Neighbors
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.
Hebrews 10:24-25 (NRSV)
Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other, but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (NRSV)
STORY
Mary Cameron has a doctorate in historical geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Cameron reported that homes that were being built after the 1950s were increasingly being designed without front porches, and that by the 1970s the front porch had disappeared altogether from home designs. One reason for this is air conditioning, since people no longer needed to sit in the cool breeze to avoid the summer heat.
But that was only a minor reason as the most significant reason was the dawn of television. Prior to television people would sit on their front porch and socialize with neighbors. Television brought people indoors where they stayed cocooned in front of their entertainment box.
DEVOTION
In many ways social media has drawn individuals closer. Facebook, along with Twitter and Instagram, have provided “face-to-face” encounters spanning distances that were never before imagined; though, there has also been an opposite effect. Long distance relationships have been enhanced, yet neighborly relationships have suffered. An individual will text a neighbor before he or she walks across the lawn to personally greet their neighbor. We have become a very impersonal society as a result. We need homes that have a front porch. We need to return to a society that has neighbors.
Helen Lee Bouygues is the founder and president of the Reboot Foundation, which develops tools and resources to help people cultivate critical thinking, media literacy, and reflective thought. She wrote an article titled “Social Media Is a Public Health Crisis. Let’s Treat It Like One.” The article was published in U.S. News and World Report on July 20, 2021. Bouygues wrote:
Then consider that more than half of people we surveyed acknowledged that their social media use intensified their feelings of anxiety, depression or loneliness. They also told us that it contributed to their low self-esteem and made it harder for them to concentrate. Yet despite recognizing these deleterious effects, only about a third said they had taken steps to limit their social media use, such as deleting or suspending social media accounts, turning off their phones or limiting time on their feeds.
I find it incredible that even though users know the harm social media is having on their mental health, they’re unwilling – or unable – to limit their use of these platforms. It’s a lot like smokers and their cigarettes. We should treat it that way.
There is a strong urge to dismiss concerns about social media as a “moral panic” and to compare it to other communication innovations like the printing press or the telephone, which raised serious worries in their own time that turned out to be largely unfounded. But there’s good reason to think we are dealing with a very different problem today.
Social media promotes social isolation and that is neither heathy for an individual or society. Our reading from Ecclesiastes this morning stresses the importance of fellowship. As our lesson reads, “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other, but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.” It is imperative that we foster neighborliness. There is no substitute for being a member of an interpersonal community.
The author of Hebrews expressed concern that individuals were neglecting to participate in corporate worship. It was written, “…not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another…” It was understood by the author that worship must be experienced in the fellowship of others. An individual can meditate alone, but he or she can only worship as a member of a community. God created us to be in relationship with others, and in those relationships with others can support and encourage us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident who was a founding member of the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church was an underground movement within German Protestantism during the reign of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church. Bonhoeffer died as a martyr on April 9, 1945.
While teaching at the seminary established by the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer wrote a book titled Life Together. He believed that God bestows human solidarity because people are in fact their “brother’s keeper,” paraphrasing Genesis 4:9. He opened his book with this quote from Psalms 133:1: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” Throughout the book Life Together Bonhoeffer defines the Church as the meeting grounds of Christianity. When the people of God come together to share their lives openly and freely, accepting each other with a kind of unconditional positive regard, there is, according to Bonhoffer, a sort of social-spiritual “chemistry” that emerges, and those who come together experience a delightful cohesion and sense of belonging.
In his book Bonhoeffer wrote that living in a community allows us to see God in the other person. He wrote:
God did not make this person as I would have made him. He did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find above him the Creator. Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image.
In a story that appeared in People magazine in September 2016, Jeanelle Folbrecht was able to see the image of God in a special needs child. Jeanelle is a phycologist at City of Hope hospital near Los Angeles. Dominick was a 13-year-old with an aggressive form of leukemia that he had been battling for years. Dominick had no family connections and therefore he could not receive a bone marrow transplant absent of a family for follow up care. When Jeanelle met the boy for the first time she thought to herself, “Wow. This kid doesn’t need a phycologist, he needs a mom. Maybe I’m supposed to be that mom.” Jeanelle and her husband Eric discussed the child’s case, and decided to adopt him. As Dominick now had a family he was able to have his life saving bone marrow transplant.
Let us live in a society that has front porches.