Today, we come as a community to a particular annual discipline and liturgical practice. It is an intentional practice, our commitment/recommitment to membership in the Eighth Day Faith Community. It is a practice that defined the Church of the Saviour at its very beginning, a practice that continues to hold up the “integrity” of belonging to a spiritual community committed to following Jesus. This practice is a “discipline” as one of our founders, Elizabeth O’Connor stated in Call to Commitment. “Each year under God, we will review our commitment to this expression of the [Christian] Church. If we find at any time this doesn’t have meaning for us or we are automatically performing a ritual, we will not recommit.” (Call to Commitment, p. 37) This year is the 47th year that Eighth Day has celebrated recommitment. We are blessed that two of our founding members are still among us: Ann Barnet and David Dorsey, both of whom signed our membership book back on November 21, 1976.
Our membership commitment was last revised about thirteen years ago when we decided at our community gathering in late winter to draft a commitment that each of us in the community could recite together regardless of where we were on our spiritual journey. The first paragraph in our commitment starts with the words, “I come … ” And, this morning we will be hearing from a number of you as to why you are coming today, why you are committing or recommitting.
But, first, I want to share a few thoughts about what we might mean if the “I” also is a “We”: We come as a community …” Kate Lasso in her teaching gave us some words to start our thinking; she entitled her teaching “Sharing in the Love That Makes Us One.” It is this Love that Jesus embodied, taught and gifted to his followers, so we as a community would commit to his commandment to “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12). Jesus spent his relatively short life teaching and embodying what he understood as God’s call to a people, the nation of Israel, to Jesus’ community, as well as to other individuals. Recall, for example, the stories of the Samaritan Traveler and the Forgiving Father as well as Jesus’ images of what God’s kingdom looked like. These point to the embodiment of the commandment to “Love the Lord, your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10: 27-28).
If I/we want to follow Jesus, how do we stay true to the life of God, the Divine, within ourselves and within our community? It can be a struggle and a narrow path; it takes consistency in our commitment, and as Kate said, “our willingness to light the flame within [to become] our gift to others, releasing the energy and beauty of the divine aliveness to the outer world.”
So, why am I (re)committing to covenant membership?
* As a young adult, I decided that my faith should not be separate: it’s the inward/outward journey if I want to grow spiritually and become a more integrated person. I need to continue to learn and practice how to do that.
* In order to grow, I need some structure, a scaffold and community. The virtues and values and practices of Community matter. Sharing our lives with others striving to be faithful gives the Spirit a chance to hold up a mirror and show me/us who we are and what we need to grow. One of my big questions this year is “How do I know that I am growing spiritually? How do we know that we as a community are growing spiritually, are becoming more mature and informed followers of Jesus’ Way. Community should and can help us do that.
* Third, I want to be open to learning because it’s energizing, despite being challenging and sometimes threatening. I love the short story in Luke’s gospel of Jesus as a young adolescent “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” (Lk 2:46) Jesus’ action seems to me based on an awakening within himself of who he is, and with this comes a desire to learn … (One Foot in Eden, p. 34) Then later, Jesus as a leader, teacher and healer changed his mind and agreed to heal the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman, a person outside of the Jewish community.
------------------------------
I want to conclude by sharing some meaningful words from a Pentecost and Recommitment teaching that our dear friend Fred Taylor gave in 2011.
He said,
If you recommit today, you are (re)committing to belonging to a community with unresolved issues … All of us at times feel like children who feel frustrated, children who see things but lack the language or courage to put it into words. This is true of our faith and our doubt. Blessed is the community that can go deeper with each other, get beneath the walls that divide us and help each other bring forth those thoughts and feelings too deep for words into understanding expression. That happened at the first Pentecost … [The early followers of Jesus] never forgot the suffering of their leader or of God’s vindication of Jesus’ life and death giving him back to them to comfort, confront, support and lead them in continuing and expanding the movement. As a bottom line, this is what recommitment in our understanding of church is all about. It is longing, celebrating, reconciling, continuing the Jesus’ movement in darkness and in light.
It is a commitment to Love.