Make Every Effort – Community
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
March 10, 2024
Good morning Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. This morning we continue to look at Quaker Virtues, specifically the virtue of community. The scriptures I have chosen are from Hebrews 10:24-25 from the New Revised Standard Version.
And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
I always find it ironic that when I get on a roll with a sermon series, I begin to see people making connections and starting to anticipate things that I may be going to say in future messages. I believe this to be a beautiful aspect of true community.
As Quakers, we encourage those who feel nudged by the Spirit to speak out of the silence in waiting worship. Often what I believe happens is the Spirit begins to weave the work I have done through the week on a message with the thoughts of those in the pews or watching from home. This then allows Friends to expand, clarify, even at times to correct the things that I have been considering or experiencing throughout the week as I live within the community of First Friends. This is something that many churches would frown upon and may even discourage within their communities.
Last Sunday, several of you spoke out of the silence and added great wisdom to the message and to our lives in general. Inwardly, I chuckled as so many spoke of the importance of community in the process of understanding our authenticity knowing that this week, I would be looking at this very subject.
From little children in a classroom to our partners or spouses, to groups within our Meeting, many identified the importance of the community in our process. Kent Farr even went as far as having us consider adding another query last week regarding the essential importance of community in dealing with our authenticity.
So, this Sunday, as I had planned, I want to look at the Quaker virtue or S.P.I.C.E. of community.
When I worked in Campus Ministries in a college setting back in the early 2000’s, everyone seemed to be talking about community. Every Christian book seemed to be about building community, ever worship song was about finding community, and every conference I attended was on the importance of community. It was almost like they were anticipating something…hmmm…
Even though for most college students back then, small groups were their parents “Oldsmobile” of ministry programming, and they were trying hard to find new ways to build community while quickly getting lost in the growing world of technology. All while, finding themselves alone and lacking the very community that everyone was talking about. Many visited my office talking about loneliness and isolation.
Now after a pandemic, a much more polarized world, and almost 20+ more years of technology’s influence – it isn’t just college students struggling with community – but all of us.
Loneliness and isolation are at epidemic levels in our country and are now considered as factors in rising deaths rates.
Back then, I began wrestling with the idea of community but had not fully worked it out (and please understand I still have a long way to go).
As many of my students, I thought building community was something that would come easy or maybe even naturally. At least that is how sermons and teaching back then made it seem.
I even had an idealistic idea that community would somehow magically form around me and I would not have to do much work to create it or utilize it.
I think even deep down, I believed community was optional and at any time, if it got difficult, I could simply opt out of it. And on several occasions, I did.
The reality is that what I have learned since that day is that many people think this way about community. Maybe you have had similar thoughts.
Now, I am sure if we, at First Friends, took a moment right now and each shared our ideas or definitions of community – we would have a wide range of understandings. There would be some similarities, some common interests and goals, but probably many differences.
For the last 20+ years, my exploration of the idea of community has evolved. I admit that I’ve had a few misconceptions about what constitutes community - actually, I had more than I knew.
And as I began to study community in more death, I realized there were even more misconceptions. I had been taught to believe that community (especially in a faith setting) came best through people who agreed with me, who had similar interests as me, even thought, believed, and voted like me.
It also had me believing that community had my best interests in mind. The people in my community would always be looking out for me, I would always feel supported, and I would be comfortably content. But that too was not always the case.
Clearly in this way of thinking, community was all about me and my needs – and naively I thought everyone around me probably had the same interests and needs.
Folks, just that thought alone is really disturbing, especially since community is not so much about me as much as we.
Overtime, I began to realize that not only did I have wrong perceptions of community, but even some of the churches I was part of had the wrong ideas of what constituted true community.
One day in a conversation with the psychological director of my doctoral program, I began to share some of the challenges I was bumping up against with the struggle my students were bringing to me and my distorted views of community.
He in turn told me a story about his community. He started by sharing the beauty in the diversity of the people that made up his community. He told me of the challenges, the triumphs, even the losses of living in community. But something I will never forget is when he said, one of the most essential parts of community is learning to spend time with people who are not exactly like you.
He went on to say the best thing that could happen to communities would be more diversity of thought, culture, race, age, and sexuality. He said, that is when growth really happens, and true community begins to form.
Interesting…most of the community I was trying to build was all about people who looked like and sounded like me.
I began to wonder what this means for the church universal that is made up largely of an aging boomer population – who are moving into retirement communities with absolutely no diversity? Whole cities in places like Florida and Arizona are made up of people in their late 60’s and 70’s who are mostly white, vote for the same candidate, and live a rather homogenous life away from anyone different than them. And we should be watching carefully those studying these communities because the problems arising in them are starting to creep into the church. I sense one of the reasons the church is seeing less young people is because of this very phenomenon. I could be wrong…but the similarities are despairing.
As I started to really ponder my psychological director’s words, I realized very few people are exactly like me in this world. When we are being authentically ourselves, we are also uniquely different.
If we really thought about it, if everyone was like us, it would drive us nuts. Yet, too many churches and people of faith seem to want everyone to think, believe, act, vote, and even look the same. The artist in was beginning to havw an uprising.
Just think about that for a moment. Is that the beautiful diversity that makes up the Kingdom of God? Even the National Institute of Health starts its definition of community with this wording,
“…a group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties…”
Let’s delve into this a little more. I have a feeling that it is likely that God doesn’t encourage fellowship with one another for the sole purpose of being with people who only think, believe, act, vote, or look like us.
Just maybe, God has something for us to learn or be challenged by through community.
For instance, in Romans 12:4-5 it states,
4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
This shows how even though we are all part of the same body, we all have different roles or functions. We have each been given gifts that we are to use for unique purposes – this is part of being our authentic selves. Instead of thinking that everyone should do things the way we would, we are to appreciate the diversity that God has placed within the body.
Once I realized this beautiful aspect of community, I thought I was getting somewhere, but then I found Ephesians 4:2-3. Paul is talking to the Ephesians, again, about being united as a body (a theme that is essential in understanding community). He urges them to recognize each other’s individual callings. He also tells them to
“be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace."
I don’t know about you, but I am really good at knowing when others need to make an effort to be humble or patient, as my wife pointed out in waiting worship last week. I can point out when someone should be better at bearing with me in love.
But what hit me when reading this passage was the command to “make every effort."
I may be completely justified in the fact that I do just enough, but have I done all I can to be united with my neighbors, family, and friends – especially those different than me? This is tough.
Perhaps the Bible encourages us to love one another and to be united because it helps us take the focus off ourselves and our own feeling and allows us to see others more completely – more authentically – without the masks, the biases, the expectations we have.
Living in community with others means.
We cannot control how other people respond to us or what they believe.
We cannot make them be what we think they should be.
But we can do what has been asked of us.
And uncomfortably for us, Quakers who work hard to embrace integrity, have been asked to do a lot. We have been asked to make every effort to have a good attitude, no matter what the other person is doing, believing, voting…
We are to make every effort to love at all times. This love for others – whether or not they love us back – is part of our responsibility in encouraging fruitful community and relationships.
Can I love someone who isn’t like me? Or maybe I should ask first, can someone love my authentic self? Maybe I am just as bad.
Part of what community teaches us is to slowly and sometimes painfully begin to think about others, to forgive others, and to bear with one another through the good and bad. We don’t always have to agree, but that doesn’t mean we have to rid them from our lives, so it is easier for us to live. But that is what many of us do, isn’t it?
This means taking the focus off ourselves is about being part of community. It is another aspect of positioning ourselves in a humble and patient manner so we are able to be taught, transformed, and loved.
Yet, too often we cocoon ourselves within community.
We use our desire for fellowship with other people as an excuse to ignore or refuse people we don’t want in our community. This no longer is a community but rather a clique or a cult. Let’s be honest, we have a growing number of cults in our country that sound and speak very religious, but are far from it.
Isn’t this the opposite of what we are supposed to be doing as a faith community?
Quaker Rex Ambler in his book, “The Quaker Way” has a chapter focused on Meeting Others. By meeting together and opening up to one another in community, he says “we find strength and insight, and a basis for action” – but he also says “it means we take a responsibility for one another.”
As he closes out this chapter Rex specifically talks about worshipping together in community. He says,
Our practice of coming together once a week to sit in silence [or Meeting for Worship] makes sense only if we have learned to do that during the week and have got to know the people we sit with in ordinary, everyday interactions.
Being in community is a holistic experience that incorporates both a responsibility for one another and a desire to get to know one another in a more holistic way.
Folks, that means being part of the First Friends community will be about taking risks. And risks can be scary and often difficult or complicated.
Quaker Marty Walton in “The Meeting Experience: Practicing Quakerism in Community,” says,
“We cannot stay in safety, hidden behind walls of private thoughts, with aloof smiles on our faces…When we move beyond our protective barriers, lift up our shroud of privacy a bit, and begin to ask each other real questions and engage each other in honest searching, we inevitably discover how very different each of us is. We are confronted with experiences both delightful and confounding.”
That, I believe is exactly what Kent Farr was challenging us with last week in waiting worship.
It is also how farmer, essayist, and environmental activist, Wendell Berry summed up community. Let me end with this, as it may be one of the best definitions of community I have read:
A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity, no matter how admirable the layout of the shopping center and the streets, no matter if we demolish the horizontal slums and replace them with vertical ones. A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
As we ponder those words, let us now enter waiting worship. Take a moment to consider the following queries:
1. What is my idea of community and what are my misconceptions?
2. Who do I find the easiest to exclude from my community? Why?
3. How at First Friends am I moving beyond my protective barriers and opening myself up to real questions and honest answers with people different than me?