We NEED Each Other!
Pastor Bob Henry
Indianapolis First Friends Meeting
August 27, 2023
Good morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. Our scripture reading for this morning is from Romans 12:4-5 from the New Revised Standard Version.
For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.
Last week, I spoke about darkness and the challenges and opportunities it presents. As I began to think about all that was shared out of the silence last week and the conversations, I had with several of you. I realized how important relationships are to processing our lives, our darkness, and to ultimately finding the Light within us.
In Turning to One Another by Margaret Wheatley, she says,
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.
The reality is that we need each other more than ever. It sounds simple, but our world is getting more and more isolated, we make lots of assumptions about people, and we too often take for granted those that are closest to us.
As well, many of us come to this Meetinghouse caring huge burdens, baggage, and pain, and as soon as we get out of our car in the parking lot we put on a façade and play a character for the next hour or so,
I don’t think that’s what Jesus intended, since the church he set-up was to be about a group of people who care for one another and not just coming to a building. Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”
This is why early Quakers called one another brothers and sisters instead of calling them by their titles or status. Today, to be more gender inclusive, I would rather simply use the term, siblings. We are siblings in one big spiritual family.
Thus, the church is not just about any people, but about true family – ideally, people who know each other, live life with one another, struggle together, challenge each other, listen to, and help each other, who deeply love each other, and who want the best for each other.
The United Kingdom’s Faith and Practice describes this so well. It says,
All of us in the meeting have needs. Sometimes the need will be for patient understanding, sometimes for practical help, sometimes for challenge and encouragement; but we cannot be aware of each other’s needs unless we know each other.
Although we may be busy, we must take time to hear about the absent daughter, the examination result, the worries over a lease renewal, the revelation of an uplifting holiday, the joy of a new love. Every conversation with another Friend, every business meeting, every discussion group, and every meeting for worship can increase our loving and caring and our knowledge of each other.
Folks, I believe that is what a spiritual family is supposed to do for each other.
In his book, Living the Quaker Way, my friend Phil Gulley wrote about the importance of the community (or I would say spiritual family) for those we consider saints in our world. He says,
Behind every saint is a community. Think for a moment of our spiritual heroes – Mother Teresa, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, Mohandes Gandhi and others. What do they have in common? Each of them was immersed in a spiritual community that honed their faith, clarified their thought, tested their resolve, and provided support.
Mother Teresa received much public acclaim, but behind her stood the Missionaries of Charity. Thomas Merton wrote beautifully of the spiritual life, but he did so alongside the Trappists at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Martin Luther King Jr. enjoyed the support of his peers in the civil rights movement, the Dali Lama is surrounded spiritually and physically by his fellow Buddhists, and Gandhi had the faithful support of Sabarmati Ashram. I think of my own life and spiritual communities that have enriched my faith and expanded my mind. I can’t begin to imagine how different my life might have been without the people I’ve loved, who have loved me in return.
And it is not just being loved by our spiritual family - It is also about being challenged or as Proverbs 27:17 states: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
It is important to have the influence of people who challenge you to think and do not let you fall into a “cookie-cutter Christian culture” where everyone looks the same, talks the same, or has the same vibe.
This kind of spiritual family can allow for only shallow discussions, without the encouragement of analytical, diverse, and spirited discussion of faith.
True sharpening of iron requires friction, sparks, and pressure. This does not sound like someone who stays strictly inside a comfort zone or within the confines of a group who are just like them.
I think we have to admit that life can be messy. Our relationships can become estranged or even ended due to abuse or a lack of boundaries, and a variety of other reasons.
Often, we do not know where to turn for help. This is one of the arenas a mature spiritual family can support you.
A spiritual family can be there through the birth of your child, an illness, divorce, or even when you purpose to give up alcohol or substance abuse.
When you need counsel in a difficult life decision, where do you turn? Probably to someone who is wise, a Friend with spiritual insight. Maybe a clearness committee.
Having a healthy spiritual family surrounding you can be a boon to the turmoil life brings our way. This is reciprocal, a circular relationship, one with a hand up and a hand down.
As it states in the book of Romans each member belongs to ALL the others.
Phil Gulley described this Spiritual Family or Community profoundly when he wrote,
It labors not for its own glory, but for the well-being of all people everywhere. It rejoices when the marginalized are included, when the slave is freed, when the despised are embraced. It sees in its fellow beings not sin and separation from God but potential, promise, and connection. Wherever people love, it is there. Wherever people include, it is present. Whenever people join together in a spirit of compassion and inclusion, this church feels at home, for those values have been priorities from its earliest days…This church seeks to learn, understand, and include. It is of the world, loves the world, and welcomes all people as its brothers and sisters [siblings]. Where boarders separate, this community straddles the partition, refusing to let arbitrary lines rule their conscience and conduct. They are in every sense of the word members of one another.
In Near Occasions of Grace, Richard Rohr talks about what he labels a “Vision of Peoplehood” and it is both a vision and a kind of warning to the importance of relationship. Rohr says,
The Body of Christ, the spiritual family, is God’s strategy. It is both medium and message. It is both beginning and end:
“May they all be one . . . so that the world may believe it was you who sent me . . . that they may be one as we are one, with me in them and you in me” (John 17:21–23).
There is no other form for the Christian life except a common one. This may even be a matter of culture, if culture refers to something which is shared and passed on. In this sense, I am wondering if there is any other kind of Christianity except “cultural Christianity,” for better and for worse.
And here is where I think he really nails it.
Until and unless Christ is someone happening between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Jesus Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness, through bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on at all.
We are now paying the price for centuries in which the Church was narrowed from a full vision of peoplehood to an almost total preoccupation with private persons and their devotional needs. But history has shown that individuals who are confirmed in their individualism by the very character of our evangelism will never create church, except after the model of a service station: they will use it as a commodity like everything else. This is far cry from our “original participation”…in the Body of Christ from the moment of our conception.
Certainly, we must deal with individuals. But the very nature of our lifestyle and our church teaching must say from the beginning what the goal is—the communion of saints, a shared life together as family…the kingdom—here!
The prophet Haggai criticizes the Jews after the exile for dwelling comfortably in their “paneled houses” while the common walls of the temple lie in ruins (see Haggai 1:4, 9). His prophetic call is now and forever. We still think that we can work with the world’s agenda, where career and individual fulfillment are the basic building blocks of society. And we believe that we can build church from those well-educated and well-saved blocks. But God needs “living stones making a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5).
For Jesus, such teachings as forgiveness, healing, and justice are not just a spiritual test or obstacle course. They are quite simply the necessary requirements for a basic shared life. Peacemaking and reconciliation are not some kind of box seat tickets to heaven. They are the price of peoplehood. They express the truth in the heart of God, the truth that has been shared with us in the Holy Spirit, the union in Jesus the Christ who is reconciling all people to God.
So, if you just come to First Friends for my sermons, or Eric, Wolff, the Choir’s music, or our children’s ministry or our small groups, or whatever it is, alone…you may need to ask yourself if you are preoccupied with your individual needs? That is not embracing the relationships, the personhood, the full benefits of this spiritual family – and it doesn’t allow us to fully be members to one another.
If the church was truly to be about the people – then our relationships, as Margaret Wheatley stated, “are all there is.” And if it was God’s strategy to create a spiritual family and be living stones making a spiritual house, then we can’t be just focused on our personal needs or likes, but instead like Phil Gulley said, we must labor not for our own glory, but for the well-being of all people everywhere.
Folks, that is why we need each other more than ever!
I want to close these thoughts this morning with one of my favorite poems by Sue and my good friend, Sarah Hoggatt. It is titled,
The Journey Worth Taking
From “Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices”
We come from far-off lands,
cultures apart, struggling to
understand a foreign tongue,
another viewpoint, another way to live,
to see, to hear God in different words.
We listen, opening to new sights, perspectives,
ways to love as we discover
we are unique parts of a greater circle,
distinctive expressions of the Divine Life.
Yet our voices together lift up the mountains.
Our chorus pulses the river down the outward
flow into a world needing to hear the rushing tide.
We are on a journey and it may not even
matter so much where we end up,
but that we rise up to take the voyage.
We speak the truth of our lives,
hear each other and are changed.
We can love without complete understanding,
Walking the light together while miles apart.
If in the tension we can find
the one light we are birthed from,
the thread through our stories,
we may discover we are brothers, sisters all
of one skin, one laughter, music, lilting, free,
if we can just find the courage to come together
And take the journey.
As we enter waiting worship, take a moment to consider the following queries:
1. Where have I isolated myself from my Spiritual Family?
2. How might I engage new relationships at First Friends?
3. What might it mean for First Friends to be “living stones making a spiritual house”?