Community Immunity?
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.
At the mere mention of the word community, people often eye you as if you had dropped in from another world, smile tolerantly, and hope you change the subject. Mentioning community can be something of a foreign language for us, but recently we are hearing a lot about community. 2020 has seen a blend of interesting, unique, and uncharted ways of living in community. We are enduring a pandemic that has grave consequences for community. People were asked to quarantine away from each other until we better understood how this virus was going to play out. 8 months later we are still learning how to handle living safely in the midst of a pandemic. One of the ideas that has been considered was to institute Community Immunity or Herd Immunity.
Herd immunity or community immunity is when a large part of the population is immune to a specific disease. If people are resistant to the cause of the disease, such as a virus, then it has nowhere to go.
While it will take some time and likely a vaccine for our society to reach herd immunity for COVID-19, I wonder if we have developed a version of community immunity within our own walls? Do we reach beyond the brick and mortar to engage, create and embellish community or are we content with what we have come to be?
Now is the perfect time for each of us to ask do we know who is out there beyond our doors? Now is the perfect time to ask, what part of God’s community have we separated from? What part do we need to connect with? Living in a deeper community means connecting to more than just our own church, our own community, that place where we can at times have immunity from the community, where we can find ourselves using language like us/them. As a people of God, we give great thanks that we are not immune to God’s love, but understand that building real community means we give God’s love to others, Jesus tell us to love our neighbors as ourselves knowing this is the way to growing deeper with community.
How then do we avoid becoming immune to the community? By always expanding the community, by understanding the community needs, by inviting those around us to experience this wonderful grace in Christ, by living bold in Christ. Even though we need to be physically distant from one another, we can start to deepen our connection to the community, by reaching out, by listening, and by working to understand those located around you.
Jesus Christ is calling us to be deep in community. Jesus is calling us to expand the walls so far that you can see no wall at all because allowing for a deeper experience with community allows us to be the vessel for sharing the good news of Christ with others creating unity in the community.
God never intended for any of us to live the Christian life alone.
Reflection by Pastor Chuck Miller