Sermon: Tenacious Commitment
This is the first sermon in our Lent series, “Covenant: The Tie that Binds,” during which we explore what it means to be a covenanted community now, after the many changes of the past several years. This sermon was accompanied by a slide show of photos from our community’s life together. Please contact Sheri at fmcsf@aol.com if you’d like a link to it.
Mark 1:9-15
I was talking to Sharon the other day and I realized: I’m an official old-timer. Not as much of an old-timer as Sharon or others of you — I can only aspire — but I’ve spent half of my life in this congregation, so I think I qualify.
I’m such an old-timer that when I think about how I have experienced life in this covenanted community since 1993, three distinct eras become clear. Before I talk about that history, however, I want to briefly say what I mean by covenanted community. We invite people to sign a covenant every year that puts in black and white our commitments to each other. Many Mennonite churches do this, to keep commitment current and to remind people of what it means to be a part of a faith community. Mennonites have typically had a “thick” sense of community — it’s not a flimsy commitment we make to each other — and covenant signing helps reinforce that thickness. It reinforces the tie that binds so that it’s strong and can withstand forces that might seek to unravel it or tear it apart. I’m going to talk more about those forces later.
We have been signing a covenant since our beginnings in 1975 as an intentional community. Since then and up through the time I first began attending in 1993, we were always a quite small group — at most, maybe 25-35 on a Sunday morning, and mostly young adults. We were small enough that everyone knew each other intimately. Back then, the church was the primary social group for most of the folks who came.
Our commitment to each other was clear: You came and got involved. Most people in the church were on one committee if not two. It was a high-commitment community, but this commitment came not from coercion or Christian guilt, but from love and creativity. As Sharon said, we were playing church together, and we got to make this church be what we wanted it to be. Not our parents’ church. There were stories back then of weekly worship committee meetings to plan the Sunday service that went late into the night.
The second era began in the mid-2000s, when we began to grow. By 2017, we were up to almost 100 on a Sunday morning, and we were now a much more age-diverse group — lots of young kids, and a wider span of adults. Even so, we had a very active and strong young adult core as more of our Mennonite Voluntary Service workers ended up staying in San Francisco after their service year. Of course, we were no longer this little social group where everyone knew everything about everyone. We didn’t even have committee spots for everyone who wanted to get involved! But we also increased our social justice and spiritual formation activities because we had more people to do them — and we also had more staff, with Pat increasing her hours and portfolio and Joanna joining us in 2014.
I’d say we were still a quite high-commitment church. However, because we were bigger it was easier for people to step back and not participate as much or to not find their place in the community as quickly as when we were a smaller, more intimate group. And, in contrast to a group of mostly young adults, our congregation was now made up of many midlife folks with more competing commitments — challenging professional jobs and long commutes, young children, a social network of more than just church folks. Also, during this time, San Francisco was the place to be. This area was flying high — our mayor started a marriage equality movement, the city was booming, there was lots of life, few shuttered storefronts, and no talk of doom loops.
And then, things started shifting by about 2018. Housing was becoming so expensive that folks, especially our young adults, began reluctantly moving to more affordable places. Some of our former young adults were now approaching retirement age and wondering if they could afford to retire here. There were more and more unhoused folks, the fentanyl crisis hit, crime went up — and then, of course, the Big Bad: COVID. The thickness of our community was never more necessary. This community carried many of us through a very difficult time. Attendance at online services was initially very high before we all got Zoom fatigue, and we started a lot of new online spiritual formation and support groups that are still continuing and have allowed many people who don’t live in the area or who, for reasons of disability or health, can’t attend in person, to participate in our community life. This was great and it also raised questions: What does it mean to be a covenanted community that is online and in-person, when community is not so clearly defined by geographic area?
After we started regathering in person, it soon became clear there wasn’t going to be a return to a pre-pandemic normal. Many folks were gone — some of them moved away to more affordable areas now that jobs were remote, and some just drifted away after 18 months of not meeting in person. Culturally, the idea that people show up in the same place at the same time shifted a lot during the pandemic — as any of you who work in offices know. That same cultural shift, of course, really affected churches. As one recent national report said, regular participation in faith communities was once viewed as weekly attendance, but now attending services once or twice a month is considered such. And more people are participating in churches via online groups or maybe a quarterly hiking group than showing up on Sunday morning. A Mennonite pastor in Lancaster told me that he used to only plan one big event a week — the Sunday worship service and most people came. Now, he said, he’s planning a lot of smaller events that draw smaller groups of people. It’s good, because those events draw in some folks who may never come to Sunday morning church. But, he said, he misses that sense of being a gathered community that comes together in one place, at one time, as one body. Things feel more fragmented now, he said.
Even back in 1993, being a covenanted community was countercultural. We live in an individualistic, consumerist society that has only gotten moreso over the decades. If people even go to church, they approach it in the same way that they buy pants or laundry detergent – looking around at all the options, choosing one that fits their preferences, “buying” it, and then discarding it when it no longer suits them. That’s why it’s called church shopping. And, of course, we know that here in the Bay Area few people even go to church or faith communities. Trust in all institutions is way down nationwide, and trust in churches is at an all-time low. Plus, there’s so many more ways to meet spiritual needs in the “spiritual marketplace” — yoga classes, weekend meditation retreats, online communities, podcasts — all of which are just easier than covenanted community.
In short, the cultural forces moving against covenanted community are more powerful now than when I started attending. I often think of these cultural forces as centrifugal forces. Centrifugal means center-fearing. It’s the feeling you get if you were ever on a Round-up carnival ride, where – as the ride starts spinning faster and faster – you’re pushed away from the center, against the wall. Centripetal, which literally means center-seeking, is the opposite. A centripetal force gathers people in, toward the center. We live in a time of powerful centrifugal forces when it comes to covenanted community.
And yet, have we ever needed thick, covenanted community more? The world is more chaotic and uncertain than a decade ago by far, and society is more polarized and frayed than it has been in generations. Locally, things have also changed a lot, and I thought Joanna really nailed that shift during a recent planning meeting when she said: “The popular sentiments about the Bay Areas have totally shifted in the time I’ve been here. It used to be ‘this is the place to be, we’re the best,’ and now it’s ‘San Francisco is doomed, Oakland is having a car stolen every 5 seconds, and the As left. A lot of people are moving away, it’s so expensive.’”
“But,” she said, “this is the gravitas of being a covenanted community: We have each other in the midst of all these changes. Not just when the sun shines and everyone wants to live in the Bay Area. Now, when it is more challenging than ever, we are invited into an even deeper tenacity of commitment to each other and to place.”
It was that tenacity of commitment to covenanted community that Jesus is calling people to in the passage we heard from Mark — that is his good news. He is calling people into a thick community that can be a force of healing and hope for each other and the world.
What does that mean to be even more deeply tenacious to community now? How can the tie that binds be strengthened? How can be we breathe even more life into those connections so that we can breath more life into the healing and hope the world so desperately needs? That’s what I’m looking forward to exploring in these coming weeks of Lent, together.