The Social Network: The Social What?

A couple of months ago I preached a sermon series (titled The Social Network) on our need for community and its vital role in our faith. I'll post a couple this week and a couple next week. This sermon was preached April 7, 2013.
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Ephesians 4:11-16

New Living Translation (NLT)

11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

The Social What? 

Today we are starting a new sermon series titled “The Social Network.” When we think of a social network, most of us think of social media. Things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. That’s not the social network we’re going to talk about for the next few weeks.

But the series title is a play off of that thought. When I began thinking about this series several months ago, I came up with some great sermon titles. Some ways to play off of social networking, and specifically, the names of some popular social media outlets. Here’s one:  “Get your face in the book” 

Nice, right? How about this one?  “Don’t Twitter Around with Jesus”. 

Even better, I think. Here’s another –  “Make Jesus your (P)interest”. 

And finally – “Get Linked In to Jesus.” 

Those are great, right? I’ll admit, they are purposely cheesy. And they really have nothing to do with this series of sermons. They have little to nothing to do with what I really want to talk about for the next few weeks.

We are going to talk about a concept that, like it or not, is vital to our faith. Community. The social network we’re going to talk about has nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter, but has everything to do with the person sitting on your right and your left, and in front of you and behind you. It’s about us.

The truth is, we need one another. We need community. The concept of community seems foreign to our modern sensibilities. Instead we are a society based on individualism. But there is still an innate need, and a longing for community. And here’s where social media will make a brief appearance. Because for many of us, Facebook has become our community. Actually, I should say: Facebook has become a substitute for community. In reality, I think it may have done more harm than good in terms of connecting people.

I’m going to get on my soapbox for a minute. Well, I guess that’s what I do every week, isn’t it.

Let me start by saying that I use Facebook. Facebook has some great features and some wonderful qualities. BUT – Facebook and other social media sites have developed what I would call a false community. It’s people offering impersonal happy birthday wishes and sharing either the mundane moments of everyday life or just sharing how wonderful their kids and husband and in-laws are. It has become our personal hype machine. “Look how great my life is.” But don’t ask me how things are going. Just “like” my status when I share the latest wonderful life event. I’ll tell you, I have kids. They are not always angelic and wonderful. Sometimes they are selfish and bratty. I’ve been married for 18 years. Misty will tell you that every day with me is not a walk through the roses. Maybe that’s a cynical view of Facebook, but it irks me a little that this is what we know as a social network – this is what some people call community. Being in community means that we live together. It means we share life. Good and bad. It means having a real connection to one another.

I found a couple of definitions of community that I want to share. The first is a sociological definition. It says that community is a social unit larger than a small village that shares common values. Yawn. That is little more that a group of people in proximity to one another. That doesn’t sound like a community to me.

The other definition comes from biology. It says a community is a group of living organisms interacting and sharing a populated environment. OK, that sounds like my idea of a community. Not simply living near one another, but interacting, conversing. Living together.

The way I see it, something like Facebook doesn’t promote community. It promotes individualism. It’s not about living together or interacting. It’s about me and what I want to share and how I feel and what I think is important. Again, I’m being a little cynical. I know there are other aspects to social media that are helpful in connecting us. But our true connection should be real. It should be face-to-face. It should be with people, not websites.

I shared part of a quote from John Wesley with you last week. I want to repeat it this morning. This is part of the inspiration for this sermon series. In the preface to a book by John and Charles Wesley called Hymns and Sacred Poems, Wesley wrote “Solitary religion is not to be found [in the gospel of Christ]. ‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.”

The last sentence, and especially the last phrase, of that quote has been taken out of context and misused for a long time. You will often hear ‘no holiness but social holiness’ as a call for the church to be involved in social justice issues. There might be a connection to make there, but it’s a stretch. What Wesley is really talking about is Christianity as a social religion. Wesley went on to explain that phrase in a sermon later in life. He said that by social religion he means “it cannot subsist at all without society, without living and conversing with other [believers].” In other words, our faith is meant to be lived out in community. Not only that, but our faith depends on community.

Unfortunately, we live in a society that thrives on individualism. Individualism is the idea the individual is of primary importance. It emphasizes the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence. It’s a concept and an attitude that has been taught for a long, long time in this country. And there is a lot of good in the concept. Individualism promotes self-confidence. It promotes the idea that you are a person of worth and importance. Individualism should promote equality of all people. It allows us to have our own opinions and allows us the freedom to share those opinions. Individualism tells us that we can be successful, that we can accomplish things.

But there is a flip side to individualism. Individualism also teaches that we should rely on ourselves. Instead of equality, it sometimes goes to the extremes of “I’m the most important, so I’m better than the rest.” It creates people who, to contradict Barbara Streisand – who don’t need people, but still consider themselves the luckiest people in the world. Individualism teaches us that we can do it on our own, which leads to the attitude that we should do it on our own. That if we can’t, then we are a failure. And those who can’t succeed, they’re just not trying.

And this attitude of individualism seeps into our church life. Maybe it’s less “I can save myself” than “I can be saved alone.” But still it’s an attitude that believes in self. Church becomes about me and what I need. I go to church to save my soul. I go to church so I can feel better about myself. I go to church for me. For my needs. For my soul.

I love how the Holy Spirit works. I’ve been planning this series for several months now. But this week, one of my professors said this: “We are much more interested in an individual faith – ‘Getting my soul right with Jesus’ – than we are with notions of talking about the community of the church. We need to reclaim the notion that we are never Christians alone, but we are only Christians and we are only faithful, insofar as we are faithful to God with one another in the community of the church.” This is exactly what John Wesley means when he says that our faith cannot survive without being with, talking to, and learning from other believers.

If all we have is individualism, we end up, well, we end up as idolaters. Ayn Rand wrote this is her book Anthem. “And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.’”

In her book, Because He Loves Me, Elyse Fitzpatrick talks about the idolatry of individualism. She writes about our need for community, and specifically our need for people of faith to whom we can confide and expect to be held accountable. People with whom we can talk about our faith and our doubts, and who talk to us about their faith and their doubts. That sort of relationship, she says, flies in the face of our individualistic society. She writes this: “This idolatry of privacy and individualism is one of the greatest detriments … in the church today. God has placed us in a family because we don’t grow very well on our own. It’s still not good to be alone. We need the encouragement, correction, and loving involvement of others who are willing to risk everything for the sake of the beauty of his bride.” His bride, referring to the church, the bride of Christ. In other words, what’s important, what the church should be about, is not “getting my soul right” but the act of being together. Worship together. Learning together. Growing together.

I want to make an important distinction between individualism and individuality. Individuality means that we have our own identity. We are who we are and we remain that way. That is what Paul writes about in our scripture this morning. He says we are all created with certain gifts, and all of those gifts are important to the life of the church. He also says that we are given those gifts with the responsibility of using them to do God’s work and build up the church. Don’t think of building up the church as simply growing in terms of numbers. But growing in faith, helping one another grow more and more like Christ. Our scripture wraps up with a sentence that is one of the most important sentences you’ll hear today. Paul is talking about the body of Christ and the part each of us plays in that body. “As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.” Our faith depends on community, on being together – worshiping together, learning together. We are created to be in community.

Next week we’re going to talk more about the Body of Christ and what it means to be a part of that body.

This morning we come together to celebrate that community – the community of the Body of Christ.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here or not, but several years ago when we lived in Kentucky, Abby, my youngest, was about 3 years-old. She loved communion. She got so excited on communion Sundays. One Sunday we were driving to church, and it happened to be the first Sunday of the month. From the back seat Abby asks, “Dad, are we having community today?” We laughed because it was cute, then I thought, you know, we are. And I answered, “Yes, Abby. Yes we are.”

Today we are going to have community. Holy Communion is community. It is the gathering of the community of faith around the table of Christ. It is meaningful to us as individuals, but it is much more than a personal event.

That notion of community noticeable in the liturgy used in observing communion. The prayers and readings use plural pronouns. We, us, our. For years when I participated in Communion, I would pray I, me, and my instead. I didn’t realize the communal nature, probably until Abby asked that question almost 10 years ago. We gather as one body. Paul wrote in 1^st Corinthians that “because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” So we gather as one body to share in the grace of God and to celebrate our one faith.