Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
August 1, 2021
Good morning and welcome to Light Reflections. This morning our centering text is from…
Ephesians 4:4-7 (Message).
You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one Master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think and do is permeated with Oneness. But that doesn’t mean you should all look and speak and act the same.
Earlier this week, Beth sent me an email that included the following quote from Richard Rohr,
“Without the great stories that free us, we remain trapped in small cultural and private worlds. True transcendence frees us from the tyranny of I Am and the idolatry of We Are.”
I found this quote a summary of what I have been led to say this morning.
Every year after attending Yearly Meeting Sessions, I spend some time reflecting. Often, I find a sense of frustration brewing in my mind that often spills over into my conversations. The main thing that consumes my thoughts is the wide range of differences, experiences, and beliefs among Quakers.
It amazes me that each year we gather from our various Meetings throughout mainly Indiana for business where a wide range of beliefs and experiences are on display. Some beliefs and experiences that clearly differ from mine, and from other Local Meetings within our Yearly Meeting. We often walk on eggshells trying hard to avoid engaging them, because we fear exclusion or simply seeming unkind, but they still are clearly present.
Often, Quakers claim that even if we have different beliefs, we all have the same underlying experiences in common, but the more I listen to our various Spiritual experiences, I realize this is just not true.
Some Quakers find a special oneness with the natural world, others encounter the sacred in other people, some experience the presence and guidance of a personal God as described in the Bible, others describe visions and encounters with spiritual beings, and still, some find their deepest source of meaning in what I would call ethical principles or values. It is a mixed bag of beliefs and spiritual experiences – no uniform or formulaic occurrence.
Now, some have a problem with this diversity of experience. Some speak up and argue while others roll their eyes and stay silent. Serving three different denominations in my lifetime, I can tell you this is not unique to Quakers.
As a student of Spiritual Formation, I have come to understand that people’s spiritual experiences and beliefs depend on a wide range of factors – everything from their temperament, education, geographical location, family upbringing, and personal experience.
One thing that originally drew me to Quakerism was the diversity of religious understanding, opinion, experience, and the opportunity for people to ask questions and explore the factors that have created one’s faith.
Now, this is not how it has always been among Quakers. Friend Craig Barnett of Britain Yearly Meeting gives us some background that I think is important and helpful in understanding the change that has taken place. He says,
Until the late 1960s the Quaker community as a whole shared a collection of sacred stories. They knew and used the stories of the Bible, including the life and sayings of Jesus, the creation story, the history of Israel, and the writings of the prophets and apostles, to explain the meaning and purpose of their community and its practices.
The first generation of Quakers called their movement ‘Primitive Christianity revived’; identifying themselves with the story of the early Church. George Fox drew on the Gospel stories in which Jesus promised to return at the end of history to claim that ‘Christ has come to teach his people himself’, in the form of the ‘Inward Christ’, within the lives and bodies of the ‘Children of the Light’. This made sense of Quaker worship as the way that the gathered community encounters the presence of Christ and expects to receive inspired ministry and guidance.
The distinctively Quaker versions of the Christian stories explained their Meetings for Church Affairs as discerning God’s purposes for the community. Quaker testimony was shaped by the Sermon on the Mount, which prohibits oaths, violence, empty ritual and religious hierarchy. Early Friends understood their testimony as the way that God was revealing the Divine intentions for the world through the Quaker community.
Because Quakers had these stories in common, they shared a language for describing their experience. Quaker writings until about 50 years ago are filled with references to Biblical characters, parables, myths and symbols, which all carried shared meaning because of their resonance with familiar stories.
Yet listen carefully to what he says next…
Quakers used these stories and symbols in distinctive ways, which were often sharply at odds with official versions of Christianity. They were also given creative new interpretations, according to individual Friends’ differing perspectives and spiritual experiences. The use of these shared stories was not a sign that Quakers all had the same beliefs, but that they had a common vocabulary for expressing and interpreting their differences.
A lot has changed among Quakers since the late 1960s. We live in a much more plural and secular America. Quakers today, are much more diverse in the stories we use to make sense of the world.
It is clear as we sit in Yearly Meeting Sessions and listen to the different interpretations of the Bible that we no longer share a common vocabulary of Biblical stories.
Some Quakers have a high view of the Bible, while others find guidance from other sources, everything from Buddhist to humanist understandings, to many other traditions of thought.
One of the things I love about First Friends is that we are not afraid to use stories and ideas from many different sources to try to make sense of what we do, and to understand and describe our experiences.
Craig Barnett points out the difficulties this can create. He says,
Because we don’t share a common language that we can expect to be accessible to all, we rely on others trying to ‘translate’ whatever language we use into their own terms to understand what we are saying. But since we don’t know what concepts or stories others are using to ‘translate’ our words, it is difficult to know what, if anything, we have managed to communicate.
I believe this is why, every year I walk away from our Yearly Meeting Sessions so frustrated. We have a communication problem at the core of who we are.
And one of the most important distinctives we must make is that having the same stories does not automatically mean we have the same beliefs. This is evident just by looking at all the varieties of Christian denominations in our world – which as of 2012 we had over 30,000 just Christian Denominations.
What we have to realize is that the stories that many of us embraced and used to translate our life situations have continued to evolve. Today, every single religious denomination has many individuals sitting within their buildings believing a variety of things. This is mainly due to the availability and accessibility of religious resources, the internet, and so many more opportunities for religious and spiritual education.
George Fox may not have been in favor of credentialed ministers, but with all that we continue to learn about our stories and the stories of other religious groups, education is becoming more and more essential. Again, causing more communication breakdown.
Beth and I are extremely blessed that you respect our education and see it helping our community gain new perspectives, spiritual insights, and growth.
When I went through the Recording Process in Western Yearly Meeting, I had to read our Faith and Practice in detail. Since I believe as Quakers originally taught that our Faith and Practice is a guide for our life and a fluid document that should continue to be questioned, I found poetic wording, beautifully crafted statements and queries, and some things that I completely disagreed with, or that time, further insight, and ongoing revelation has proven needs to be changed.
What I realized during the Recording Process was that the other pastors preparing for recording did not have the same shared stories or beliefs that I had – I wasn’t even sure that the Yearly Meeting I was being recorded within held the same shared stories.
I have come to realize we live in a culturally and spiritually diverse world, and that includes people with a variety of backgrounds, religions, and cultural influences and life experiences.
That means we are all going to have different perspectives, interpretations, and experiences.
Personally, this may come as a shock to some of you, but I no longer rely solely on Christian stories or just the stories from the Bible to guide my life.
Don’t get me wrong – they are still very important to me, because they are part of my make-up, my heritage, and they are the stories that are the easiest for me to draw from. But even many of these stories, I have learned to reinterpret or see from different perspectives.
And then there are all of those narratives that I was never taught growing up, the people groups I never encountered, the cultures I never explored, and yes, stories I had never heard, that if I let them, could speak to my condition and enhance my spiritual journey.
So, as I have reflected this week, I have realized that if we are going to continue our Quaker legacy, we are going to have to stop avoiding sharing all of our stories, even if they are different, even if they are not solely what some label Christian or Biblical in nature.
We must acknowledge that we now live in a different world than our ancestors. We live in a culturally diverse society, and our community includes people from many different backgrounds, with all sorts of religious beliefs and stories – and if we are willing to listen to them they just may be beneficial for our evolving Quaker faith.
What I realized as I pondered all of this was that we desperately need to start sharing our stories with each other once again – no matter how different they are.
Not only could this help us create a new common vocabulary for a shared understanding, but it also could be a way to express and interpret our differences.
We can’t simply continue to reinterpret or tell stories from the past and expect everyone to relate – If we believe in ongoing revelation – we need ongoing story-telling of what God is up to in our lives, today!
It is clear sitting in the Western Yearly Meeting room in Plainfield or on Zoom that we don’t really know each other or what God is doing in our midst, anymore. We have become out of touch and need to listen carefully to each other to renew our hope and learn to communicate once again.
This is what I love about our Seeking Friends Class here at First Friends. I can only speak for the last four years that I have facilitated these classes, but in those four years I have listened as we have all taken turns sharing our stories, our interpretations, our spiritual journeys within Christianity, Quakerism, and outside of it as well. My faith journey has been enriched and my understanding of the Quaker Way has grown and I know others have, as well.
Yes, we all have different backgrounds and religious experiences that have shaped us and somehow they have drawn us to be among Friends. I think it is far time we started to understand why.
This isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen overnight. Because what it means is we will be asked to be vulnerable and open our lives and faith journeys and struggles to each other.
Sadly, too often, we avoid this type of sharing within our Yearly Meeting because we fear being judged, rejected, or exposed by the stories we tell. This makes it unsafe to tell our stories because they may be brushed aside or not valued, or simply rejected.
I sense, we think it to be easier to gather each year and simply avoid the stories that need to be told and never get to know each other. But that is causing our demise.
As Craig Barnett warns,
The risk with continuing in this way is that we will steadily lose any shared tradition of religious practice. Without shared stories that describe the significance of core Quaker practices such as worship, discernment and testimony, the Quaker way cannot survive. It is a meaningless, indifferent universe, in which we can arbitrarily choose our own values but never find any inherent purpose or value. There is no truth to be discovered, only ‘personal truths’ to be asserted and projected onto the blank screen of the world. No purpose to our life beyond our own preferences, no guidance to be found, and nothing to heal or transform the world through us.
Folks, I am tired of coming home from Yearly Meeting sessions or Quaker Events wondering when we will again change the world as our Early Quaker Ancestors did.
I have decided that it is not worth being silent, but that it IS worth being judged, rejected, and exposed. Because if our stories truly speak to that of God within us and within our community, then no one can really discount that. And whenever I am willing to be bold and share my experience, my story, my faith journey, someone benefits, Quakerism benefits, because communication is happening once again.
My hope this year is that we will take time sharing our stories, our experiences, our journeys of faith, so that at First Friends and maybe within our Yearly Meeting as well, we will begin again to have a common vocabulary that will inspire, heal and transform a new generation of Friends!
Now, as we enter waiting worship, I ask you to take a moment to ponder the following queries..
1. What are the stories that have shaped my understanding of my life as a Quaker?
2. How might communicating my story help create better communication with those at First Friends and within our Yearly Meeting?