Sparking joy in a Christian community

This is the reflection that our Team Rector, Miranda, led at St Bride’s this morning.

The prayer table with an installation of things that might have fed us in childhood, and in maturity. we added hearts with what sparked joy, and arrows for what we wanted to let go

Both our readings today (1 Corinthians 3:1-9 and Matthew 5:21-24) focus on what it is to be a Christian community. What builds up a community? What makes it healthy? What feeds it?  And in particular, how does a church community healthily cope with the everyday resentments and dislikes and jealousies that, if we’re not careful, can eat away at us and at our communal life.

Being a good community is a core value for us here at St Bride’s. One of the important anchor points for this church that came out of the appreciative inquiry process a few years ago was that the aspiration for this to be a community that is ‘radically committed at the centre, and easy to access at the edges’.

Just think about that for a moment. Whether you consider yourself to be at the heart of this community or more of a fringe-dweller, what does  it mean to you to be ‘radically committed’ to a community?

And thinking about your experience of joining a community – whether this church or any other communities that you are part of – what makes a group easy to access at the edges?

The building up of the Christian community is the main theme of Paul’s first letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. All through the letter, this is what Paul tries to keep at the front of their minds in all their decision making and agonising over theology. If it builds up the community it is good, if it doesn’t build up the community, and especially if it weakens the community, it is bad.

Paul is not known in his letters for being a self-effacing kind of a chap, but here he makes it quite clear that he and the other competing leaders are not important. They are simply technicians, church engineers, or farmers. We, he says, are just God’s servants doing our job. You, the church who are the body of Christ, are God’s field, God’s building. Building you up as a healthy community, says Paul, is the aim of all that he is writing and all that he is doing.

I’ve been living and praying with you here at St Bride’s for 2 and a half years now. And I’ve become aware as I’ve talked with so many of you that many, perhaps most of us here, carry a lot of anger and pain about some of our past church experiences.

I’ve become aware that some of what we do here as a church on a Sunday morning is shaped not so much by our positive choices for God, but by our reactions against things we are still being negatively formed by.

Some of the things we are rejecting and reacting against are unhealthy and it is good for us to turn away from them. Other things may have been healthy and normal for us at the stage that we were at in our faith journey then.

Paul uses the analogy of milk being appropriate for young children who aren’t yet ready for solid food. Its not the right food for a mature digestive system, but it is the right and healthy thing for infants.

Those of you who know my home – or worse still, have seen my desk - will know that tidiness is not something you’d readily associate with me. But I’ve found my attitude to clutter and stuff being transformed over this past year as I’ve been reading and putting into practice Marie Kondo’s way of de-cluttering areas of my life and cupboards. I’m not saying you’ll find my house immaculate now, far from it, but the cupboards and boxes are no longer full of stuff that makes me feel laden down when I think about it, or which reminds me of times or emotions I’d prefer to forget. The dress I wore for a job interview that I didn’t get. The books that I bought for an article that I never wrote. Things like that hang over us and clutter up our mental space as much as our physical space.

Marie Kondo’s technique boils down to the simple act of holding each individual item in your hands and asking yourself – ‘does this spark joy?’

If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, thank it for the part it has played in your life so far, and let it go.

And so I invite you today to reflect on what, in your spiritual life and in your church journey, has been healthy, even those things you’ve now moved on from; and what has been unhealthy.  I invite you to consider what sparks joy when you look back over your journey. Keep those things. The things that don’t spark joy – can you find it in your heart to thank God for what you have learned from those experiences, and to let them go?  

Let’s let go, as a community, of the pain and the heaviness of carrying the burden of all the things that we want to reject.

Let’s stop allowing  those things the power to define us as a community, as a church, by what we are reacting against.

Let’s let them go, keeping only those things from our past and our present that spark joy, so that we, as God’s field and God’s building, may be built up.

This is the wordcloud generated from all the things from our past and present Christian journeys that we found ‘sparked joy’