Vision Renewal: Deeper Relationships
Vision Renewal: Deper Relationships by Rev. L. John Gable
May 14, 2023
Introduction:
In recent weeks we have been revisiting our Vision Renewal statement adopted in 2016 on the 50th anniversary of the Metropolitan Community Program Report written in 1966 which influenced our decision to remain in place here at the corner of 34th and Central. We are in the section of the statement which addresses our “vision” as a church. Last week we discussed our commitment to “greater faith” and next week “stronger community.” Today we will focus on our desire for “deeper relationships”, an appropriate theme, particularly on this Mother’s Day.
Reading from the Vision Renewal statement: “Tab will be a catalyst for deeper, loving relationships that embrace differences for the sake of fellowship and service. Tab will be a place that helps to create, nurture and deepen the relationships with God, our families, church family and neighbors.”
To that end, let us pray.
Jesus’ teaching on the vine and the branches is as applicable today as it was when He first spoke it. One does not need to have a degree in horticulture or even a green thumb to know what happens when a branch is cut off from the vine, a limb from the trunk, a flower from its root. It withers and dies, sometimes quickly, invariably eventually. That is true physically. It is true spiritually. It is true socially and relationally.
“We ask a leaf, ‘Are you complete in yourself?’ and the leaf answers, ‘No, my life is in the branches.’ We ask the branch and the branch answers, ‘No, my life is in the root.’ We ask the root and it answers, ‘No, my life is in the trunk and the branches and the leaves. Keep the branches stripped of leaves and I shall die.’ So it is with the great tree of being. Nothing is completely and merely individual.” (Harry Emerson Fosdick)
This essential nature of relationship, of connectedness, is one of the primary themes woven throughout Scripture. In the opening verses of Genesis God creates out of a desire to be connected to, in relationship with, His creation and all that dwell in it, culminating in the relationship He establishes with the first man and the first woman, pronouncing them not just “good” as He had the other parts of creation, but “very good.” And when, in our sin and disobedience, we wandered away from Him and hid, He called us back to Himself, saying, “Where are you?”, expressing His desire for relationship, and He continues to do so still, seeking, calling, wooing, saying, “I will be your God and you will be My people.” The fullest expression of God’s desire is when Jesus Christ came to be among us, to become one of us, in order to restore us back in to a right relationship with Himself and through Him one another.
Our relationship with God is fundamental, and that relationship establishes the design for all other relationships: we are born in to families, we are gathered in to communities of social interaction and faith. God created us to be social beings, to be in relationship with Him and with one another, interrelated and inter-dependent. When those relationships are healthy and well-established we are vibrant and whole; and when they are damaged, broken or severed, we wither and die: physically, socially, emotionally and spiritually. Recognizing this, our Vision Renewal statement puts it this way, “We find ourselves compelled to relationship. When something stands in the way of that relationship or prevents it from reaching its potential we feel incomplete.” As Robert Frost would write, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
We don’t really need anyone else to convince us of this. We know it for ourselves, perhaps all too well. Are you aware that the Surgeon General has recently announced that the US is facing a loneliness epidemic? Loneliness and social isolation are serious issues that plague 1 in 2 adults, leading to increased risk of anxiety, depression, suicide, as well as physical illness, heart disease, dementia and premature death. Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford University writes, “I know of no more potent killer than isolation. There is no more destructive influence on physical and mental health than the isolation of you from me and us from them.”
Imposed loneliness and isolation is different than solitude which we may choose for ourselves and its effects can be devastating. It is little wonder that solitary confinement is the harshest punishment for those who are incarcerated. I listened to an interview several years ago on NPR with a maestro who had been imprisoned in Eastern Europe for his social/political views. He was placed in solitary confinement for 4 years before his release. Discussing his experience the interviewer asked, “What is the most beautiful music in the world?” The conductor gave no reply. The interviewer rephrased his question, “When in solitary confinement what music did you think about and long to hear?” The maestro finally answered, “The most beautiful music in all the world is the sound of another person’s voice.”
Admittedly, we have not experienced anything to that extent, but I think it is safe to say that each of us has experienced something similar due to the effects of the pandemic; I certainly know I did and perhaps still do. I felt the effects of isolation and separation and the breakdown of relationships: physically, emotionally, socially, even spiritually. One example: recall, pre-pandemic we offered three Sunday morning services (8:00, 9:00 and 11:00). My Sunday morning routine started when I arrived in the building a little before 7:00 am and ended when I finally left the building a little before 1:00 pm. As you might expect, I would go home a bit drained and tired, but not as drained and tired as when we offered one 45 minute service on line when I had to preach to an empty sanctuary. What was missing was not the message or the music or the liturgy, but the relationships, the connectedness, the interactions we have with one another. I felt it and it exhausted me. God created us to be social beings and something essential is missing when our relationships with one another are damaged, broken or severed.
This is why this second vision for us is so important. Again I quote, “Tab will be a place that helps to create, nurture and deepen the relationships we have with God, our families, church family and neighbors…We know we are weaker as a people when we are divided. In this context, this vision stands as a call to the people of Tab to reach further, to engage more, to risk often and to forge deep and meaningful relationships that will bear fruit in the form of a united community in worship, life and every way that pleases God.”
The statement identifies the primary relationships of our lives which need to be established and then maintained, and when necessary repaired and restored.
Our relationship with God. We spoke of the essential nature of this last week and what we need to do to help it grow. As Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” That connectedness is essential.
Our relationship with our families, not just on Mother’s Day, but each and every day: stronger marriages, parent-child relationships, grandparent- grandchild relationships, siblings, in-laws, extended families. All are essential to our sense of being and well-being. These relationships need to be tended to and we want to be a people and a place where those relationships are valued and enriched.
Our relationship with our church family. I am reminded of the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he writes that ours is a “mediated relationship.” “Christ stands between us and God, and for that matter He stands between us and one another.” Using the analogy Jesus gives of the vine and the branches, I am not a grape hanging out here all by myself, concerned only for myself and my own right connectedness to the vine. Me and Jesus, if you will. No, I am one of many grapes, not individual and isolated, but interrelated and interconnected because we are all related and connected to the same vine, our life source, to Jesus Christ. I belong to Christ. You belong to Christ. We belong together.
And finally, our relationship with our community. This neighborhood. Your neighborhood. Our neighbors. Your neighbors. The Church can too often be perceived as a safe haven and a place of refuge from the world around it, and there are times when each of us need that place of sanctuary. But we need to safeguard against taking the posture of circling the wagons in order to protect ourselves from the world out there and the people in it, for they are our neighbors.
Howard Thurman rightly writes, “The first step toward hatred is contact without fellowship.” Proximity without any sense of relationship. There are countless examples of this, differences which divide without any real knowledge or awareness of the “other”: social, racial, economic, political; all used to separate “us from them” without us really knowing them at all. Technology and social media can certainly do that to us, we can hide behind our screens, say what we want in any way we want about anybody we want under the cloak of anonymity, but so can a closed heart or a closed mind toward someone who is somehow different than us.
Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play major league baseball. Breaking baseball’s color barrier, he faced taunts and threats in every stadium they visited. While playing one day in his home stadium in Brooklyn, he committed an error. The fans began to ridicule him in unimaginable ways. He stood at second base humiliated, while the fans jeered. Then shortstop Pee Wee Reese came over and stood next to him. He put his arm around Robinson’s shoulder and faced the crowd. The fans grew quiet. Robinson later said that that arm around his shoulder saved his career.
If “the first step toward hatred is contact without fellowship”, then the inverse, the corrective, must also be true, “The first step toward friendship is contact with fellowship”, actually getting to know one another, not as an “other”, as a “need”, as an “irritant, an opponent, a stranger”, but as “a brother, a sister, a neighbor, a friend, a child of God”. St. John of the Cross, the same who wrote about the dark night of the soul, also wrote, “God has so ordained things that we grow in faith only through the frail instrumentality of one another.” We grow in our relationship with God through our relationships with one another.
One of the ways we see this happening at Tab is the shift in emphasis which Terri has brought to our understanding of the ministry of the Open Door. For decades we have been serving bowls of soup and writing checks to help meet the needs of those who come to us for assistance. All good ministry, but something essential was missing: relationships! So Terri has helped us navigate the change from an Open Door Soup Kitchen to the Open Door Café, where those who come for a meal are greeted as neighbors and guests, seated and served and engaged with in conversation by a Tab volunteer. What was once transactional has become transformational as relationships are built and friendships are enjoyed by those who are served as well as by those who serve. Such is evidence of “the fruit” Jesus refers to in His teaching.
Relationships, essential as they are with God, our families, our church family, our neighbors, are also fragile, so once established must be tended to and maintained. And how do we do that? The ways are myriad and specific to each particular relationship, but the motive and the motivation is always the same in each of them: love.
Mother Theresa writes, “The greatest disease in the West today is not tuberculosis or leprosy. It is being unwanted, unloved, uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more who are dying for a little love.”
That is what Jesus was saying when He used the analogy of the vine and the branches. You don’t need to have a degree in horticulture or even a green thumb to understand His meaning, but just to make sure we don’t miss it, He sums it all up by saying, “As My Father has loved Me, so I have loved you; abide in My love (rest in My love, live in My love)…This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved You.” Amen.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN