbor, without a sense of the greater good, without a sense that greatness is to be found in service only, genuine community is impossible.

And yet, community is our deepest yearning. We want it and we do not want to do what is necessary to experience it.  The word for that is sin!

The opposite of humility is arrogance, putting yourself, your fears, your ambition before the needs of the other. It assumes that greatness happens when others serve you!

In his book on Prayer Philip Yancey quotes theologian Daniel Hawks: “The basic human problem is that everyone believes that there is a god and I am it.”  By that he means that our fundamental temptation is to live as though we were the center of the universe and that the world owes it to us to conform to our belief and desire.  That would be the opposite of humility.

Yancey reports a story that a Russian Orthodox priest told on himself. Alexander Schmemann was a leader in the recent movement to reform the Orthodox Church in Russia.

As a young man, he and his fiancée were riding the subway in Paris. At one stop, an old and ugly woman, dressed in the uniform of the Salvation Army got on the train and found a seat nearby. The two young lovers whispered to one another in Russian about how repulsive and ugly she looked. (They were no doubt very smug in their youth and good looks. Some of us remember when!)  A few stops later the woman stood to exit.  As she passed them she said in perfect Russian, “I wasn’t always ugly.”   Father Schmemann later told his students that the woman was an angel of God. She opened his eyes, searing his vision in a way that he would never forget.

They looked at her and on the basis of what they first saw, with no other information, they judged her to be unworthy and ugly and something less than a child of God! For Father Schmemann, it was a lesson in discipleship, a lesson in humility.

What is the humility that makes community possible?  I think that it begins with the heartfelt desire to see the other person as God sees that person. Like the Good Samaritan, it is seeing the sorrow and pain rather than focusing on the lifetime of enmity. Like the Father of the Prodigal Son, it is getting past one’s pride in order to accept the Son home.  Like Schmemann, it is seeing the face of an angel in the face of an old and not-so-attractive face.  Like Jesus, it is becoming a servant … to sinners.

And this is the surprise ending. What do you get for your humility?  You may get the community that heals the soul.

You may see the face of angels in unexpected places.