“Beloved Community”

            Given the political climate of the last few years, I think it is still important that we remain committed to a beloved community. What is a beloved community? Simply put, it’s a community where one experiences they are beloved. It’s a community where one feels both connected and finds joy in realizing the inherent worth of their lives. It’s a community where justice is not just sought, but celebrated. It’s a community of endless gratitude.

            Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the phrase often to reinforce the vision of what America was reaching towards. Dr. King, as some of you may know, was deeply influenced by the Buddhist activist Thich Nhat Hanh who held up a similar vision for the community in Vietnam. A place free from violence, war, and hatred. A place that instead of being motivated by personal gain was motivated by mutual support and realization of our connection to one another. Dr. King was also influenced by Gandhi who held up a similar vision for his people in India – emancipation from colonialism, and self-actualization as a true and independently governed people.

            I don’t think it was an accident that all three of these figures had a religious background, and a faith orientation toward the world. Though their religious traditions differed, the vision of the beloved community can be found in all their public statements and actions. I’m personally compelled by the view that is found in the New Testament as well as the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh that beloved community is not merely aspirational – it is actually here, if we can awaken to it. In the New Testament beloved community is referred to as “the kingdom of God,” but it points to the same reality – a place where one discovers they are loved completely and without end.

            I’m compelled by this latter vision. We are living in the truth of a beloved community, but we remain asleep to this great and fundamental experience of being alive much of the time. But it is possible to discover and embody it completely here and now. I think Rosa Parks embodied this for America when she took her seat at the front of the bus. I think mothers are doing that when they share the experience of losing their children to police violence at a march.

            There are also quieter and less public displays of beloved community that have great power – reading your child a bedtime story, making yourself a nutritious and delicious meal after a long day, being a friend to someone who needs a listening ear or a helping hand, offering a stranger a kind expression. All of these moments, in my opinion, are the full embodiment and realization of beloved community here and now.

            But you might be wondering to yourself, how do these small events change a world in the throes of violence, ignorance, and destruction? All I can say is that I trust that it does. I have faith. Our acts of embodying beloved community in public and private may not seem to change the world, but I think they do. It changes the way we see and experience the world, and in doing so we awaken to the possibility of realizing beloved community in the here and now. This does not discount all the evidence to the contrary, and the rampant suffering we witness. But it gives us a perspective from which we can more skillfully engage the issues of our day. It fortifies us with an experiential hope that there is more to the story than the dreadful thing we are witnessing at that moment. There is always the possibility of a beloved community even and especially when all seems lost in a moment.

            I think realizing this vision experientially in our daily living is the opportunity we have as a church. I look forward to finding ways that we can awaken and support each other into living and discovering that we are indeed beloved.

In faith,

Rev. Joseph