Love Is the Guarantee
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
April 30, 2023
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. Today’s scriptures are from I John 3:16-18 from the Voice version.
16 We know what true love looks like because of Jesus. He gave His life for us, and He calls us to give our lives for our brothers and sisters.
17 If a person owns the kinds of things we need to make it in the world but refuses to share with those in need, is it even possible that God’s love lives in him? 18 My little children, don’t just talk about love as an idea or a theory. Make it your true way of life, and live in the pattern of gracious love.
Last week we celebrated Earth Sunday and close to the end of our time of waiting worship, one of our new attenders, Jen, approached the microphone and shared that if we want to make a difference in our world, it must start with loving and seeing our neighbors.
As Quakers who believe everyone is a minister and that anyone can speak out what God is sharing with them during worship, I was deeply ministered to by these words. Throughout the week as I prepared my message, I could not stop thinking about how foundational loving and seeing our neighbors is to our livelihood and to our growth as a species.
Every Monday, I begin my day with doing a review of the weekend and specifically Sunday’s worship. Most of the time, I go online and listen to our “Light Reflections from First Friends” and allow what God has inspired me to say to speak once again to my condition. But this week, it was Jen’s words that seemed to continue to speak between the words of my message, the songs, and prayers.
If you read my As Way Opens from this week (which I usually write on Monday as well), I even found Jen’s words focusing my thoughts. One of the beauties of a Quaker Meeting is that we do not wrap things up nicely and put a bow on them on Sunday morning. Actually, we leave with queries to ponder so we may continue to process and wrestle with what we have heard throughout the week.
So, on Monday, as I sat down to begin outlining my message. I wrote at the top of my sermon document for this Sunday – To Love and See Each Other Is Foundational. Usually, after writing down some thoughts from the previous week, I begin to do my research.
Before even opening a book or a website, an email appeared in my inbox. I subscribe to several different newsletters that give insights and wisdom from a variety of sources. This email happened to be the latest newsletter from Progressing Spirit: Explorations in Theology, Spirituality, and the News. Usually, I would not allow my emails to distract me during sermon prep, but I was nudged by the Spirit to open it.
The Progressing Spirit newsletter is set up in Question-and-Answer format. A lay person usually poses a question and then a theologian or philosopher tries their best to answer the question. I quickly went to the opening question posed by a man named Peter. I was a bit shocked by what I read. He asked:
The perfection of nature amazes me, while the imperfection of human beings continues to disappoint me. What will it take for humans to learn the lessons of Jesus - that love is the only way to guarantee the survival of the world and its inhabitants?
That was the query I had been trying to find words for all morning. Obviously, I had to read on. This week the answer was from Rev. Matt Syrdal, a pastor in the Denver area, a visionary, founder of Church of Lost Walls, and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Recently, Matt has begun a new venture called Mythic Christ, a mystery school and podcast for awakening mythic imagination and ritual embodiment.
Matt captured my sentiments exactly, by beginning with “Great question Peter!”
But as he continued answering his question, I sensed a moment of divine connectedness. That underlining all our conversations was a wisdom that we were missing. Something I believe Jen was trying to emphasize in Waiting Worship last week. Matt begins by exploring the word, love. He says,
Love is a great word. Love as a verb is active, dynamic, inclusive, relational, and vulnerable. I would love to move us away from understanding love as an abstract noun or simply a virtue or emotion toward an ecology of relatedness, like how the systems of the human body work together for life and growth and greater consciousness.
Let’s just pause there. That is a beautiful concept that “Love is an ecology of relatedness” and what a beautiful metaphor considering it to be like the human body working together. Another great theologian and philosopher, the Apostle Paul, utilized the human body as the metaphor of love. But maybe over time we have missed its implications.
Matt goes on to specifically show these missed implications by looking at Jesus’ love saying,
Jesus’ love was not soft, and he was not a pushover. He demanded hard things of his disciples. He spoke fiery words to the elites, the upper castes of the Roman world. His love towards others was not sentimental or rescuing, but focused and deliberate.
American Christianity has often over sentimentalized Jesus and his love. From certain praise music, to prayers, to even the way we address Jesus in our daily lives. If only we took those words we taught our children to sing a little more seriously and actually explored what it meant when we sang “Jesus love me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” What does it really tell us? Matt goes on to explain.
Some languages have dozens of words for love. Jesus spoke of four primary types of love, with the whole heart, soul, mind, and strength... that is with the centered presence of the heart connected to deep emotion and feeling, with the soul’s imaginative and visionary faculties, with the heart-centered intellect, and one’s erotic vitality put into decisive action.
Jesus’ love was much more than what most people talk about in religious circles, today. Actually, most churches are just skimming the surface and never getting to the depths of the love Jesus was getting at. Thus, Jesus brought it closer to home by turning the greatest commandment on us. Matt says,
Jesus modeled this four-fold way of loving God from his own wholeness of being. The second command is like the first, “loving one’s neighbor as oneself.” We have all heard that in this command is also the injunction to love oneself. It is pretty hard to really love someone else if we don’t love ourselves.
So, yes we are to love and see our neighbors, but before we can even do that we have one more important step to take – which I believe may be the hardest in our world today -and that is to love ourselves. Let’s be honest, it is hard to see or give love to someone else, if we first don’t love ourselves.
Maybe you and I grew up with not enough acceptance and too much shame, or we clung to our shortcomings, past failures, and poor decisions. Maybe we came to minimize the good things about ourselves and our positive qualities because someone put us down or told us we weren’t good enough. Maybe it was abuse and we cannot see our true beauty and joy because someone stole it and never gave it back.
Or maybe it is simply about lack of respect for who we are because of our sexuality, our gender, our neuro-diversity, our age, our health, our financial status, our education, and the list could go on. Maybe depression, anxiety, addiction, illness, or even peer pressure (both youth and adults) is causing us to not love ourselves.
Or maybe it is bullies - people with greater power and more resources who can keep you from growing, learning, and rising to the place where you can survive and succeed – all while they gain more power, resources, and wealth.
Do you know that most of the people in this room are hurting in some way?
Most of us are struggling to love ourselves in some way. Scientists even tell us it is because our brain has a negativity bias. It is part of our evolution, because of how we have been treated by those around us. This is why loving and seeing each other (like Jen said last week) truly is the foundation.
Matt askes a personal query that really had me pondering. He askes: Can I love the world as myself? What would happen if I did?
Most of us come here pulling the wool over each other’s eyes or maybe even putting on airs each Sunday. At one point in our history, First Friends was all about personal status and socio-economic status. I am glad I wasn’t here then.
Quakers are not about status. Throughout history, we refused titles, did not take our hats off for people, spoke plain and wore plain clothing, because we believed everyone was Equal – no one better or worse – just Equal.
Matt speaks to this by saying,
Poet David Whyte gives my favorite definition of sin when he says, humans are “the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering.” By this he means the dark-side of self-reflexive consciousness, that is, of choice, is that we have the freedom to choose death rather than life. We have the freedom to live unconsciously, or selfishly. It is not just individuals either. It is systems and structures we have created that are hardwired to reward selfish greed and exploitation of Earth itself.
The early Quakers worked hard and suffered greatly to build structures and fight for a livelihood that was conscious, that valued community, integrity, simplicity…are you getting it?
The Quakers intentionally worked to testify and create testimonies so that we could love ourselves and one another better. Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Sustainability/Stewardship were ALL about loving well. And I believe we need to return to testifying to these things – the world and earth is crying out for them.
Matt closes his thoughts with one last important item. He says,
I don’t think it is not that we have not learned the lessons of Jesus, it’s that we value our own personal comfort and gain over the survival of the world, even beauty and life itself. We are choosing to refuse our flowering. But one thing must be clear, choice is not fate, until it becomes too late to choose.
I think that is the most important query we can ask ourselves, today.
Do I value my own personal comfort and gain over the survival of the world, even beauty and life itself? Am I choosing to refuse my flowering?
Again, thank you Jen for listening to the nudging of the Spirit last week and thank you Matt for answering a query honestly so we can love better.
I hope we will ponder these thoughts and queries during waiting worship this morning and consider how love is the only guarantee of the survival of the earth and its inhabitants.