[…] How does the sacrifice of one, the offering of the Lamb, create a community, a movement, a new world?

I think a glimpse of an answer comes from one of America’s great philosophers of the early twentieth century: Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (1855–1916) was an American philosopher associated with absolute idealism, best known for his work on loyalty, community, and the moral meaning of shared life. He wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period marked by rapid industrialization, social fragmentation, and the crisis of modernity, seeking a philosophical account of truth and ethics that could sustain genuine community amid cultural and religious change.

Royce saw the heart of Christianity as the creation of what he called the Beloved Community — a community bound together by shared loyalty and love, greater than any individual member. It is a community where betrayal can be forgiven, where wounds can be healed, because its bond is rooted in something beyond itself.

Royce believed that such a community is both created and its members transformed, by a singular, shared event — an event so formative that by remembering it, by re-living it, the members are knit together into something far greater than the sum of its parts. He saw this as the end game of humanity – a vision for what our future could and should become.

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It seems clear to me that for us as Christians, that singular, formative event that Royce references and from which Thurman and King start, is the Triduum — the Cross, the Tomb, and the Resurrection of Jesus. The Church relives that event every Holy Week and remembers it every Sunday in the Eucharist. In that remembrance we are not only bound to Jesus, but to one another. That is how the Beloved Community is born.

So here is the challenge for this MLK weekend: How do we become the Beloved Community in our own time? How do we live God’s dream for the world while our nation is riven by violence, division, and despair?

I believe it begins the same way it began for those first disciples. When they asked Jesus, “Where are you staying?” — or more literally, “Where are you abiding?” (using the same word that John had used for the Spirit’s presence with Jesus.) he did not give them a lecture or a doctrine. He said: “Come and see.” And the disciples followed him, saw where he was abiding (staying) and they abided there with him that day. Abide is doing a lot of theological work in this Gospel reading, and it’s not an accident.

We cannot explain the Kingdom of God into existence. We must invite people to experience it. We must bring others into the fellowship where Christ abides, into the worship where his death and resurrection are remembered, into the spaces where love and mercy are practiced. In that abiding, hearts are changed, and lives are bound together.

You can view the full sermon at this link.