Second Sunday of Easter
April 27, 2025

Adventures in Belonging

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor

1 Peter 4:8–11
Romans 12:1–5

Today is Volunteer Recognition Sunday. We not only recognize but we also celebrate our volunteers. We thank you for all the ways you participate and give to this community and to our neighbors and guests. We welcome those of you who are with us today by our invitation because you volunteer in some of our many programs and services but are members of other churches or members of other faiths or who do not practice or hold to any faith tradition. You are all welcome here, and we celebrate you for the gifts you have brought through volunteer service.

Because we are a Christian church, our worship practices, the things we sing and recite, the scripture we read, and even my sermon this morning all reflect a Christian identity. The stories we tell and the metaphors we use here reflect and form our identities as followers of God in the Way of Jesus. At the same time, we celebrate our shared identity with all peoples, our shared humanity. Christians and Jews both refer to the book of Genesis when we speak of all humanity being created in the image of God.

Christians add the metaphor we heard in the letter to the Roman church, which says that we are the body of Christ. Christians seek to embody Jesus Christ, and as such we are invited to love and honor all people, as Jesus did, loving across barriers, across differences, across cultures. If we are the body of Christ, we are invited to act in Christlike ways — eating dinner with all kinds of people; talking to people that no one expected him to talk to—women, for example, Samaritans, Roman soldiers, children.

Jesus always invited people into community, into belonging, into dignity and honor. He was, and with the Holy Spirit continues to be, a Master of Belonging. Christian author Cole Arthur Riley has written that “people talk about God as three distinct people in one.” This is a reference to the mysterious idea that God is, at the same time, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; God is, at the same time, Creator, Beloved, and Breath of Life. We have different ways to speak of the Trinity.

“If this is true,” Arthur Riley goes on, “it means the whole cosmos is predicated on a diverse and holy community. And if we bear the image of God, that means we bear the image of a multitude. And that to bear the image of God in its fullness, we need each other. Maybe every culture, every household, every community bears that image in a unique way” (Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us, pp. 72–73).

We need each other, and we can see God in each other if we pay attention. We can even say that in some spiritual way, we belong to each other. In a beautiful and poetic modern parable, Arthur Riley describes holy belonging in this way:

“Long, long ago, when all the earth was still as silence, the moon got all choked up on the beauty of the stars. She coughed and then wind was born. The wind rushed out with such a force she didn’t even know where she came from at all. She started roaming and searching, darting through trees and trying to wrap herself around anything she could find.

“No matter what she did, it was as if she was invisible. She wanted to rest in something, but no place would have her. Whenever she became really desperate, she would rend herself into cold and hot air and collide with herself. This, of course, made a tornado of her. So she would thrash through places with an ugliness, picking everything up and forcing it to be held by her, even if just for a little while.

“Until one day, God was in the garden making something like their own image, and they saw her, and their heart went out to her. And so God inhaled a little bit of her and blew it right into the breast of the image. The wind went on searching and remains very lonely to this day — only every once in a while, when she passes by a human or caresses a cheek on a summer day, the wind God put in you and me will stir and recognize herself for a moment. And those tiny moments of being seen, of being felt, collect like a hope in her, carrying her through her loneliness to this day.” (Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, pp. 69–70).

What a poetic description of this longing for belonging that we all have. At the root, we have a need to feel that we are good, that we are valuable, that we are beloved. Because we are created by God in the image of God and filled with God’s Spirit in the form of the breath of God, we are inherently all those things. All human beings have this deep and unchanging identity.

We’re connected by something invisible like the wind, something invisible like the Spirit of God, the breath of God. It’s beautiful, but it’s difficult to understand, difficult to remember sometimes. Because although we have a shared identity as humans, we also have diverse identities and different experiences that give us divergent opinions. Sometimes we even have conflict because of our differences. We don’t feel like “us” writ large, we feel like “me” and “you” or (small) “us” and “them.”

Social forces that divide us — by any number of things, like race or class or gender or sexuality or religion or nationality — social forces, patterns of repeated experiences, can set up hierarchies that make us question our own value or that prevent us from experiencing belonging and dignity.

We can begin to experience self-doubt or shame or fear. Feeling excluded by others, we can even start to exclude ourselves, try to keep ourselves safe by keeping our distance, becoming “a loner” perhaps. Arthur Riley calls it “lived escapism” when trying to avoid heartbreak, injustice, the pain of racism, or any other betrayal.

Or, falling into the myth of hyper-individualism, we can embrace self-sufficiency to a degree that actually isolates us and cuts us off from the possibility of community and support. Trying to avoid conflict, we can start to avoid differences altogether, cutting ourselves off from opportunities to learn and grow from and with each other.

Irish Poet Pádraig Ó Tuama was interviewed by Krista Tippett on her radio show called On Being. Ó Tuama is described as a theologian, writer, and conflict transformation practitioner. He’s a member and former leader of the Corrymeela Community of Northern Ireland, described by Tippett as a place “which helped bring peace to Northern Ireland after generations of violence. It remains a beacon and refuge for people around the world” (onbeing.com)

“Corrymeela’s practice for all those years,” Ó Tuama said, “has been to be a place of story, and that within that, the society, the religion, the politics, the pain are all held within those stories. They don’t exist in an abstract way. These concepts … exist in people next to people next to people next to people.” The relationships are what change us and heal us.

There are important questions to ask ourselves, Ó Tuama says: “Where are the limitations of our understanding? Do we have friendships? ... Are there human connection points where quietly you can say to people, Can you help me understand this? And maybe then you’ll participate in this fantastic argument of being alive in such a dynamic way that it’s great fun or really enlivening, and you can have a really robust disagreement.”

“In Corrymeela,” Ó Tuama said, “we talk about living well together; that that is the vision we have, to live well together. That doesn’t mean to agree. That doesn’t mean that everything will be perfect. It means to say that in the context of imperfection and difficulty we can find the capacity and the skill, as well as the generosity and courtesy, to live well together.” These were their own adventures in belonging.

In more recent years, Ó Tuama has been creating spaces for conservative Christians to talk with members of the LGBTQ community. He tells a story of one man, who described himself as being fundamentalist, asking a question after being in a two-day encounter. The man said, “I have a question for all the homosexuals in the room.”

First, Ó Tuama wanted to say “We don’t really like that word.” But he thought, well, let’s wait and hear what the question is. The man asked, “I want to know how many times since we’ve met together in the last while have my words bruised you.”

Someone responded first, “Ah, you’re lovely. You’re very nice.” This is an understandable first response. Often we want to comfort people who have bruised us, especially if we believe they didn’t intend to hurt us. This can happen in matters of race, too.

But the man didn’t accept this. He said, “No. Don’t patronize me. How many times have my words bruised you?” Someone started counting: one, two, three, four. Then he stops and says, “I’ve given up after the first hour.” The man replies, “Are you telling me that it’s painful for you to be around me?” Another person said, “Yeah. It is.”       

Ó Tuama reflects on this experience, describing the questioner as someone who “had gone to the edges of his own understanding and asked others to help populate that edge with information and insight.” He asked for help to understand something that was beyond his own experience or knowledge. No one else could have done that for him. Ó Tuama said that he could never have gone to the man and told him, “Do you realize your words are bruising?” Instead, by showing up, this man, Ó Tuama said, “was being brought into … the transformative power of human encounter in relationship.” He had to first become open to understanding the impact that his words were having.

In relationship we can be transformed by the renewing of our minds. In relationship, if we can show up for it, if we can ask each other truly interested questions, and if we can tell each other the truth with courage, and if we can listen attentively — that’s a lot of ifs, I know — but if we try, we will grow. We grow beyond our focus on “I, me, my” and learn how we are part of a story much larger than ourselves. We are part of a body with many members, with different purposes, different gifts.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote that “what we have most in common is not religion, but humanity. I learned this from my religion, which also teaches me that encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get — in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing — which is where God‘s beloved has promised to show up. Paradoxically, the point is not to see him. The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery” (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. 102).

Created in the image of God, we are part of a greater whole. We contain and we reflect multitudes.

Christian pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “In a Christian community everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable.”

Cole Arthur Riley explains that Bonhoeffer “meant that each part of a community would have agency to affect the whole, in whatever way that may be — that the community’s survival would depend on each link. I have a friend,” she said, “who calls this mutuality, the truth that says, We don’t just welcome you or accept you; we need you. We are insufficient without you. One part’s absence renders the whole impoverished in some way, even if the whole didn’t previously apprehend it. In mutuality, belonging is both a gift received and a gift given. There is comfort in being welcomed,” Arthur Riley continues, “but there is dignity in knowing that your arrival just shifted a group toward deeper wholeness” (Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 72). We need each other. We belong to each other. We are more than we know.

Following God in the Way of Jesus means following a Master of Belonging. Jesus welcomed others in, invited them to follow him, offered them food, told them to sit together in groups when he was feeding thousands, received the offerings of fish and bread from a boy, a cup of water from a Samaritan woman. Gifts received and gifts given. Christ is our model. “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Romans 12:5).

At the edges of our knowing we continue to grow. As we expand our world through adventures in belonging, we also learn more about what those around us need. We can offer our service in ways that meet the deepest needs. We can strengthen the bonds that hold us together, affirm our shared humanity, and even deepen in our trust that we ourselves are each precious, beloved, and inherently valuable. May it be so. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church