bring on the lovingoverthrow

People often ask me for copies of my sermons and, because the text I work from is never the text I end up speaking, I always put them off. An unprecedented number asked me for my sermon on friendship which I gave on New Member Sunday recently. Since I did relent and give it out - after extracting promises to treat it as a draft and not circulate it, I decided I might as well post it here. After all, one beauty of a blog is that you can post things that you don't consider ready for real publication.  Anyway, here it is:

I can’t count the number of times that one of you has told me that friendships are a big part of what makes this community meaningful for you. So, you can imagine how deeply I’ve pondered the fact that I often hear from ministers and church consultants that frequent mentioning of the importance of friendship can be a red flag indicating that a congregation is functioning more like a country club than a religious community. I don’t know who coined the term but “a country club church” is not considered a good thing. A country club church is a church that exists primarily for the benefit of its members. It is inwardly focused. The opportunity to spend enjoyable time together with like-minded people is the point. Personalities rather than principles set the tone of meetings and other events. There are cliques and in-fighting. There is the expectation that staff and officers will serve the needs of members, keep them comfortable, and certainly not lead them outside their comfort zone.

While I have experienced the dynamic of the country club in every congregation I’ve ever been associated with, I find I can’t agree with the implication that friendships are a faulty foundation for building religious community. The Buddha said that the whole of holy life is association with good friends. In the West, the idea that friendship is necessary dates at least to Aristotle and modern theologian Thomas Moore wrote “. . Friendship is a necessity.  If we neglect it we will feel its lack as a morbidity of soul.”

So, what do we make of this talk of friendship as a red flag?

Well, clearly, we need to distinguish between the “good friends” that Buddha was talking about and the country club friends that the ministers and consultants are warning us against.

How do we know if the friendships we are cultivating are good for our souls?  Here are some questions we can ask?

Does my friend expect me to be my highest and best self?

Does she help me forgive myself when I am not?

Are we creative together?

Does our friendship serve anyone other than ourselves?

Does our conversation regularly take us into our depths?

Does it reveal to us our tender and growing edges?

Irish poet and philosopher, John O'Donohue, author of a book called Anan Cara (Gaelic for “soul friend”) asked about it this way. “when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn't just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture. But when had you last a great conversation, in which you over heard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew. That you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plane. . . . a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards, you know?” He goes on to say, “And I've — I've had some of them recently, and it's just absolutely amazing, like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul, you know? “

You probably remember the old slogan from the United Negro College Fund. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Well just as the human mind will not come to fruition without proper cultivation, neither will the human soul. I know some people will balk at the word soul. But there is something in the human being that can rightfully be called soul and it is the presence that emerges when the gifts of mind and the gifts of heart are fully integrated. That integration doesn’t happen without work and true friendship is a place for that work. One writer has said that a soul-friend is a lovingly stern companion to whom you can, in stringent honesty, unburden your heart as you move toward enlightenment. So, this kind of friendship, soul-friendship, is a discipline.  It requires attention and courage. It is necessary for all those who wish to grow a soul.  And it is the most proper foundation of religious community that I can imagine. It is a foundation upon which a truly transformative community might emerge.

And, here’s the truth, dear people. Truly transformative community is what the world needs you to be. I don’t know if we are holding our breaths our breathing a collective sigh of relief as we wait for regime change in November, but which ever it is, it is not enough. As Howard Zinn suggested in his recent analysis of media coverage of the campaign, nothing good has ever happened simply because we got a new president. There always had to be the grass-roots demand for change.

So, if you are a people who long for justice, and I believe you are, if you are a people concerned about more than your own needs, and I believe you are, if you are a people who want to leave a legacy of hope to young people, and I believe you are, if you want to put your most precious values into action, and I believe you do, then be soul-friends to one another. Let your friendships raise you up in understanding, in courage, in creativity, and in compassion. Let me go from here telling a different story about what it means when people say that friendship is what their congregation is all about.