Sunday, September 28, 2025
We are about building community and recognizing its deep necessity. In connection with one another, we discover not just companionship, but the shared strength, wisdom, and compassion that sustain our spirits.
Community can sometimes feel abstract, but we bring it into life through participation and presence. Events like our Holiday Fair, or committees like our Social Concerns, turn ideas into action, offering a chance to meet others, explore your gifts, and shape the life of our congregation together.
In coming together, we find that community is not just something we build—it is something that builds us.
We invite you to reflect: How might you bring your presence, your gifts, and your curiosity to help our community grow stronger, deeper, and more connected?
Reading, Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness (1965: 58)
One may lose fear also by a sense of being a part of a company of people who share the same concerns and are conscious of participating in the same collective destiny. This is an additional form that the feeling of community inspires. A strange and wonderful courage often comes into a man’s life when he [or she] shares a commitment to something that is more important than whether he [or she] lives or dies. It is the discovery of the dynamic character of life itself. This may not be a conscious act as far as the rationale for it is concerned. It is a discovery of the conditions that generate fresh resources of energy.
Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness (1965: 58).
Sermon, Building Community
Today is our last on a series of sermons on welcoming. We welcome by building community. But how is it we build community? And by community I don’t just mean any community, but the beloved community?
Beloved community is usually associated with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King thought of the word agape used mostly when Jesus talked about love., ultimate love mentioned in the Bible that is passionate yet platonic, charitable but demanding equality. Non-violent resistance which enables us to stand up for our differences without harming another in the perpetual cycles of trauma, builds that beloved community, because only then can we truly embrace one another as equals.
Actually, however, beloved community was borrowed from King’s mentor, the great scholar, theologian and mystic Howard Thurman, who taught young Martin at the Boston University School of Theology. He wrote many sermons on community.
Let me share with you a story about how I got to see a larger view of community, and maybe you will begin to think about your own stories. I’ve shared before a little of being raised by woods hippies in NH. When I got to college, though, I went on an abroad program in Kenya East Africa. I was used to being a little different than the rest of my peers, but on my third day in Africa in a mud hut in the Western Province, living with a family who spoke very little English, where there were no roads, let alone electricity, made me feel like I had landed on a different planet. Even the very simple way I had been raised, made it seem that the comparative wealth I had taken for granted all these years, was like having been brought up in Louis XVI’s Versailles and not knowing anything about how the rest of French people lived. I was there for ten days so I tried my best to get used to it.
At first it felt like I was living in a dream, but then I just started soaking it all in. The live termites fished from a mound by a seven year old child, wriggling on my palm which I dashed with salt, had a satisfying crunch, and were slightly juicy. I had my first beer in a little mercado and wondered why there were pictures of the president, Daniel Arap Moi everywhere, and some kids my age piped up and using their best English, told me a little bit about what it was like to grow up under an authoritarian government. We bonded as I talked about my own issues with President George Bush Sr. After a while, I started to grow to like things I saw, the kind of densely managed beauty all around; behind each hedge there was another house with their small plot of vegetables, chickens, maybe a pig or even a cow if they were really lucky. I got to be friends with the teenage son living in his separate, smaller hut, and the mother with the two still small children who made me ugalli served with chipattis with sakumuwicki and nyama. I suddenly felt like we were all one big family. I wondered why it was that I had such difficulty talking to classmates I had perceived to be so different from me, just because they had spoken with a heavy NH accent and parents worked in the local factory and voted Republican.
Howard Thurman said,
We have committed to heart and to nervous system a feeling of belonging and our spirits are no longer isolated and afraid…. [We need to resist the] “will to quarantine” and to separate ourselves behind self-imposed walls… For this is why we were born: Men, all men, belong to each other, and he who shuts himself away diminishes himself, and he who shuts another away from him destroys himself.
That experience in Kenya blew apart my little view of what I had considered community. When I got back I was more able and willing to talk to everyone and build community. Its easy to forget this sometimes getting stuck on 95 somewhere outside of Boston or Providence, but once you have really experienced the full breadth of humanity, and how closely related we all are, even in remotest Africa, let alone arguing with a Maga dude in a convenient store, its kind of liberating.
This vision of the wider community of humankind was there with us just yesterday when a bunch of us were out protesting here in Attleboro, in front of the fake abortion clinic where a bunch of serious, conservative Catholics were out there with bloody fetuses and icons of Mary as they said their hail Mary’s. They had their priest, and I was on the other side of the street wearing my own clergy collar I sometimes wear when I’m protesting, or having to visit people in the hospital. We said prayers of our own, and and at one point, in a flash of insight I said, “Thank God Mary had a choice!”
That got many of them out of their hail Mary recitation! What? And the arguments from the other side of the street began to flow. Mary did have a choice with that out of wedlock pregnancy of hers. We know that the people of ancient Judea did know how to terminate pregnancies. And the fact that the Bible which carefully instructs people on what kind of clothes you can wear, and meat you can eat says nothing about abortion- well yes Mary did have a choice. And she chose to see Jesus as the repairer of the breach and the promise of humanity, and give birth to him.
How does that kind of interchange build community? Well our side of the road could use informed religious language just as much as they could, and I’ll bet it got them thinking deeper about this Mary they worship as the mother of God. And because there was no violence, just a passionate sharing of our political views, it was kind of fun.
I mean how often do we really get to confront one another on the things we disagree the most about? Not often. I know maybe not everyone here will agree with me, but that is what community means too. The throng on the other side of the street was my family too. And there were no guns just people disagreeing, which believe it or not happens a lot in my opinionated family!
Last week we talked about being sanctuary, and the necessity of it. Sanctuary does come with being with like minds. But ultimately it’s only when we truly recognize the larger preciousness of all life, and how deserving they are of sanctuary, and political opinions too, that we have a chance at overcoming our differences and finally creating what Martin Luther King Jr. saw as the beloved community of all humankind.
I have to remember and I want to invite you to remember with me, that this commitment to the beloved community of all humankind is ultimately that source of energy Thurman describes as a …”Strange and wonderful courage” that comes when we “commit ourselves to something more important than whether we live or die.” That is the energy that motivates us to hold our signs and write our letters to the editor, and to continue to stay in dialogue even with the people who most vehemently disagree with us. We exist this church to build the beloved community not just with people who are just like us, but most importantly with the people that are least like us!
First we welcomed us all back from our summer vacations with water communion, then we lifted up our important missions such as Black Lives or being an LGBTQ welcoming place. Next service was about being a welcoming sanctuary. But today we think about how to extend our welcome to everyone, even those who think very differently than us. With this commitment to non-violent resistance let us continue to stand for our beliefs and build community in this world out here beyond these walls even with those who hold up very different signs than ours. Blessed be in our work of the beloved community.
