Spokane Friends Meeting

Good morning! Grace and peace to you from God, our gracious loving Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me start out with these two Bible passages out of the dozens I could have chosen:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…. Ephesians 2:8

Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. 2 Peter 1:2-4

His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

In two weeks, here in London, Charles the Third will be crowned king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If the model of the two previous coronations will be followed, at some point during the ceremony, Charles will be anointed with holy oil, while the choir sings, “Anoint and cheer our soiled face / with the abundance of thy grace.” In fact, God’s grace will be invoked several times during the coronation. What is this grace that they’re singing and talking about, that is apparently essential to sealing the deal for Charles to be the king?

When I was in seminary, I had Tom Mullen as my preaching professor. I have lots of Tom Mullen stories, and maybe some of you do, too. He was an excellent speaker himself, so of course we students were all eager to do well in his course, and at the same time knew we had a hard act to follow.

I think HE thought he was making it easier when he told us, “There is really only one truly Christian sermon theme, and that is ‘grace’ — but that gives you enough material for a lifetime of messages.” I suppose I should have been comforted by the idea that I really don’t have to search for new topics every time I speak, but there really is a problem: thinking about “grace” is a little like looking directly at the sun. It seems much safer to skirt around the issue than to dare to look directly at God’s unconditional love poured out on us.

When I was a pastor at Reedwood Friends Church in Portland, I don’t think I gave a single sermon that was focused completely on grace. Well, maybe one–and that was a children’s message. Sometimes, when I gave children’s messages, I used my friends Garfield and Lamb Chop and Dima the Bear. You all know Garfield, right? How many of you remember Shari Lewis’s puppet Lamb Chop? Usually, when I speak to you from our home in Portland, you see Lamb Chop peeking out from the bookshelves on my left. In my storytelling world, Garfield and Lamb Chop are friends, and they were the main cast members of the stories I used to tell our kids at bedtime when they were young. Later I used some of these same stories for the kids at Reedwood. One of the stories, for example, was a fable to explain the Trinity. But the one I’m recalling today involved the lasagna restaurant that Garfield and Lamb Chop opened in Kokomo, Indiana. They needed a bank loan to finance this project. Their friend Dima the banker gave them the money they needed. Dima explained to them that if they couldn’t make their loan payment on the day it was due, they had a 30-day period of grace, during which they could sell enough lasagna to make the payment. During those thirty days, they could focus their energy on making lasagna, not the debt. Dima was a good banker and a good friend, but he wasn’t God. God has no time limit on grace.

Tom Mullen’s students weren’t the first to be dazzled by the theme of grace. Theologians of higher rank than Dima and Lamb Chop have been trying to filter it into manageable size for millennia. I thought I knew what the word meant: God’s unmerited loving power and care, that enables us to be in relationship with God and to act in the world on the basis of that power and that relationship. It is ours for the asking; there’s nothing we have to do to earn or deserve it. It’s so overwhelming, so total, that of course we humans had to figure out how to manage such generosity intellectually. Some early theologians thought that, though grace was supposedly universal, we humans are so rotten to the core that God has to select a fixed number on whom to bestow mercy, and then they would continue to need grace to maintain the relationship. Others, particularly in the Eastern church, protested that grace was unconditional, and we human beings, all of us, are always at liberty to choose to receive it. Eastern Orthodox Christians have their own ways of interpreting the word, and often it involves the idea that grace is the primordial, uncreated energies of God. When we receive grace, we are potentially participating as much in God’s own nature as it is possible for a creature of God to do.

Listen again to Second Peter:

His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature….

No wonder we need strong sunglasses to even think about what God offers us in grace.

Now, church as human institution, church as power structure, might not want us ordinary people to have direct access to these promises without some kind of supervision. I don’t mean to make out that the church necessarily had bad motives. Somehow these incredible promises had to be conveyed to people who were not yet aware of them, and so, those who had the gift of conveying them, were also given the responsibility to communicate what God was promising. We can see in Acts and the New Testament epistles how this was going on. Paul starts out most of his New Testament letters with the words “grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Parenthetically, I could comment that “God our creator” or “God our parent” instead of “Father” would work just as well for me. This is an important point, which we could talk about another time. I don’t want to go there now, but I also didn’t want just to blow right past it.)

And, along with that gracious introduction, most of Paul’s letters then end up greeting the various people he knows in those places he’s writing to; these are the men and women who are actually proclaiming and showing grace in their house churches and communities.

The vocabulary of grace got more elaborate as time went on, and as the church’s intellectuals grappled with such questions as “Are we sinners capable of receiving grace unless God intervenes somehow to open us up to it; and, if such intervention is necessary, does it happen to everyone or just some of us? And “Does it depend on us or does it depend on God’s choice?” Along with that set of questions comes the politically weighty question of “Who decides?” Who operates the gates of the church, signaling to us which of us are acceptable and which aren’t?

And then there is the equally political question of how grace, once it’s satisfactorily defined, is conveyed from God to God’s creatures. Once again, in simplifying these questions, I have no desire to mock the church in its humanness. Communication is always a challenge, and choosing the most effective words and symbols for the early church was often done with care and beauty, drawing on the resources of the Jewish communities that gave birth to Christianity. Passover, for example, helped shape the sacrament of communion, both being intended to convey God’s promises to God’s people. Only later was communion defined as one of a limited number of sacraments that were codified as the way grace is communicated to the people. Sacraments were supposedly the way that our souls and our affections are drawn into cooperation with God. And far be it from us Quakers to look condescendingly on the outward sacraments if we have not ourselves found an equally effective way to be reminded of our need for grace and our standing invitation to open ourselves up to it.

Some theologians came to see the Bible as another vehicle of grace, but, then, can we church leaders risk letting ordinary people read the Bible for themselves, or is this channel of grace reserved for the leadership? For centuries, giving the wrong answer to this question could get you burned at the stake.

Where politics and conflict came in, of course, was not in the good motivation of developing vocabularies and symbols to communicate grace. Thank God our ancestral mentors in faith cared enough to do that. But with the passing of generations, that motivation may have been overshadowed by the tradecraft of sacraments, which after all require licensing–that is, who is authorized to perform them and get compensated for their performance–and there has to be quality control–how do we know when the ceremonies are being correctly performed in all the various settings where churches arise? If grace is promised, how do we know that the promise is effectively kept? The history of Western Christianity is a nearly unbroken series of arguments about these sorts of complications.

Then along came Quakers, who claimed to cherish the Scriptures equally with their contemporaries, but who didn’t seem to require the traditional channels for conveying the grace promised in those Scriptures. As William Penn explained in his defense of Quakers against what he called the “perversions” charged against them:

Of water baptism and the supper

Perversion 14: The Quakers deny the two great sacraments or ordinances of the Gospel, Baptism and the Supper.

Principle: Whatever is truly a Gospel ordinance, they desire to own and practice. But they observe no such language in the Scriptures as in the reflection. They do confess the practice of John’s baptism and the Supper is to be found there; but practice only is no institution, nor a sufficient reason for continuation. … [T]hey were then proper, they believe, when the mysteries lay yet couched in figures and shadows. But it is their belief that no figures or signs are perpetual or of institution under the Gospel administration, when Christ, Who is the Substance of them, is come.

When it comes to theology, we Quakers have another peculiarity. Historically, we haven’t spent much time on trying to understand or describe the mysteries of faith, preferring to describe the functional outcomes of faith. To put it another way, metaphysics isn’t one of our strengths as a people. So, for example, here’s William Penn again, from the same tract I just quoted from, treating the subject of the Trinity:

            Perversion 9: The Quakers deny the Trinity.

Principle: Nothing less. They believe in the holy three, or Trinity of Father, Word, and Spirit, according to Scripture. And that these things are truly and properly one; of one nature as well as will. But they are tender of quitting Scripture terms and phrases for schoolmen’s, such as distinct and separate Persons or substances are, from whence people are apt to entertain gross ideas and notions of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And they judge that a curious inquiry into those high and divine revelations, or into speculative subjects, though never so great truths in themselves, tends little to godliness and less to peace, which should be the chief aim of true Christians. Therefore, they cannot gratify that curiosity in themselves or others. Speculative truths are, in their judgment, to be sparingly and tenderly declared, and never to be made the measure and condition of Christian communion. [Penn went on to write…] Men are too apt to let their heads outrun their hearts, and their notions exceed their obedience, and their passions support their conceits, instead of a daily cross, a constant watch, and a holy practice.

So, not surprisingly, we Friends have not prioritized describing exactly how grace is conveyed from God to us, and in what order, and under what conditions, but we love to see it in operation as people grow closer to God and to each other, and our lives reflect what we’re learning daily about living with God at the center.

However! (There always has to be a however!) … If other Christians say that grace is conveyed through Word (with a capital W) and Sacrament, and we say, those are well and good but not necessary, because those are all types and shadows and we have the substance, Christ, we better mind our manners. Those “types and shadows,” so-called, have visibly been effective for many generations of dear people who were never abandoned by God, even if church authorities became over-controlling or, on the other hand, began phoning it in because it all became so routine. AND, also, do we in fact have the substance we claim to have? Do we functionally know what it is to live with Jesus himself at the head of our meetings, and our yearly meetings, or are we too just as vulnerable as everyone else to falling in love with our own cliches and conceits?

The good news for this morning, and for all mornings, is that God’s promises are true and unconditional, and we can claim and reclaim them at every moment. Every time I visit you, I get glimpses of that functional grace that even peering at each other through Zoom can’t dim. As you ask for prayer, and pray for each other, I see grace in operation. I see grace in the fascinating material you put in your newsletters. I love how grace is reflected in the music that you choose for worship, because I know that making those choices is a talent I wish I had, but don’t.

But maybe there’s someone here this morning, or online, who’s not feeling much grace at the moment. It happens. It’s happened to me. I just have two points in conclusion: first, God is pouring it out on us now and always, whether or not we’re in a place to be as aware as we’d like. And, second, sometimes we do need a channel for that grace to touch us. That’s where the community comes in. Today I may feel lost and without a sense of grace, but you as a body are remembering God’s promises on my behalf. Tomorrow, I might be far more ready to receive this reassurance, and carry it on your behalf. Together, step by step, sometimes in fits and starts, God’s grace is helping us, just as Peter’s letter promised, grow into the Divine nature.

I would love to stop here, but I have a request for you. Yesterday evening, as I was finishing this message, Judy asked me whether I had seen the news from our friend Eden. Eden had just posted a journal entry online, in which she explained that she had just received a grim prognosis in the latest round of her half-year battle with cancer. Eden and her husband Jim had met at the same place where Judy and I met: Beacon Hill Friends Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. When they decided to get married, they thought about the question of what last name they would have as a family. Eden Parker and Jim Condict decided to choose a completely new last name, so they became Eden and Jim Grace. Both of them have given much to Friends in their own way; Eden particularly to the World Council of Churches and to Friends United Meeting, and its office in East Africa. She just started a PhD program in Birmingham, England, last fall, with the research topic of decolonializing missions. I hope it’s ok to invite you to join us in praying that God’s grace would be poured out on her like an ocean of light over the ocean of darkness. Thank you.

Scriptures: Ephesians 2:8, 2 Peter 1:2-4; and a brief reference to all the epistles that include the greeting, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

This message was given to Spokane Friends by Johan Maurer during Sunday worship on April 23, 2023.

Good morning.  A while back, I was asked to help speak at a week long camp for high- schoolers – and the Scripture that the camp asked me to use was this very text in Matthew 22 (Matt. 22:34-40). And so I busily began to prepare each day’s message by reading this passage until it was seared in my memory and digging deep into the context and words and meanings. But the further I got into this preparation, the slower I worked, because I found myself convicted — almost paralyzingly convicted. Scribbling down thoughts that made me pause in prayer and silence for long stretches of time. God was speaking to me. And so I wrote these thoughts down – and they may be a little personal to be sharing with you all, as I don’t know all of you that well. But we are the Church together, and so perhaps we can lean into the ways we are meant to help each other grow with courage and humility. And perhaps you might also hear what God is saying in this passage as convicting to you as well.

So to begin, I want to share a bit about my own life… I grew up as a kid with a passionate love for God. I was baptized when I was seven years old, gave my testimony in front of the whole church. I went on to memorize Bible verses, attend Bible studies, I prayed diligently. I went ot church on Sundays and Wednesdays and retreats on weekends. I loved God as well as I could. But when I was in high school, I stumbled upon a documentary about the AIDS crisis in Africa for the first time – and I was broken hearted. I realized that I had spent so much time and so much of my life loving God and cultivating my own faith life – and I began to question – what does that have to say to these people who were dying of a disease on the other side of the world? How did my faith and love of God help me love the world?

So at that point, in high school, I started a journey of looking outward and not just inward– learning about people. It started by learning about the AIDs crisis and other diseases wreaking havoc on the world’s poor, which led to learning about cities in the US, in our own country, which led to learning about race and racism and how that plays out in our schools, neighborhoods, and our government. And I continue to follow my curiosity on these things today…

I have found, in all of this learning and looking outward, that my soul stirred by these stories. And I live and work and breath in the ministry world—I’ve had this refrain from the Lord’s Prayer beating in my chest, “Let your Kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth, this earth, as it is in heaven,” –I preach and I teach again and again and again that we are called to love our neighbor! To know those whose life is different than ours. To know those for whom life is harder. To love the orphan and the widow and the fatherless and motherless. To walk alongside of and learn from those who have less. To welcome the stranger. To understand our privilege. To listen the race conversation in America and learn how to be part of it. To know the Church in the Global South is an important voice! A leading voice. Love others! I say, Love them well! Stop thinking so individually! See yourself as part of a community! Look outward!

And I believe this is important! In a lot of ways, this is the fuel my ministry mind and heart run on. All I have to do is look at Jesus for half a second in the gospel, and it becomes crystal clear that if we are to follow his example, our life has to be marked by this type of listening and seeing and radically loving others.

But in all of this thinking and teaching and preaching and listening and learning and loving, I fear… I confess to you… that I’ve neglected my own love for God. The pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction since the days of my youth. And so Jesus convicts me in this passage.

Now, I don’t know if you were able to follow the gospel story we just read– it’s pretty straight forward.

A man, a lawyer, a Pharisee, one of those churchy-leader-types, comes up to Jesus with a question. A question to test Jesus, Scripture says. He asks him – Jesus: what is the greatest commandment? What is the one thing we must to do follow God?

Now, every good Jew would know the answer to this question: to love God. So it’s sort of a soft-ball question that the lawyer is using here. The text tells us that he’s trying to test Jesus, right? So why would this soft-ball question be testing Jesus here??

In the background, if I were to read between the lines – and use my sanctified imagination to fill in the gaps of this story – to read this story through the lens of today… I might hear in this question, the lawyer saying something like this — “You’ve spent all your time, Jesus, with these certain types of people. People with diseases–people with sin – people without money – people in trouble. You’ve spent all your time talking with them. Healing them. Helping them. You’ve spent all your time with the poor, the marginalized, the minorities, the outcasts… Your radical social life, this lawyer may have said between the lines, has made me uneasy. Your disregard for all the rules that I follow so carefully has made me uneasy. So let me hear you just say it out loud – what’s the most important commandment? Because by looking at your life, I could guess you think it has to do with these people you spend so much of your time with…

And so, in this climactic moment in which the lawyer tests Jesus – when these two men are nose to nose, the lawyer’s chest puffed out, Jesus brow furrowed, and there’s a drawn out awkward silence between them– Jesus looks at this skeptical lawyer in the eyes. Jesus life is oozing all around them this uncontainable compassion for others. And so with his love for others exuding out of his every pore—that marks his every day—the fuel for his ministry, and the reason for his fame – with this love covering every square inch of Jesus — Jesus looks at the lawyer and says this: The first and most important commandment is this – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

And this is what cuts me to the heart. Jesus, whose every move seems to seek justice and love mercy for the sake of others  – this same Jesus calls us to remember that we must first walk humbly with our God.

Jesus here is quoting an important verse from the book of Deuteronomy, and these verses – this creed really – is so important in the Jewish faith, that it has its own name: the Shema. This is the pledge we’re called to make to God every day: Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your mind. The verse is from Dt 6:4, but the following verses in Deuteronomy 6 help unpack what this means and what this looks like better. So in order to unpack what Jesus means with his answer, let’s look into this passage:

• Deuteronomy goes on to explain that a person who loves God in this way teaches the children about this love of God – raises up the next generation into this love.
• A person who loves God in this way, talks about it – out loud—talk about this love at home.
• Talks about this love while not at home – while out and about: at work, at the store, on vacation, in the city hall, with friends and with family with politicians.
• A person who loves God in this way prays into this love every single morning before their feet hit the floor and every single night before their head hits the pillow. Their life is marked by praying into this verse.
• A person who loves God in this way takes the time to intentionally remember where God’s love has shown up in the past – in their life, in their families life, in the history of the church and God’s people — and uses this memory of God’s love as a source of encouragement, as a source of identity, as a source of strength.
• A person who loves God in this way has woven this pledge of allegiance in their daily routine – has tattooed their life – their body, their house, their rhythms, their relationships, with this love so as to remember it, in all places and at all times.

“Love the Lord your God, Deuteronomy says, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. When the Lord your God brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the and of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Love the Lord your God… This is the first and greatest commandment.”

I can imagine the surprise on the lawyer’s face at this answer as he stared back at this outstandingly social, progressive, people-centered god-man who so often was critical of religious institutions and rules. I can imagine the surprise on the lawyer’s face when Jesus said the most important commandment, in all the Scriptures, is to love the Lord your God with everything you have, because this lawyer wasn’t expecting to have the same answer!

I think Jesus is teaching us here that the best place to begin loving others has to be by first loving God. Knowing this responsibility that we bear as believers should inspire us! Because it continually draws us back to the reason we live and love others in the first place. We love, because God first loved us.

Just when the lawyer beings to turn away from Jesus, perplexed by his answer… Jesus catches the man, I imagine maybe catches him by the arm, and continues … “And the second greatest commandment, Jesus says, is just like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

You see the lawyer asked for one answer – and Jesus gave him two answers. The lawyer asked for the one greatest commandment, and Jesus says: there are two. As if to say, one answer is too narrow. We need to love God, yes. That is the first and greatest, and the starting spot. But we also need to love our neighbors. By giving the man two answers, Jesus tells him you cannot have one without the other. The first is the first, and the second is the second, but they are equally important. Different – but inseparable.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

And here, Jesus is quoting again from the Old Testament – an important verse from Leviticus 19, where God’s people are being taught what it looks like to love others.

• Leviticus goes on to explain that the person who loves others works their land, but doesn’t take all the harvest. They leave some for the poor and the hungry, who come to glean the fields after the harvest for food.
• The person who loves others won’t lie or distort the truth to others, but rather their speech will be generous and engaging and uplifting and truth-telling even if it’s hard.
• A person who loves others in this way will demonstrate this love with their lives, but will also demonstrate this love where no one else will see it — within their own hearts. This love permeates their actions and their words, their hands and their heart.
• The person who loves others in this way, loves all people of all abilities – those for whom life is easy who don’t need much help, and those for whom life is difficult, who may need an extra leg up.
• A person who loves others in this way loves even the stranger who comes to live in our land – the refugee, the alien, the outsider. And they treat this outsider well, they don’t oppress the stranger, they don’t make life harder for them – but instead they treat the outsider like an insider. Because the person who loves others in this way remembers that we all were outsiders once, until God made us insiders.

“When you reap the harvest of your land,” Leviticus says, ”you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest…you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger… You shall not steal, you shall not lie, you shall defraud your neighbor…you shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord… When a stranger resides in your land, Leviticus says, you shall not oppress the stranger. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

Love God, love others. The whole faith hangs on these two commands.

So where do you feel the most comfortable? Is it talking and thinking and acting on your own interior faith life? Do you love God well? Do you pray often, set aside time carefully for your daily time in the Word? Then Jesus calls out to you, catches you by the arm and says – the second is just like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Think about loving the world. Let that challenge you to move outside your comfort zone.

Or, like me, do you find yourself in these days most comfortable, as ironic as this sounds, talking about the uncomfortable ways we’re called to love others? Social Justice? Then Jesus calls out to you and says – the first and greatest commandment is to love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Let that challenge you to move outside your comfort zone.

In whatever wing we feel most comfortable, left to our own devices, we’d probably just stay there. But Christ calls us in this passage us to not stay there. To not let the pendulum swing too far one way or another. To realize that the one most important thing is actually two.

This message was given by Rev. Lauren Taylor to Spokane Friends Church on June 2, 2019