Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Bob Henry, Bob
March 21, 2021
Psalm 15 (Voice)
1 Eternal One, who is invited to stay in Your dwelling?
Who is granted passage to Your holy mountain?
2 Here is the answer: The one who lives with integrity, does what is right,
and speaks honestly with truth from the heart.
3 The one who doesn’t speak evil against others
or wrong his neighbor,
or slander his friends.
4 The one who loathes the loathsome,
honors those who fear the Eternal,
And keeps all promises no matter the cost.
5 The one who does not lend money with gain in mind
and cannot be bought to harm an innocent name.
If you live this way, you will not be shaken and will live together with the Lord.
Good morning, Friends! It is good to be with you once again in the comfort of your own homes. I pray this finds you safe and well.
For the last three weeks, we have been looking at our Quaker Testimonies (also what we often refer to as our S.P.I.C.E.S. simply because it is an acronym to help us remember each of them – and we Quakers are known to love our acronyms). We have been taking time to explore these testimonies in light of helping to carry one another’s burdens.
The first week, I did a brief overview highlighting each of these testimonies, then we spent the last two weeks looking more in depth at each one. We started with the gift of Simplicity, and how it helps us to “strip off the excess” of our lives and get to the most important things – our relationship with the Divine and care for our neighbors.
Last week, we looked at the Testimony of Peace, by exploring it’s shadow side, violence. Quaker Parker Palmer helped focus our thoughts and reflection by defining violence as “any way we have of violating the identity and integrity of another person.”
This week we move to the third Quaker Testimony (the “I” in S.P.I.C.E.S.) – Integrity.
The Testimony of Integrity has always been a central tenet of Quakerism. It encourages Friends to tell the truth, say what they really mean, and stand up for what they believe, even in the face of condemnation or conflict.
Some people would go as far as to say the Testimony of Integrity may, at times, feel like a stern taskmaster. This is because Truth can be slippery, or not very clear at the moment we need it to be. I know for me, at times, having the courage to speak the Truth can feel like a nearly impossible requirement, especially when dealing with sensitive topics in which people may disagree.
Sometimes our circumstances can be clouded by our deep love or concern for others. And on other occasions, it can be clouded by the possibility of selfish embarrassment or coming off as weak.
Integrity – just as the testimonies of Simplicity and Peace – causes us to wrestle both inwardly and outwardly with our responses.
I sense when talking about integrity, most go to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition which says that Integrity is defined as:
The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, moral uprightness.
Some people in our world would quickly write this off as religious piety or Puritanism – which many Early Quakers were lumped together with for this very reason.
But a further examination would find that integrity is rooted in the biblical concept of righteousness. Again, this can be taken wrong and be viewed as self-righteous and pointing our fingers at those not as honest, moral or upright.
Yet, if we take the time to explore the root of the biblical concept of righteousness, one will find a deeper, more useful, and I believe, much more profound concept – that being WHOLENESS.
Righteousness in scripture is about making one whole in body, mind, and spirit – not better, or more holy, or more right-eous than others. It is about working to attain a wholeness personally and helping those around us achieve this as well.
This is reflected so well in the Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Testimony of Integrity which reads:
“The testimony of integrity calls us to wholeness; it is the whole of life open to truth. When lives are centered in the spirit, beliefs and actions are congruent and words are dependable. As we achieve wholeness in ourselves, we are better able to heal the conflict and fragmentation in our community and world.”
Let me read that again…
“The testimony of integrity calls us to wholeness; it is the whole of life open to truth. When lives are centered in the spirit, beliefs and actions are congruent and words are dependable. As we achieve wholeness in ourselves, we are better able to heal the conflict and fragmentation in our community and world.”
If we are going to learn to bear one another’s burdens, wholeness seems to be the key.
For too long, Quakers have interpreted the Testimony of Integrity as guidance for how to operate in the larger world -especially as it relates to our business and societal practices.
Yet as the Pacific Yearly Meeting’s statement clearly professes, it must also be central to helping us discern what we are thinking and feeling in our hearts. It must be both a desire for outward wholeness, as well as, inward wholeness.
Actually, this statement from the Pacific Yearly Meeting is almost a call to each of us personally to work for wholeness in ourselves first. Quaker Rufus Jones eludes to this when he writes:
“Experience is the Quaker’s starting-point. This light must be my light, this truth must be my truth, this faith must be my very own faith. The key that unlocks the door to the spiritual life belongs not to Peter, or some other person, as an official. It belongs to the individual soul, that finds the light, that discovers the truth, that sees the revelation of God and goes on living in the demonstration and power of it.”
If you and I have any hope to work effectively to alleviate or bear some of our neighbors burdens, we will need to first spend time examining our own motivations and beliefs and learn to live into the demonstration and power of God’s revelation to us.
To do that, Wendy Swallow, a Friend in Reno Friends Meeting writing on the Testimony of Integrity says we need to ask ourselves some queries:
· Are we driven to action out of a sense of self-abnegation or self-aggrandizement?
· Are we motivated by fear?
· Are we listening to what the world would tell us, or are we arrogantly pushing our personal agendas and beliefs?
She also points out that the Testimony of Integrity doesn’t just prohibit lying to others; it also cautions not to lie to ourselves. Before we begin pointing our fingers at the world around us, we must first center our attention on our own personal integrity and wholeness.
I don’t know how often I catch myself making excuses, believing lies about my gifting or abilities, even cowering in fear hoping that what I am sensing from the Spirit would just go away.
But how do we come to know and understand ourselves, to find the wholeness that will lead in the right direction?
My Friend, and fellow Quaker minister, Wess Daniels, says it has to be through what he labels the “practice of integrity” where we may begin to understand ourselves and find this wholeness personally and communally. He says,
The practice of Integrity is about both self-awareness and wholeness. It is born out of a community of practice committed to living integrated lives.
Practices and language develop out of that commitment that gives tools for understanding the self, my relationship to God and other people, the natural world, and material objects. A practice of integrity provides a kind of self-reflective mirror upon which I am invited to look at myself and my community and reflect upon whether my “Yes is yes,” and my “No is no.”
A practice of Integrity requires us to participate in an honest assessment of all areas of life consistent with our practice of worship and understanding of what God calls us to.
Wess, too, believes that this consistency is about having the inside and outside line up.
He warns that we should not use integrity as a claim upon another human being if we are not in constant practice of investigating our own lives under the same searching light. To do otherwise, he says, would itself lack integrity.
He goes on to reiterate that Integrity is about truthfulness. It is something we constantly strive for and yet never fully arrive at. Thus, he believes that to strive for wholeness is to be vulnerable; there is a confessional quality to integrity. We must claim our own integrity with great trepidation as we recognize that there is often a gap between our reality and that which we strive for, but if we undertake it within a caring community, we can trust that we shall be under this work of love together.
And when we put this in the context of bearing one another’s burdens, you can see clearly that this caring community is what we hopefully consider First Friends.
A place where together, we are learning to trust, learning to recognize the gaps, learning to strive for wholeness and vulnerability together.
We are to be this type of community that practices integrity by living integrated lives – integrated lives with each other, but then also with our neighbors, our community, with the hurting, the less fortunate, the oppressed. This is how we bring wholeness (body, mind and soul) and how we help carry one another’s burdens.
I hope that when people consider our community at First Friends, they are finding themselves challenged, as well as, encouraged personally to seek wholeness.
I hope that when people consider our community at First Friends, they are being challenged, as well as, encouraged by their fellow Friends within our meeting to strive for wholeness with one another.
And I hope that as First Friends together, we would be challenged, as well as encouraged by our fellow Friends to live out this integrity in a way that would draw the world around us into a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit and to a hopeful and promising life on this planet.
Now, let us take these thoughts into our time of silent waiting worship. Also, I we will again offer the queries from Friend Wendy Swallow for you to ponder this morning.
· Are we driven to action out of a sense of self-abnegation or self-aggrandizement?
· Are we motivated by fear?
· Are we listening to what the world would tell us, or are we arrogantly pushing our personal agendas and beliefs?