Moving from Heaven to Earth (Part 1)
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
February 20, 2022
Good morning and welcome to Light Reflections. Today, we begin a new sermon series. Our scripture reading for this first installment is from Matthew 6:9-13. A very familiar set of words from Jesus.
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,[a]
but deliver us from the evil one.[b]’
A few months ago, when we came back together in-person for worship, we simplified our virtual presence and created this format called “Light Reflections from First Friends.” As part of that change, we included a voice-over which Beth Henricks reads at the beginning of these videos that describe our meeting. In that voiceover she says,
“First Friends is a thriving, progressive Quaker Meeting in the city of Indianapolis, Indiana.”
When I wrote this descriptor, I had chosen these words very carefully, because I believe First Friends has historically been a thriving and progressive meeting from its earliest days. I am sure some people would like to debate this and even say we should not use these words.
A church of about 300 people would not be “thriving” by many people’s standards, today, especially in the Midwest and even here in Indianapolis - which is known for its mega-church mindset and many mega-church ministries.
And obviously in the political arena in which we find ourselves, especially in Indiana, the use of the word, progressive, must be stripped of its politicized and often negative connotation and returned to its proper place in our Quaker vocabulary to be fully understood.
So, let’s start this 7-week series, “To Be Thriving and Progressive Quakers in 2022” with some basic definitions.
What do I mean when I say we are “thriving and progressive”? Well, the dictionary says that to thrive means,
“to grow or develop well or vigorously”
And to be progressive means,
“happening or developing gradually or in stages – step by step.”
As Beth shared last week in our “Adult Affirmation Program” Quakers have been known for our “splits” or as we say in the church, “schisms.” Now, that does not seem like thriving.
As well, Quakers are not that big of a religious society throughout the world and we have greatly declined in numbers over the years.
But again, I want to clarify, I am not saying Quakers or the Religious Society of Friends, or even Western Yearly Meeting are thriving and progressive.
I am saying we, here at First Friends are growing and developing well and I believe vigorously. The ministry opportunities, the worship experiences, the small groups, the children and youth programming all are thriving at our meeting. If you don’t think so, you must not know what is going on at First Friends and its impact throughout Quakerdom.
As well, we are what I have called a “slow church” or “slow meeting” – we are developing gradually and intentionally, or we could say in stages – step by step. This is where I would say we are more similar to the greater Quaker world. Quakers or Friends have always been progressive in this form.
We have always been willing to expectantly wait, seek the Spirit’s guidance, and together affirm our fellow sisters and brothers. Because we have been “progressive” we have responded often quite differently, even at times radically, to our world, to the neighboring theologies, to even our understanding of Scripture.
So, in 2022, I think if we at First Friends want to continue this beautiful tradition, we are going to need to lean into the fact that we are a thriving and progressive Quaker meeting in the city of Indianapolis.
Now that being said, I want to begin this series with looking at a shift that, I believe, Quakers have been trying to make from early on. It has been sidetracked, confused, even at times lost among Quakers. For us to be a thriving and progressive meeting in 2022, I believe it will take a shift from being heaven focused to becoming earthly focused.
During our visit to the mosque a week ago, one of the young Muslim girls made a generalization that most religions believe in a heaven and hell. I know many people in our meeting and in many Quaker circles who do not believe in a physical heaven or hell – and for a variety of reasons – but this is not what I want to focus on this morning.
Instead, I want to look at our focus and what it means to move from a heavenly trajectory to an earthlier one. That will take us learning how early Quakers viewed scripture and how it moves us away from a transactional to a more transformative way of living and being.
As I said in the promotion of this series, I will also be providing a “reading list” which you will be able to find in our weekly newsletter, Friend to Friend and on our Facebook pages (this list will most likely be updated as we move through this series).
T. Vail Palmer Jr. in his book “Face to Face: Early Quaker Encounters with the Bible” helped define how early Quakers utilized the Bible.
For Palmer, he had to go on a journey of discovery and step out of his many engrained views of early Quakers to finally see what other educators and historians had come to understand.
And what Palmer found was that it came down to “empathy” – yes, I said empathy.
Since George Fox and Margaret Fell were both pioneers of narrative theology, and they both read the Bible in personal, rather than legalistic terms, thus they both engaged the scriptures by empathetically identifying with the characters of scripture. This may be a new concept for some, but let me explain.
Palmer says,
“…most Christian theologians, ministers, and moralists, have looked to the Bible as a handbook, a collection of resources and guidelines for salvation and Christian living…or they regarded the Bible as a legal constitution, not subject to amendment as the American Constitution is. George Fox…and Margaret Fell turned that approach upside down.”
Unlike theologian John Calvin who was a lawyer and used that discipline to approach his understanding of scripture, George Fox and Margaret Fell instead took an empathetic view.
One great example of the difference this approach makes is with the role of women in the church.
Calvin saw women in a scriptural legal system, and he deducted that women have no authority in the church – and especially not to be preachers or pastors.
George and Margaret taking an empathetic view retold the stories of women in the Bible and empathized with their condition – thus they came to see women as having the full right to teach, preach, and exercise authority in the church.
Even Scottish Quaker and Apologist, Robert Barclay even understood this empathic view, when he wrote the following:
“God has seen meet that herein we should, as in a looking-glass, see the conditions and experiences of the saints of old: that finding our experience answer to theirs, we might thereby be the more confirmed and comforted, and our hope of attaining the same end strengthened; that observing the providences attending them, seeing the snares they were liable to, and beholding their deliverances, we may thereby be made wise unto salvation.”
Sadly, for a long time in history, Friends did not embrace this empathetic view. But Michael Birckle at Earlham School of Religion reemphasized and pointed out the resurgence of this empathetic approach in the ministry of John Woolman.
Birckle stresses how Woolman had a “near sympathy” with the biblical prophets which opened a way for his “near sympathy” with Native Americans and black slaves. Woolman took an empathetic view of the biblical prophets and it led him to respond in a similar way to the oppressed of his day.
Painter shows that it would be Thomas Kelly who would reintroduce us to this empathetic reading of scripture in our modern day. Kelly wrote in Reality of the Spiritual World of
“…the Fellowship and Communion of the Saints, the Blessed Community. We find a group answer in the Scriptures. For now, we know, from within, some of the Gospel writers, and the prophets, and the singers of songs, or Psalms. For now, they seem to be singing our song, or we can sing their song, or the same song of the Eternal Love is sung through us all, and out into the world.
What this means for us today, is exactly what Michael Birckle comes to proclaim, that
“The story in the Bible is our own story, it is relived in our own lives” “The sense of connectedness that we may come to feel with biblical stories and figures through meditative reading can grow to be applied to wider life. As we come to see that the biblical story is our personal story, we may also come to see that others’ stories can in some sense become our own story.”
So, what does this approach mean for us today?
First, I believe it takes our focus off where we are going when we die and trying to understand and relegate mysteries beyond our comprehension. And it grounds us again in the present moment here on earth.
Taking an empathetic view of the bible, like our earliest Friends, has us entering into an exercise in character formation with the lives of these biblical persons.
As we identify with Mary, with the apostles like John and Paul, with the great Old Testament prophets – even with Jesus himself – we share their compassion (as I talked about last week) for the poor, for persons not protected by the structures of their society, for foreigners, we empathize with these people and cross boundaries into the fellowship of outsiders – or as it says in the book of Hebrews, the “strangers and foreigners of the earth.”
Second, when making our focus all about heaven, it draws us to want to make “cookie-cutter” followers that all look and believe like us. It also leads us to draw lines with who is in and who is out and to attempt to control that division.
Yet when we empathize with the characters of scripture, we see many different approaches and outcomes and that more people than we might expect are accepted – much like our Quaker founders.
Painter concludes,
“Is it not true empathy to recognize that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus? (Galatians 3:28). The great mission of the church, the people of God, is to be an ever-widening covenant community in which all hostile groups come together – Jew and Gentile, black and white, gay and straight, American and Middle Eastern – because
Christ Jesus is…our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us,…that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups in one body through the cross…you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens of the saints and also members of the household of God. (Ephesians 2:13-16, 19)
To me, this empathetic view makes sense to how the early Quakers could thrive and progress. How they could be radical and uniting in such a divided and turbulent time. How they could embrace those that others wanted to oppress, ignore, or separate from. And how they could find hope and peace in that struggle.
They were able to embrace our scripture for this morning where Jesus says to pray that God’s kingdom comes, and God’s will be done, [and here it is] on earth as it is in heaven.”
May we too empathize with the characters of the Bible and respond to our condition in the present moment. May we turn our focus off of the future or the eternal and make a difference in the now. This will help us become more thriving and progressive Friends, today.
And like Lucretia Mott suggested, if we take this empathetic approach, we may find our own testimonies and lives becoming the continuing volumes of the scriptures in our present day.
Next week we will talk about an important aspect of helping play out this empathetic understanding by allowing ourselves to ask questions (or as we say, queries).
Until then, let us enter waiting worship and ponder these queries:
· How might I need to move from a heavenly focus to an earthlier one?
· What characters in the bible do I need to see through a more empathetic view? And how might that change my response to my world?
· In what ways do I see First Friends as a thriving and progressive meeting in Indianapolis?