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.

If you ask someone in Metaline what they are doing on the weekend and they say they need to go to town, it means go to Spokane. I do so enjoy being with you here in “town.” For churches that follow a liturgical calendar, Easter doesn’t officially end until Pentecost, May 28^th. The scripture passage I will talk about is very much an Easter one. However, before I talk about the scripture I would like to give the scripture a chance to talk to you. I will do that via Lectio Divina.

Lectio divina is a contemplative practice with its Christian roots in the Benedictine tradition. It combines slow, conscious reading of a biblical or sacred text with contemplation and silent prayer. It is meant to promote communication with God and a deeper knowledge of Christ in our lives today.

During Lectio Divina we put aside thoughts of studying the text. This is not the time to consider the historical or theological meanings of what we are reading. We read with a willingness to enter into the text in a felt sense. The purpose of this practice is to hear, in silence, the word of God, in this moment. What, through this reading, is God saying to me right now? What do I hear that helps me know what it means to walk the Christ path today?

Step 1: I will read the text out loud. As you listen, see if there is one word or phrase that you’re drawn to? After I have read we will have 2 minutes of silence.

John 20: 19-23

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

[2 minutes of silence.]

Step 2: If you haven’t received a word yet, it’s okay. Keep listening as it may come later. As I read the text again

What do you feel? 

What are your emotions? 

What specific situation in your life today relates?

John 20: 19-23

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

[2 minutes of silence.]

Step 3: To hear God, you need to turn off the critic or cynic in your mind that questions whether you’re really hearing God. When God speaks, it’s usually in thoughts and feelings that come into your mind.

John 20: 19-23

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

In Jesus’s name we pray. Anyone like to share anything?

“The doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews.” Jesus broke through the disciples locked door of fear. “Do not be afraid “appears 70 times in the bible. I found this in an article by John Whitehead an American journalist:

“America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions. This plague on our nation — one that has been spreading like wildfire — is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance. Everywhere you turn, those on both the left and the right wings are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it. We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of Muslims, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on. Fear makes people stupid. Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance. Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls. This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.”

I feel helpless to do anything about it. The problem is too big and too entrenched. It is systemic evil, what Paul refers to as the powers and principalities. Fear works. Fear sells. Fortunately Jesus never said, “Thou shalt fix it.” These verses help: 2 Tim 1:7 “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love and of a sound mind” and I John 4:18 “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.” Rohr said, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” We all need to refuse to be sucked in by the whirlpool of fear that surrounds us. People are drawn to calm people that radiate peace. Let us be those people, small islands of refuge in a storm of crap.

Christ’s first words to the disciples were “Peace be with you. “ That is not what I would have said. I would have said, “Where were you? When I needed you the most you scattered. If you would have even just been watching from afar and I would have seen you it would have eased my sense of abandonment. Did the three years we spent together mean nothing? You argued about who would be on my right and who would be on my left. Was that what it was about, getting a position of power and influence in what you thought would be my kingdom? Did anything I taught you sink in? How could I ever trust you again? You are such a disappointment. Your sense of shame and guilt will haunt you the rest of your lives.”

That is not what Christ said. Christ said, “Peace be with you.” By peace Christ is saying, “Be with me in a state of relational wholeness and well- being in which love, not hostility reigns.” No condemnation. No accusation. No sense of retribution. No “get down on your knees and beg for forgiveness.” Not even an, “I think you owe me an apology.” They received forgiveness without even asking for it. To hammer it home Christ says it again, “Peace be with you.” How in the literal name of Heaven do some Christians morph the resurrected Jesus into a Christ that is a mighty king on a throne of judgement full of harshness and condemnation?

Genesis 2:7 says, “Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being.” and in the selection from John’s gospel Christ breathes on them and says, ‘Receive the holy Spirit.” Something very profound is happening. Christ is giving them the grace to let their old selves fall away and live in a new way. What might that look like? The rest of the verse gives us one example of living in a new way: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

I have two older sisters. My oldest sister Mary Lynne is 6 years older than me. I recall that when I was maybe 10, Mary Lynne said something to me that I found very hurtful. My response was to not talk to her. At one point she told me she was very sorry, and would I please talk to her. Aha! I realized that I had power over her and I doubled down. Hold the grudge. Give the cold shoulder. Play the victim. The silent treatment. Retain the hurt. Refuse to give forgiveness. We have all done it. Christ is saying don’t do that. Do what I just did. He freely released them from any sense of guilt, shame and remorse. Total unconditional restoration. We are called to do the same. We can’t do it on our own but through the ever present breath of the Holy Spirit, the Light within, we can. Never hold someone in bondage to a wrong they committed. Free them.

I am often struck with this thought, “What is this wonderful mystery of love through which we live, move and have our being?” The universe is a safe place. God has our backs. We are tightly held in an all-encompassing unconditional embrace of love.

Thank you.

QUERIES

Is there someone you need to forgive?

Has someone you deeply offended ever released and restored you?

This message was given to Spokane Friends Meeting by John Kinney during Sunday worship on May 14, 2023.

It is always good to with my brothers and sisters in Christ in person and on zoom. For denominations that follow a liturgical calendar, this is the 40-day season of Lent which commemorates Jesus’s 40 days of fasting in the desert.  The gospel reading for the first week in Lent was Matthew 4:1-11

 ‘If you are Son of God, tell these stones to turn into loaves.’ But he replied, ‘Scripture says: Human beings live not on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ The devil then took him to the holy city and set him on the parapet of the Temple. ‘If you are Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down; for scripture says: He has given his angels orders about you, and they will carry you in their arms in case you trip over a stone.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Scripture also says: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ Next, taking him to a very high mountain, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’ Then Jesus replied, ‘Away with you, Satan! For scripture says: The Lord your God is the one to whom you must do homage, him alone you must serve.’ Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels appeared and looked after him.

The temptations can be summarized as the 3 P’s. Possessions–unlimited bread. Prestige–Hey look I just jumped off the parapet and angels saved me. Power-political.  The most alluring one is power. If I can be in control then I can fix everything, make it right. Of course I am the one who will decide what is right. Here are some examples of how things can go south when you or your organization is in total control.

• There are 13 countries where being gay is punishable by death. 

• Prior to the reformation, the Roman Catholic Church had all of Europe in its’ back pocket and had power to call the shots everywhere.  The Doctrine of Discovery papal Bull issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452 stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers with the right to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans…to reduce their persons

to perpetual slavery and to take away all theirpossessions and property. Praise you Jesus.

My comments were very typical. Nothing new. No major insights. What I will read next is word for word from Episcopal priest Fr. Mike Marsh.  I found it on his, “Interrupting the Silence” site.  He consistently has unique insights.

Fr. Mike:

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” That’s the first line in today’s gospel and my first thought is, “Well, that is not fair.  The Spirit and the devil in cahoots?

What are we supposed to do with that? Maybe it’s an opportunity to reconsider the wilderness and temptation. Maybe there is more to temptation than a test of our faithfulness, morality, or will power. After all, St. Anthony said, “Without temptations no one can be saved”

What if we saw the wilderness as a classroom and the temptations as our teacher? What if temptations are necessary to our self-knowledge and growing into wholeness? Maybe that’s what is happening in today’s gospel. 

How many temptations does Jesus undergo?  Three, right? That’s the obvious answer. Three is not an incorrect answer, but I wonder if it might be an incomplete answer. What if there is a fourth temptation? What if the fourth temptation is a universal temptation that runs through and underlies the other three? And what if it’s the temptation that you and I are always struggling with? What if all the other temptations are just variations on this fourth one?

One of the things I’ve recognized in my life is that my temptations aren’t really between me and someone or something else. My temptations are almost always a struggle between me and myself. The fourth temptation is the temptation to betray ourselves. In some ways it’s the first temptation. I betray myself before I betray you or give in to any other temptation. And I think that’s what Jesus is facing in the wilderness. Here’s why I say that. 

Immediately before today’s gospel Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan River “and a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:17) “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” (Matthew 4:1)

“Son, beloved, well pleased.” That’s who God declares Jesus to be. Jesus hasn’t done anything to earn or prove himself to be those things. And that’s true for you and me too. “Son or daughter, beloved, well pleased.” That’s who we are regardless of what we’ve done or left undone. They are a given for Jesus and us. They are the Father’s view of Jesus, and of you and

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me. Hold on to them. I’ll come back to them in a minute because I think they are central to Jesus’ and our temptations.

The way Matthew tells it Jesus goes from river water to desert sand with nothing in between. There’s no lunch with family and friends celebrating his baptism. He doesn’t teach or preach about what just happened. And he doesn’t perform any miracles. Instead, he entered the wilderness with the Father’s words clinging to him like wet clothes. He goes from baptism to temptation. “The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God…”

With those words the tempter has raised the possibility, a doubt, that Jesus is not the Son of God. That temptation will follow Jesus to the cross where “those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”

“If you are the Son of God …” That’s not a question between Jesus and the tempter, Jesus and God the Father, or Jesus and those who deride him. It’s a question between Jesus and himself. No one else can answer it for him. And no one else can answer it for you and me. It’s a question each of us must answer for ourselves.

That’s the fourth temptation. It’s the temptation for Jesus to doubt that he is the Son of God and prove himself by turning stones into bread. It’s the temptation to doubt that he is God’s Beloved and prove it by throwing himself off the pinnacle of the temple into the hands of angels. It’s the temptation to doubt that God is well pleased with him and seek approval and recognition from another by falling down and worshipping Satan, the deceiver.

I’ve never been tempted to turn stones into bread but I have often been tempted and tried to prove myself, haven’t you? And haven’t there been times when you did or wanted to do something to remind and assure yourself that you are beloved? And how often do we betray ourselves trying to seek another’s approval or recognition? 

When I am in touch with my deepest identity and value I usually remain true to myself. But when I’m disconnected from my true identity and value I often betray myself. And that’s exactly what Jesus will not do. He stays true to himself. He doesn’t magically overcome his temptations, he uses them to clarify and deepen his life. They are less a choice about what he will or will not do and more a choice about who and how he will be. What if that’s how we approached our temptations?

It would be tempting to say, “Well he’s Jesus, and I’m me. He’s got an advantage I don’t have.” That is just another betrayal of ourselves. Jesus doesn’t say no because he’s smarter, better, or

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more holy than us. He says no because he refuses to violate or betray himself. He will not turn away from himself or run from his life. He makes a choice about who he wants to be, what matters most to him, and how he wants to live. 

Me: The fundamental temptation is to doubt our true identity.  If we doubt that then we will seek our validation and affirmation in the really cool car we have, the award we just received, our title, the number of people we supervise. We will always be testing the waters.  How do I look?  How many likes did I get?  When you do that you are building your house on sand.  The winds of approval can change at any minute. We can betray ourselves by going in the other direction when we beat ourselves up about how sinful and unworthy we are.  But we are God’s beloved.  That is what we need to come to truly believe in our heart, mind and soul and believe the same is true for everyone, the “light” within all. People living out of their true identity are untouchable.  At peace.  Happy.  No much can upset them.  Their house rests on a rock solid foundation. Imagine how that would change the world.  The kingdom of heaven would truly be at hand, right here, right now.

Query:  

What is tempting you today to doubt that you are a beloved child of God with whom God is well pleased?

It is good to be with you, friends.  What a great name for a church “The Religious Society of Friends.”  On top of that, an early term of derision “Quakers” is later embraced. Amazing.

Matt 25 14-30

“It is like a man about to go abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one, each in proportion to his ability. Then he set out on his journey.  The man who had received the five talents promptly went and traded with them and made five more. The man who had received two made two more in the same way.  But the man who had received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. Now a long time afterwards, the master of those servants came back and went through his accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents came forward bringing five more. “Sir,” he said, “you entrusted me with five talents; here are five more that I have made.”  His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.”  Next the man with the two talents came forward. “Sir,” he said, “you entrusted me with two talents; here are two more that I have made.”  His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.”  Last came forward the man who had the single talent. “Sir,” said he, “I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you had not sown and gathering where you had not scattered; so I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back.”  But his master answered him, “You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered?  Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have got my money back with interest.  So now, take the talent from him and give it to the man who has the ten talents.  For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has.  As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.””

A similar parable appears in Luke.  The setup is different and I believe it is important. 

Luke 19:11

While they were listening to him speak, he proceeded to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that the kingdom of God would appear there immediately.  So he said, “A nobleman went off to a distant country to obtain the kingship for himself and then to return.  His fellow citizens however despised him and sent a delegation after him to announce, “We do not want this man to be our king.”

I am sure you have all heard many sermons about that parable.  I searched the internet and here are some representative interpretations

Excerpt 1: Jesus tells this parable immediately before going to Jerusalem, where he is to be crowned king but soon rejected by his people. This identifies Jesus with the nobleman in the parable and the crowd shouting “Crucify him!”  with the people in the parable who oppose the nobleman’s coronation. By this we know that the people have profoundly misjudged their soon-to-be king, except for the two servants who work diligently in his absence. The parable, in this context, warns us that we must decide if Jesus is indeed God’s appointed king and be prepared to abide the consequences of our decision.  The darkness where there is wailing and grinding of teeth is hell.

Excerpt 2: Yet the particular talent invested in the parable is money.  In modern English, this fact is obscured because the word talent has come to refer mainly to skills or abilities. But this parable concerns money. It depicts investing, not hoarding, as a godly thing to do if it accomplishes godly purposes in a godly manner.

Excerpt 3: The meaning of the parable extends far beyond financial investments. God has given each person a wide variety of gifts, and he expects us to employ those gifts in his service. It is not acceptable merely to put those gifts on a closet shelf and ignore them. Like the three servants, we do not have gifts of the same degree. The return God expects of us is commensurate with the gifts we have been given. The servant who received one talent was not condemned for failing to reach the five-talent goal; he was condemned because he did nothing with what he was given. The gifts we receive from God include skills, abilities, family connections, social positions, education, experiences, and more.

ME: I have always felt uncomfortable with those interpretations.  Let’s go through it again but as a kind of play.

[Three listeners in the group are called up and act out the scene, the script for which is reprinted below at the end of the message.]

Does something make you feel uncomfortable about the interpretations?

If the master is God, then he is cruel, harsh and ruthless.  The master uses fear for motivation. It is obvious that the master lives off the sweat of other men’s brows.” Would you want to work for him knowing what happens if you screw up? 

Contrast the parable with Matt 11: 28-30

“‘Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.” 

The moral of the parable is also suspect: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Is that in any way good news for the poor? It directly contradicts Amos’ warning against those who add field to field. It is a verse tailor-made for prosperity gospel preachers.    

Then there is the ending, “As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.”  There is not one hint of mercy, forgiveness or love in that verse.  Is that what God is like?

I think the problem is interpreting the parable through the wrong lens and neglecting to do some historical research.  Jesus’ audience are the oppressed, poor, farm laborers and not middle class Americans in 2023 in a capitalist economic system.  The perspective and lens you see and interpret through is hugely important..  Think about it.  If I grabbed a well-to-do person off the street and asked, “What do you see when you read the parable?”

Well to do person: A savvy manger that rewards you if you do well. Two of the manager’s employees are phenominal —100% returns.  The 3^rd is a lazy slacker.  I would definitely buy stock in the manager’s company.

Grab a poor person: To get returns like that, someone is getting exploited.  The manager and his employees reap where they don’t sow.  Guess who is doing the real work?  Us.

The last line is right on. I am working as hard as I can and am getting farther and farther behind and the rich are getting richer and richer. 

Right lens and the right perspective happened in Brazil. For much of the 20th century, repressive governments, tremendous income inequality and lack of priests led to a proliferation in the 1970s of Base Christian Communities.  Base Christian Communities are small grass roots Catholic communities that congregate and mobilize lay people, mainly from lower social classes, to celebrate their faith and to engage socially and politically. A group of lay people regularly comes together, most often in the number of 20–50. They often meet several times a week, led by lay leaders elected by the group.  They have read the works of liberation theologians. Normally, they will read the Bible text for Sunday and dedicate much time to reflection on its meaning in their everyday situation. They have much in common with a Quaker meeting.

When I came across the Base Communities’ challenging interpretation of the parable, it started to make sense.  

It IS about money.  Huge amounts of money and the whole key is this:  The master/king is not God.  The master/king is Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great.  Archelaus lived from 23BC to 18AD.  Archelaus has been in Rome trying to get the kingship appointment from Caesar.  A delegation of Jews appeared in Rome before Caesar Augustus to oppose the request of Archelaus.  When Archelaus is appointed Tetrarch (kind of like king), and returns to Jerusalem, he arranges for 3000 of his enemies to be brought to him at the Temple where he has them slaughtered.  Archelaus’s reign occurred during Jesus’s and his audiences’ lifetime.  They know exactly who the master/nobleman is. The three servants are Achelaus’s stewards, henchmen, his property managers overseeing his vast land holdings.  One talent is equivalent to 16 years of day’s wages.  Jesus is using hyperbole.  Either way he isn’t talking pocket change.   How could the “servants” achieve such a return? 1. They were early, early, early, early, early investors in Microsoft?  2. They went public with their Silicon Valley, sorry, Jerusalem Valley start-up? 3. They opened up a new housing development called “Jerusalem Heights”? 4. They built a casino on Benjamin’s tribal land?  5. They headed for the Capernaum gold fields and struck it rich? NO.                                                                 

So how could the master’s servants get returns that big in agrarian society?  Vast numbers of the poor are like share croppers, so you tell them that the master wants a bigger cut of the harvest.  You remind a landowner that he hasn’t repaid his loan he got from you to buy seed, time is up.   You foreclose and seize his property.  Jesus’ audience knows exactly what he is talking about because they experience it every day.

Ironically the hero of the parable is the man who buries the money. That man decided he was not going to play the game anymore.  He refuses to exploit the poor.  He has had enough and has the guts to directly confront the master when he says, “You reap where you have not sown and gather where you have not scattered.”  The master does not deny it and the man pays for his insolence.  “As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.”

In Luke’s version at the start is says, “he proceeded to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that the kingdom of God would appear there immediately.”  Jesus has been pushing against the power of Rome and the Jewish religious elite.  He sides with the nobodies. He is speaking truth to power.  He won’t play the game.  He is constantly pushing back. He is telling his listeners that the kingdom of God they are anxiously awaiting is not going to be what they expect. Like the man who keeps the 1 talent and is thrown outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth,” Jesus pays.  He is scourged and crucified.

The message theme for this month is significant Quakers.  The following Quakers challenge me because they are pushing back.  They won’t play the game.

Sept. 22, 2022 USA: Eight climate activists were arrested at the Malvern headquarters of Vanguard, one of the largest mutual fund investment firms. Members of the Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) and Extinction Rebellion Philly say Vanguard should be using more of its economic muscle to actively disinvest in companies contributing to global warming, including Big Oil producers like Exxon and Chevron.

January 30, 2020: Scotland.  At Bangor WA, Hood Canal, there is a Trident Submarine base.   There are up to 8 Trident subs. Each sub carries 8 missiles and each missile carries 5 warheads.  Each warhead is around 8 times as destructive as the bomb that flattened Hiroshima. The math is 8x5x8x8 =2,560 Hiroshima bombs.  There is a similar submarine base in Scotland. Sixty-seven year old Sylvia Boyles and eighty-one year old Georgina Smith, both Quakers, were arrested at a Trident-nuclear-warhead loading jetty. The women commented, “One missile can kill the same number of people as Jews murdered during the Holocaust.  We need to be on the right side of history and oppose these weapons of mass destruction. In a world where there is so much hunger and poverty, to misuse resources on nuclear weapons is a crime in itself.”

Present day Reno:  Kyle and Katy Chandler live on a half-acre urban homestead.  They practice simple living as a way to resist war taxes, climate change and other injustices. Although they identify as non-religious, their practice of simple living has often been intertwined with and encouraged by a local Quaker meeting. Kyle and Katy say, “We found the Quakers very inspiring, historically, with their direct connection with God, their values of simplicity, and the history of being a peace church.”

I picked those people for a reason.  They are our contemporaries, relatively unknown, not famous.  They are just like us.  Some of them have families, some are old, some are young etc.

They can’t be easily dismissed.  Nor can Dorothy Day, a radical journalist who founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, a lay movement in the United States and Canada, emphasizing personal reform, radical agrarianism, absolute pacifism, and the personal practice of the principles in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. When she was proposed for sainthood, she said,  “Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” (She would make a good Quaker . . )

I am no biblical scholar.  Goodness sakes I am a math/science teacher.  Maybe the traditional interpretations of the parable are correct. I believe that the interpretation I just discussed is the correct one, but I don’t like it.  I don’t like what it is asking of me. I know that our system is corrupt, but it is working quite well for me, thank you very much.  Why make any waves?  Why upset my comfortable situation? Somebody else can work to change the injustices and pay the price.   I want to enjoy my semi-retirement, go fishing and visit my grandchildren.

As a follower of Christ I should be yeast, but I fear that I am just another part of the dough, content to shuffle along, not much different than the majority of my Christian peers who are not that much different from everybody else.

Query:

Is that what it is all about?  Is that what it is all for?  Is that it?  Is that why we were created?

This message was given to Spokane Friends by John Kinney during Sunday morning worhip service on January 29, 2023.

Script for skit:

Me: “5  Talenter, how did you do?”

5 Talenter “Sir, you entrusted me with five talents; here are five more that I have made.” 

Me: “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.” 

Me: “2  Talenter, how did you do?”

2 Talenter “Sir, you entrusted me with 2 talents; here are 2 more that I have made.” 

Me: “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.” 

Me: “1  Talenter, how did you do?”

1 talenter ” “Sir, I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you had not sown and gathering where you had not scattered; so I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back.” 

Me: “You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered?  Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have got my money back with interest.  So now, take the talent from him and give it to the man who has the ten talents. 

Me: Know this-For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has. 

As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.”

I saw this Instagram  post the other day from a person celebrating their 32nd birthday. It read: “Today is my 32nd birthday. Over the last month, I asked several 90 year olds what advice they would give to their 32 year-old selves.” Listed were 32 short proverbial-type sayings, things like

“Treat your body like a house you have to live in for another 70 years”

“The “good old days” are always happening right now.”

My favorite one from the list was “Do not fear sadness, as it tends to sit right next to love.”

One of my favorite classes from this last semester in seminary was Old Testament Exegesis. During one of our lectures, we had a panel of pastors come in to tell us about their experience preaching the Old Testament passages. Inevitably, a student asked: “What do you do with the passages that are scary, angry, violent, or traumatic?” To which one of the pastors replied, “You preach them. And you do not leave out the part at the end of the verse about death and defeat. The hardest passages for most congregants to wrestle with aren’t usually about war or bloodshed, but infertility.”

The pastor went on to talk about how Scripture encompasses the expanse of human emotion and experience and that we shouldn’t be afraid to explore the parts of the Old Testament that force us to confront pain – because much like a physical doctor, much of a pastor’s role in a congregation is pain management.

Scripture says much about pain.

I had the honor of being asked while I was still in New Jersey to do the memorial service for a boy who ended his life at 13. He was a close family friend of mine and worked with me at the cherry orchard in the summer. When I met with his parents about what they wanted for the service, they had already picked out the passages in Scripture that made them feel hopeful. Psalm 139, Romans 8, John 10. They needed help finding passages that honored their grief and pain, echoes of God’s voice that made them feel known in their affliction.

American Christianity has become very accustomed to ignoring pain for the sake of numbers and attendance. Frankly, most people don’t want to wake up early on a Sunday to hear a sermon about bloodshed and anguish. But I would also say that in every congregation there is at least one person who is actively ensnared by grief and loss.

I pointed the family that lost their child to Lamentations, specifically the 3rd chapter.

Lamentation was written in the 6th century BCE. It is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, but it is more likely that it was written by a collection of scribes all trying to encompass the grief of Israel mourning the loss of the temple that fell in 586. Lamentations is an acrostic, which means each line of Hebrew begins with the same first letter in each stanza and ends up going through the entire alphabet. The imagery is very intense.

I’m going to read the entirety of chapter 3 and the first verse of chapter 4. Feel free to close your eyes if you would like, or assume a posture of worship that is comfortable. Hear now the word of the Lord from Lamentations.

Lamentations 3

1 I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the LORD’s wrath.

2 He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light;

3 indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long.

4 He has made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones.

5 He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship.

6 He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead.

7 He has walled me in so I cannot escape; he has weighed me down with chains.

8 Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer.

9 He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my paths crooked.

10 Like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in hiding,

11 he dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help.

12 He drew his bow and made me the target for his arrows.

13 He pierced my heart with arrows from his quiver.

14 I became the laughingstock of all my people; they mock me in song all day long.

15 He has filled me with bitter herbs and given me gall to drink.

16 He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has trampled me in the dust.

17 I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is.

18 So I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the LORD.”

19 I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.

20 I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.

21 Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

22 Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.

23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

24 I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”

25 The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;

26 it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

27 It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.

28 Let him sit alone in silence, for the LORD has laid it on him.

29 Let him bury his face in the dust— there may yet be hope.

30 Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him, and let him be filled with disgrace.

31 For no one is cast off by the Lord forever.

32 Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.

33 For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone.

34 To crush underfoot all prisoners in the land,

35 to deny people their rights before the Most High,

36 to deprive them of justice— would not the Lord see such things?

37 Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it?

38 Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come?

39 Why should the living complain when punished for their sins?

40 Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the LORD.

41 Let us lift up our hearts and our hands to God in heaven, and say:

42 “We have sinned and rebelled and you have not forgiven.

43 “You have covered yourself with anger and pursued us; you have slain without pity.

44 You have covered yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can get through.

45 You have made us scum and refuse among the nations.

46 “All our enemies have opened their mouths wide against us.

47 We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction.”

48 Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed.

49 My eyes will flow unceasingly, without relief,

50 until the LORD looks down from heaven and sees.

51 What I see brings grief to my soul because of all the women of my city.

52 Those who were my enemies without cause hunted me like a bird.

53 They tried to end my life in a pit and threw stones at me;

54 the waters closed over my head, and I thought I was about to perish.

55 I called on your name, LORD, from the depths of the pit.

56 You heard my plea: “Do not close your ears to my cry for relief.”

57 You came near when I called you, and you said, “Do not fear.”

58 You, Lord, took up my case; you redeemed my life.

59 LORD, you have seen the wrong done to me. Uphold my cause!

60 You have seen the depth of their vengeance, all their plots against me.

61 LORD, you have heard their insults, all their plots against me—

62 what my enemies whisper and mutter against me all day long.

63 Look at them! Sitting or standing, they mock me in their songs.

64 Pay them back what they deserve, LORD, for what their hands have done.

65 Put a veil over their hearts, and may your curse be on them!

66 Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the LORD.

Lamentations 4

1 How the gold has lost its luster, the fine gold become dull! The sacred gems are scattered at every street corner.

“Do not be afraid of sadness, as it often sits right next to love.”

My time in New Jersey has been generally good but overwhelmingly hard. It feels like my life out there functions on a lot of extremes.

I hate the state, it is hideous and mostly concrete (except for the fall time).

I adore my roommate, he is an anchor for me.

I love my classes and my program.

At this time, I do not know how to engage with my peers. They are very very different from me. I do not fit in with them well. They are uninterested in engaging with me.

I work brewing beer at a brewery in Hamilton Township called River Horse. I am the first woman on their team since they opened in the 90’s. I love it.

I am lonely a lot of the time and miss my friends.

I am dating someone for the first time and it’s going really well.

I did not fit in at the large Presbyterian church in town that all my classmates go to, and I still don’t fit in at the small Evangelical church I currently attend.

All of these extremes bubble up in me as a sort of deep melancholy. On a particularly rough Sunday, I decided to try and attend a Friends meeting in Trenton. Trenton is the capital of New Jersey and is facing serious problems regarding poverty, homelessness and unemployment. Princeton is less than 20 minutes away and is wealthy and elitist.

The Friends Church in Trenton was built in 1739 and has been in use since then.  I decided to attend after realizing I would never be able to go to Princeton Presbyterian – one of the head pastors had made a comment about my outfit and how I would no longer be able to wear my yellow floral sundress after Labor Day. I am completely uninterested in my appropriate church clothes being policed based on color. Plus, I found the worship to be too formal to feel familiar to me. So, I went to see the Friends in Trenton because I was wrestling with the pain of feeling excluded and alone. 

I arrived and was instantly greeted by a couple – they commented about how much they liked my shoes (Doc Marten oxfords). About 6 people attended the meeting in-person. The meeting was an hour and a half long and I was the only one who was moved to share that day. I talked about acceptance and used my shoes as a metaphor. I shared a scripture that was on my heart.

After the meeting, we shared an entire meal together. Like a full breakfast meal. We talked about everything and they shared some potential churches that would be a good fit for me, if I chose to not attend their meeting. I found myself, (Presbyterian Doc-Marten-Wearer) seated at their table laughing with strangers in an old meeting house in the poorest zip code in New Jersey.

God’s presence is not afraid of pain, as Jesus Christ has experienced our pain for us. It seems that the Trenton Friends are not afraid of pain, because their trust in God’s love makes them unafraid of anything.

Do not be afraid of sadness, as it tends to sit right next to love.

This message was given to Spokane Friends by Sarah Scott during Sunday worship service on January 7, 2023.

 Philippians 4: 1-9 NIV

¹ Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

² I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. ³ Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

⁴ Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! ⁵ Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. ⁶ Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

⁸ Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. ⁹ Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

When I was asked to give the morning message I thought, what would I talk about? How can I choose just one thing?  Do I discuss the most recent book that challenged me?  What can I focus on?  Then Kent reminded me of the impact the story that I’ll share at the end of this message had on me.  The story was/is profound.  The scripture that came to my mind after reading the story was Philippians 4:4-8. 

Why Philippians 4?  When I was young (6 years old) my parents adopted my sister, Melody.  It was shortly after that adoption that my mom discovered she was pregnant with John after being married for 21 years.  She was overwhelmed with two small children.  She did what any overburdened mom would do and enrolled my older brother and I in every Daily Vacation Bible School that she thought was appropriate during the summer.  Admittedly, I was a willing participant because Daily Vacation Bible Schools had everything I loved.  It had cookies, Kool-Aid, crafts, and games.  What’s not to love!

It was during one Vacation Bible School’s (I was around 8 years old) that I learned to recite Philippians 4:4-8 (probably with cookies and Kool-Aid as a reward).  This scripture has guided me and influenced me throughout my life. 

Let’s dig into Philippians 4:1-9

First, Paul is speaking from prison to people he deeply loved.  You can hear it through his tone and gentleness.  Philippians is a love story of sorts.  While Paul is writing from prison he is speaking from his heart with raw physical constraints, he is deeply reflective on how he handles adversity.  His approach is very radical.  Webster’s definition of radical = favoring extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions.  

• How can I change my existing views and habits?
  • Look to what’s driving my anxiety?
    • Finances
    • Work
    • Overcommitment
  • What drives your anxiety?
  • Where am I focusing my attention?

Sometimes my focus is on the wrong direction, I feel that other people are not listening to me, and I have little patience to listen to them.  This brings me to the story of the battleship. 

Story of the Battleship

In the darkest part of the night, a ships captain cautiously piloted his warship through the fog-shrouded waters.  With straining eyes he scanned the hazy darkness, searching for dangers lurking just out of sight.  

Then his worst fears were realized when he saw a bright light straight ahead.  It appeared to be a vessel on a collision course with his ship.  To avert disaster, he quickly radioed the oncoming vessel.

“This is Captain Jeremiah Smith “his voice crackled over the radio.  “please alter your course 10 degrees south!  Over”. 

To the captain’s amazement, the foggy image did not move.  Instead, he heard back on the radio, “Captain Smith.  This is Private Thomas Johnson.  Please alter your course 10 degrees north!  Over”.

Appalled at the audacity of the message, the captain shouted back over the radio, “Private Johnson, this is Captain Smith, and I order you to immediately alter your course 10 degree south!  Over”.

A second time the oncoming light did not budge.  “With all due respect Captain Smith“, came the privates voice again, “I order you to alter your course immediately 10 degrees north!  Over.”

Angered and frustrated that his impudent sailor would endanger the lives of his men and crew, the captain growled back over the radio, “Private Johnson.  I can have you court-marshalled for this!  For the last time, I command you on the authority of the United States government to alter your course 10 degrees to the South!  I Am A Battleship!”

The private’s final transmission was chilling:  “Captain Smith, sir.  Once again with all due respect, I command you to alter your course 10 degrees to the North!  I am a lighthouse!”

Talk about radical change!  Okay.  Real lasting change happens when I focus on a different target and change my choices.  I find that I learn more when I try listen to others by taking a humble position, and not one of authority (like the Ship Captain)

What do these verses say about changing my choices?

• In verses 1 through 3 Paul states that the church of Philippians is his joy and his crown.  Interesting enough when Paul is talking about the crown he is not talking about a kingly crown.  He used the Greek word “stephanos (stay fanous) ” a crown of achievement.  This stephanos crown was given to athletes.  It was made of wild olive leaves, interwoven with green parsley, and bay leaves.  Herbs.  Very earthy.  Very spicy.  Perfect for Thanksgiving 😊!

This crown is also temporary.  It is not intended to be a permanent crown.  It is not a diamond or gold crown.  The stephanos crown will only last a little while. When I plan something long range, I need to prepare myself differently.  I need to look at what surrounds me.  My short-term goals are important because sometimes they are not temporary and will last a lifetime. 

• What am I doing currently to implement my long-range plan
• How do athletes prepare?
  • They continually practice and look at the short-term gains
  • They measure how their doing by participating and competing with others
  • They continually hone their skills to perfect them (a work in progress)

This spicy congregation in verses 1 through 3 had two women that he mentioned by named to make peace with one another.  He then asked a silent companion to help these women to focus on the Lord.  This powerful friend “companion” doesn’t have a name.  It’s open ended…. Interesting……….. 

• It could be anyone or everyone
  • It could be you or it could be me
  • It seems radical because it means that we work behind the scenes and not seek recognition for to ourselves

It’s about how we respond to people who disagree with us or others.  It could be that they are using the wrong spice, or maybe they are out of focus – and it’s possible that it could be me?  Maybe, I’m only looking inward and not towards what other people are feeling.  I need to be pursuing the goal of reconciliation.    

How do we perfect our skills in handling these situations?

• In Verse 4 & 5 Remind us to rejoice and let Christ’s gentleness be evident to all.  How can I manifest gentleness?
  • It is through my word and actions.  This reminds me of the picture we have in the foyer, Christ in our midst.  Christ is always present. 
  • Rejoice we don’t have to do it ourselves!
  • Through prayer.  Really, Prayer?  Why do I need to pray?
    • I hear this a lot from parents “use your words” (I have used this once or twice myself and maybe to myself)
    • God knows our thoughts but wants us to use our words
    • Why?
      • To acknowledge his presence
      • To focus our attention to him/her
• Verse 6 – 8
  • Be anxious for nothing
    • Really nothing?
      • If I don’t have anything to be anxious about then what do I do?
    • Pray about everything with thanksgiving and gratitude
      • To find the peace from God (a gift)
      • To find peace with God (working relationship)
      • To find the peace of God (beyond our comprehension)
      • Which guards our hearts and minds through a living Christ (penetrating)
    • Focus list:
      • True
      • Honorable
      • Just
      • Pure
      • Lovely
      • Commendable
      • Excellent
      • Worthy of Praise
      • Ponder these things

• Using the stephanos crown description we can weave the spices into a Venn Diagram – Learn (knowledge) – use sage which is appropriate for thanksgiving, Received (heart) – bay leaves for depth, Heard (listen) – parsley to brighten our focus, and Seen (visualized) – the olive branch for substance – Spicy would be the center of the diagram.   
  • How to get there – be an athlete
    • Practice
    • Participate
    • Perfect
  • Be spicy (tasty)

• The result is that the God of Peace will be with you
• This scripture had a profound impact on me as an eight-year-old.  It continually influences me.  It really hit home to me after reading this Story:
  
  
• An Old Cherokee Tale of Two Wolves  

One evening an old Cherokee Indian told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.’ The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: ‘Which wolf wins?’ The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one you feed.

This was on a plaque at a local store.  When I read this story, it had a profound effect on me.  I had to find a chair and sit and read it over several times.  Philippians 4:4-8 came to mind.  What are my thoughts and emotions feeding?  What are my feelings feeding?  After reading this scripture again, it’s:

Focus on the Christ

Turn my anxiety over to Him

Continually practice and perfect my faith

Rejoice because God is with me and around me

Feed my thoughts and feelings with the right spices of God’s clarity

Philippians 4:1-9 challenges me to make Thanksgiving (and everyday) a radical choice.  I hope it challenges you too. 

This message was given to Spokane Friends during Sunday morning worship by LaVerne Biel on November 13, 2023.

This time of year in the USA a religion more dominant than Christianity is preaching another message. This is from the book of Claus 1: 1-5: You better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout, I’m telling you why.  Santa Claus is coming to town.  He’s making a list.  He’s checking it twice.  He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.  Santa Claus is coming to town.  He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.  He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so for goodness sake be good.

Summary of John the Baptist’s vision of the coming kingdom: Either you repent or you will be punished.  Retributive Justice.

This is the gospel reading for the 3^rd Sunday of advent: 

Matt 11: 2-11 Now John had heard in prison what Christ was doing and he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect someone else?’ Jesus answered, ‘Go back and tell John what you hear and see; the blind see again, and the lame walk, those suffering from virulent skin-diseases are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life and the good news is proclaimed to the poor; As the men were leaving, Jesus began to talk to the people about John, ‘What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed swaying in the breeze? No? Then what did you go out to see? A man wearing fine clothes? Look, those who wear fine clothes are to be found in palaces. Then what did you go out for? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and much more than a prophet: he is the one of whom scripture says: Look, I am going to send my messenger in front of you to prepare your way before you. ‘In truth I tell you, of all the children born to women, there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.

What??  When John’s disciple asked Jesus if he is the Messiah, Jesus does not say, “Tell John I was born of a virgin, of the line of David. Tell John that you see me punishing the wicked, brandishing the sword of righteous vengeance, slaying evil doers.  The scribes and pharisees that have not repented of their wrong flee before me in terror.”

Jesus simply says to tell John what they see and hear: “the blind see again, and the lame walk, those suffering from virulent skin-diseases are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”  Jesus’ justice is not retributive. It is restorative, making the wounded whole again. The kingdom of Jesus is not the kingdom John envisioned.

The kingdom of God/Heaven preached by Jesus is the fulfillment of what was foretold by Isaiah in chapter 35: “Here is your God, coming with vengeance is coming, he is coming to save you. Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, then the lame will leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.”

John is a gifted preacher, the greatest.  People are flocking to him to be baptized and cleansed of their sin because they fear punishment.  Retribution restrains people but does not fundamentally change them.  Sometimes that is where you have to start, but John is stuck there. 

Jesus is all about restorative justice. Those who long to bring healing, restoration and wholeness, those who desire to help people change and be transformed, those who see the light in all their brothers and sisters, those living Christ’s vision of heaven right here, right now, are greater than John the Baptist. Insignificant you and I gathered here in the meeting house, greater than John the Baptist!  What more could we want for Christmas than to be those kind of people?  Thank you.  Merry Christmas.

This message was given to Spokane Friends during Sunday worship service by John Kinney on December 11, 2022.

Scripture: Isaiah 26:1-6.

It’s great to see your faces life-size, although I always enjoy seeing the people who are online with me, attending by video link. Hello again to you, too! Next week I will be back with you on your side of the camera.

You won’t be surprised that I spend a lot of my days and nights thinking about the war in Ukraine. Because of the circles we moved in during our years in Russia, the plight of the peace movement in Russia since the mobilization has been a big concern. Many of those we knew and still keep in touch with are part of that movement and are taking great risks by opposing the war publicly. It may not be the same level of danger as those on the receiving end of Russian bombs, missiles, and artillery, but I can’t help worrying. Someone asked me a couple of days ago online about the best ways to support peace people in Russia, and there are not many simple answers. The best way I know of is to support Friends House Moscow (friendshousemoscow.org), which is still supporting draft counseling for potential conscientious objectors. Since the Russian Internet is full of advice for people who’ve just been called up, and the right to alternative service is sometimes mentioned in those articles, we hope that our draft counselors are visible and able to respond.

Today I’m continuing a theme that I started on my blog two or three weeks ago: “Perfect peace.” The original blog post was entitled, “You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.” Several people on social media had recently been quoting these words from Corrie ten Boom, and in this time of peace that’s less than perfect, and peace that sometimes seems entirely absent, I’ve been thinking a lot about her words. They seem to promise a source of peace beyond the power of the world, either to guarantee or to block, but her words also imply that it will cost us a lot to learn how true that promise is.

The source of Corrie ten Boom’s credibility to say anything about Christ being all you need is based on her experiences during the Nazi time, starting with the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands for nearly five years. Corrie had been working in her father’s watchmaking workshop in Amsterdam. She was the first woman ever to be licensed as a watchmaker in her country. When a Jewish man approached them for shelter from the Nazis, her family agreed to take him in, and in this way they began their path into full participation in the underground resistance, building a false wall to hide a compartment in their home for Jewish people hiding from persecution, and helping the resistance in other ways. As many of you may already know, they were eventually arrested, and Corrie’s father Casper died in jail soon after. Corrie and her sister Betsie were eventually imprisoned in the Ravensburg concentration camp, where Betsie died. Corrie was apparently freed through a clerical error shortly before the rest of her cohort in that concentration camp were executed.

Corrie literally experienced having everything taken away from her, except, as she would say, Christ. In her words, it was her personal experience that “In the center of a hurricane there is absolute peace and quiet. There is no safer place than in the center of the will of God.” But is it really not possible to have this kind of certainty if we have not been through the trials she endured? To put it another way, can Corrie’s words be used to promote an impossible level of holiness, another way for preachers to shame us for our inadequate faith and inadequate discipleship?

I look at it all somewhat differently. As some of you already know, I grew up in a violent and chaotic alcoholic family. My parents were atheists, and my mother in particular never wanted to hear anything about religion or faith. Moreover, my mother was in the Hitler Youth movement in her school years in a German community in Japan during those Nazi years. She was a vocal racist and antisemite during my school years in Evanston, Illinois. We lived on one of the borders between black Evanston and white Evanston, and we were in no doubt about who among our neighbors didn’t measure up to my mother’s standards.

Our time of trial came when my sister Ellen (two years younger than me) began running away from home. The first time she was caught by the police, she was remanded back to us, her family. The next time she spent time in the Audy Home, Chicago’s juvenile jail. When she escaped from a private hospital, she was returned to the Audy Home. The court assigned her to a foster family in Michigan, and she ran away from there. Her last stop was the psychiatric hospital in the west side of Chicago, and that was the last place I saw her. When she left there, we didn’t know what happened to her until she was kidnapped from a bar and murdered. I had no faith to support me. Cynicism, depression, and anger were what I had to fall back on. It was even worse when my parents began blaming me for my sister’s death. During those her times of cycling through one incarceration after another, I was involved in interracial activities in our high school. In my parents’ logic, this meant that, because a black man had kidnapped and killed her, I was partly to blame for her death.

Four years after all this, I was a college student in Canada. There I became a Christian and joined the Friends meeting in Ottawa. Ever since then, Quakers have given me a spiritual home, and much else besides. About three decades after I joined Friends, I was back in Evanston for a board meeting of Right Sharing of World Resources. (By the way, I was glad to see the Right Sharing-related announcements in your newsletter.) On Sunday morning of that weekend of the board meeting, I joined Evanston Friends at their meeting for worship, in their meetinghouse near the corner of Greenleaf Street and Maple Avenue. This meetinghouse was less than two blocks from my home on Maple in my junior high years, and less than two blocks from my junior high school on Greenleaf. I must have passed near that meetinghouse every school day during some of the most difficult years of my childhood, but I never noticed it.

What I experienced on that Sunday morning, all those years later, during that almost completely silent meeting for worship, was peace and healing beyond what I can put into words. It was like healing via time travel, retroactive healing, as if the power of that worship could reach back to that junior high kid in that apartment on Maple Avenue.

I am not claiming that my experience was the equivalent of Corrie ten Boom’s much more dramatic and severe trial. Not at all. But as I looked back on both of our experiences, a passage of Scripture came to me, Isaiah chapter 26 verse 3 in its King James voice: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” Let me read the Scripture in a more contemporary translation, with some context, starting with Isaiah 26 verse 1:

Isaiah 26:1 In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:

We have a strong city;

    God makes salvation

    its walls and ramparts.

2 Open the gates

    that the righteous nation may enter,

    the nation that keeps faith.

3 You will keep in perfect peace

    those whose minds are steadfast,

    because they trust in you.

4 Trust in the Lord forever,

    for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.

5 The Lord humbles those who dwell on high,

    he lays the lofty city low;

The Lord levels it to the ground

    and casts it down to the dust.

6 Feet trample it down—

    the feet of the oppressed,

    the footsteps of the poor.

. . . . .

Verse three can be misinterpreted as yet another impossible standard: just keep thinking about Jesus and nothing bad will happen. Let’s be honest: this is a promise the ten Boom family and countless others apparently did not experience in this life.

But I see the promise in a different way: the choice to keep one’s mind stayed on Christ is a choice that nobody can take away. The Nazis could not take that choice away from Corrie ten Boom. My mother’s prohibition about even mentioning God could be healed retroactively.

Now, I don’t want to be glib about whether I would remember that choice under trial. I honestly don’t know, but it is still a desperately worthwhile goal.

Secondly, and closely related: these texts are a powerful corrective to much that is repellent about contemporary Christianity. Recently I’ve seen Christians mocking other Christians for stating their pronouns, for advocating being “safe men” (apparently what we need are dangerous men!), for using contemporary music in worship. Probably the opposite positions come in for mocking as well. (You know, even assembling this list might be a form of mocking; I better quit before I enjoy it too much….) So much of what passes for discourse among Christians (Quakers included) seems so hypercritical and crabby. And I won’t even go into all the ways Christians scandalize the secular world we’re supposed to be engaging. Often it turns out that non-Christians have a better handle than many Christians about how we should be treating people.

For all this negativity, I hear the prophet Isaiah’s words, and Corrie ten Boom’s words, as a severe but refreshing corrective. If the last choice I had in this world would be to stay centered on Christ, can I exercise, or at least imagine, that choice right now? What would that do to my priorities? How would that affect how I communicate what’s in my heart and listen to what’s in yours?

This same exercise is helping me to confront despair. God is apparently not forcing humanity to make decisive choices concerning global warming (although nobody could accuse God of hiding the evidence). God is not staying the trigger fingers on the front lines in Ukraine, or the police batons that are being used to beat antiwar protesters in Russia. Since Judy and I can vividly imagine specific Russian people who are passionately anti-war, I’m honestly scared for them.

To sum it all up frankly, God doesn’t seem to be doing what I spend hours asking God to do.

Intellectually I know that we humans have the ability and freedom to treat each other cruelly, to overthrow each other’s empires and sabotage democracies, to trample down lofty cities by the feet of the poor and the footsteps of the oppressed. We have the ability and freedom even to choose self-extinction, and some scientists warn us that we’re well on the way there. We’re not guaranteed happy endings to any story at all, except one: our relationship with our Creator. Prayer is an expression of that relationship, but not a form of control. The relationship itself is where God’s promises are kept in the face of our despair. Or as Matthew chapter eleven verse 28 puts it, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Next week, I would like to return to this same scripture, and expand the context by bringing in some of the previous chapter in Isaiah. It’s easy to take the promise of perfect peace as encouragement for our individual piety, but Isaiah is writing in a national and international and very political context. [As you can see from my Ukrainian shirt,] I don’t want to avoid that context, especially at this time in world history. I don’t think it is an honest use of the Bible, either. So next week I hope to reflect on what “perfect peace” might mean in these wider contexts, and especially for evangelism that has power and integrity for our real world.

As I end today’s message, I’d like to repeat the queries I mentioned earlier. If you find them useful, feel free to reflect on them during our time of open worship:

If the last choice I had in this world would be to stay centered on Christ, can I exercise, or at least imagine, that choice right now?

What would that do to my priorities?

How would that affect how I communicate what’s in my heart and listen to what’s in yours?

This message was given by Johan Maurer to Spokane Friends during meeting for worship on Sunday, September 25, 2022.

Some of you may be familiar with the British TV drama, “Call the Midwife.”  “Call the Midwife is the story of a group of midwives (some of whom are nuns) who worked in the East End of London in the 1950s and 60s.  The show has already completed 11 seasons, and there have been a lot of changes over those years.  But one thing remains constant.  In each episode, there is at least one birth.  If you want to see childbirth depicted on TV, this is your show.

And the births are depicted about as realistically as you can in a 45-minute public TV show…including the fact that childbirth is extremely painful.  I wonder how they audition for the parts of those mothers in labor.  The actors probably have to give some pretty convincing cries, screams, moans, and groans…because groaning is a part of childbirth.

Now, the Apostle Paul (of course) never experienced childbirth.  He may never even have observed childbirth.  And from what I read of 1 Corinthians 7, I doubt that he was ever responsible for childbirth.  However, he uses the image of childbirth, the pain of childbirth, the groaning of childbirth in this passage.

In this passage, Paul said that Creation, Mother Earth, if you will, has been groaning in labor pains.  Paul believed that in the consummation of God’s Kingdom, there will be a rebirth of Creation.  The old, the perishable, the corruptible will disappear, and something new will be born.  As the Apostle John says in Revelation 21, there will be a new heaven and new earth.  And in this new heaven and new earth there will be no death, nor crying, nor pain.  But until that happens, says Paul, Creation groans as in childbirth.

But Creation is not the only one groaning.  Paul said that we ourselves are groaning.  We are groaning with Creation because we, also, are waiting for new life.  We are waiting for resurrection.  For us, this resurrection, this transformation, has already begun because we have already received the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit has already begun that process of rebirth in us.

But still, we live in these mortal bodies.  Still, we experience pain and suffering.  Still, we exist in a world filled with pain and suffering.  And so, we groan as we wait for the redemption of our bodies and the redemption of this world.  Yes, Creation is filled with beauty, and joy and wonder.  Yes, our lives can be filled with beauty, and joy and wonder.  But until God’s Reign is complete, in this life, in this world, we continue to groan.

The picture Paul gives in these verses is the big picture, the cosmic picture, the complete and total transformation of everything.  But, to be honest, most of my groaning has little to do with waiting for some big, future, cosmic event.  Most of my groaning has to do with life in the here and now.  Most of my groaning has to do with what Shakespeare called “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

I groan every morning when I get out of bed.  I groan inwardly so I won’t wake up Irene.  But my muscles ache; my joints are stiff.  I groan.  I groan when I read the news of war in Ukraine, and Ethiopia, and Yemen.  I groan over the lies and arrogance of some political leaders.  I groan over the brutality of hunger and oppression.  I groan under the weight of personal problems and responsibilities.  I groan over heartache of unanswered prayer.  Yes, the birth of a new heaven and new earth would be wonderful.  But I groan for something closer, more proximate.

It would help to know that the pain I experience now is part of new birth.  In “Call the Midwife,” when the expectant mother is completely exhausted by hours of labor, the midwives sometimes put up a mirror so the mother can see the head of the baby crowning.  There’s hope! The pain will soon be over!  New life will soon be born!

It would be helpful if we could see the head crowning.  It would be helpful to know that the pain we experience will birth something new.  But sometimes there is no head crowning.  Sometimes there is no sign of anything new – just more, and more pain that leads to nothing.  Sometimes we cannot see any signs of hope.

But Paul says that real hope has nothing to do with visible signs.  Verse 24: “Hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?”  Real hope is not something you can see.  If you can see it, it’s no longer hope.  You’re just waiting for the inevitable.

Real hope is something you cannot see.  Real hope is hope in what God can, and will, do.  It is hope in God’s will and purpose for us and all Creation.  It is hope in God’s goodness, and power, and love.  It is hope that God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven, even when we can see no visible signs of it.

When “we hope for what we do not see,” said Paul, “we wait for it with patience.”  Now, the Greek word for “patience,” υπομονη, can also be translated endurance, steadfastness, or perseverance.  I like perseverance the best.  When we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with perseverance.

So, what do we do while we’re waiting with perseverance for a hope we cannot see?  We pray.  We persevere in prayer.  Yes, we act whenever possible.  Yes, we do whatever is within our power to accomplish God’s will.  But more than anything, we persevere in prayer.

The problem is that sometimes we don’t know how to pray.  We don’t know what to pray for.  We’ve prayed, and prayed, and prayed for something we thought was God’s will.  But in the end, what we prayed for never happened.  Or maybe the exact opposite happened.  So, we don’t know what to pray for.  

It is at times like this, said Paul, that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness…we do not know how to pray…but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  That word “sigh” in the Greek has the same root word that elsewhere in this passage is translated as, “groan.”  The Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.

If we don’t know how to pray.  If we’ve prayed and prayed and prayed, and nothing has happened.  If our prayers remain unanswered.  If we are physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted by seemingly fruitless prayer.  If we simply have run out of words.  Then we just groan.  That is enough for the Spirit to work with.

Just groan, and the Spirit will intercede for us “according to the will of God,” said Paul.  God knows our heart, and God knows the Spirit’s mind.  God and the Spirit are 100% on the same page.  So, God will respond to our prayer…even if it’s nothing but a groan.

Many years ago, when Irene and I were missionaries in El Salvador, we went to a worship service in the home of a church member’s cousin.  This man was dying of some kidney ailment.  In his last days he had accepted the Lord and asked that the church hold a special worship service in his house.

His house, like most of the houses in that community, was mud-brick with a dirt floor.  There were no windows – just two open doors.  It was the middle of the afternoon, it was the end of the dry season, the hottest time of the year, and the heat was almost unbearable.  It must have been 110 degrees in that house.  The poor man lay in a hammock in the middle of the house, sweat rolling down his face, groaning in pain. 

With a houseful of evangelicals, you would have thought at least one of us would have gone over and prayed with him.  But we all just sat there, seemingly glued to our seats, saying nothing.  To be honest, I was probably more focused on my own discomfort than the pain of that poor man in the hammock.

Then one of the man’s sons entered the room.  He was a young man (maybe twenty years-old), who had Downs’ Syndrome.  The kids around there always made fun of him.  This son approached his father’s hammock and folded his hands in a traditional symbol of respect.  Then he leaned over, wiped the sweat from his father’s forehead, and began to blow gently on his face.  

It was a novel way to cool off someone, but it seemed to work.  The old man stopped groaning.  He cleared his throat and spoke the first words he had uttered since I had arrived.  He said, “Pray for me.”

The son immediately dropped to his knees and began to mumble a bunch of barely intelligible sounds.  I could make out a few words like “father” and “thanks,” but for the most part it just sounded like gibberish.  After about three minutes of this the young man pronounced a loud, distinct “amen,” and stood up.  He looked down at his father, who lay sleeping peacefully in the hammock, relieved of his pain.

Sometimes we don’t know how to pray.  But the Spirit helps us in our weakness and intercedes with groans too deep for words.  

This passage has become extremely important to me in recent years.  It has encouraged me to hope when there are no visible signs of hope.  It has encouraged me to pray when I had exhausted all my energy and exhausted all my words.  It has encouraged me to reach for God when God seems remote and inaccessible.   It reminds me that hope is not visible.  And it reminds me that the Spirit will to intercede for us according to the will of God.

This message was given by David Morrow to Spokane Friends Church during Morning Worship on August 28, 2022.

Prayer:  We are part of a mystery we do not understand.  For that we are grateful.

It is good to be with you in person.  My message is one I have been hesitant to give.  It involves looking at a long-held belief in a different way.  To me that is very Quaker.  Wendy Swallow of the Reno Friends meeting said, “The idea that revelation is ongoing rather than set in stone by a creed or biblical text is fundamental to the Quakers’ understanding of God.”  According to the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting:  “Continuing Revelation means that the Holy Spirit’s creative capacity among us did not end with the the first generation of Apostles at Pentecost. The Spirit continues to speak and reveal God’s insight and wisdom to us if we are willing to listen. While God is ‘unchanging’, our understanding of God’s wisdom is not.”  I urge you to put today’s message in the Light and go from there. For me, what I have to say changed everything, everything.

Colossians 1: 17 Before anything was created, He existed and He holds all things in unity.

Ephesians 1: 4 Before the world was made, He chose us, chose us in Christ.

Wait a minute.  I was taught that everything was going along fine, then Adam and Eve botch it.  God says, “Dang it.  I was sitting here all chill and now I have to fix their mess.  Someone has to pay.  Got it!  I will become incarnate, be crucified, problem solved!”  If that is true, why did Christ exist before Adam and Eve?  Was Christ always a part of God’s plan and not a reaction to the fall?

Jesus died for our sins.  This is my interpretation of that statement. You commit a murder.  There is a trial and you are sentenced to death.  At the last moment, the judge’s son takes your place.  Here is another way I look at it.  We sin.  We screw up.  We do bad stuff.  God is offended and demands retribution.  Someone worthy has to pay.  A human is not worthy because humans are so inferior to God.  An angel wouldn’t work because it is pure spirit. No, the victim has to be a combination of the divine and the human.  God is so upset that the victim needs to really suffer.  The incarnation happens.  The victim is God’s son.  Jesus is crucified. God can now accept and love us.

The theological term is substitutionary atonement.  It was put forth by Anselm of Canterbury in 1094 in his work Cur Deus Homo (“Why was God a man?”)  It holds that Jesus redeemed humanity through making satisfaction for humankind’s disobedience through his own obedience. It has since been traditionally taught in most of Christianity. Since one of God’s characteristics is justice, affronts to that justice must be atoned for. It is thus connected with the legal concept of balancing out an injustice.  Anselm’s theory was a precursor to the innovations of later theologians like John Calvin, who introduced the idea of Christ suffering the Father’s just punishment as a vicarious substitute.  To me it is ironic.  Protestants took a bad Catholic idea, made it worse, handed it back to the Catholics who embraced it.

Me: It says, “One of God’s characteristics is justice, affronts to that justice must be atoned for.”  Why? Why does God have to be like us?  Can’t God’s sense of justice be different than ours?  You could really offend me and I could say, “It is OK.  I am letting go of it.”  If I can do that, why can’t God?

If you follow Anselm’s logic the only important part of Jesus’s life were the last three days.  You could even say the last three hours.  The Apostle’s creed says. “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.”

It says born of the Virgin Mary, COMMA, suffered under Pontius Pilate.  I repeat, “born of the Virgin Mary COMMA, suffered under Pontius Pilate.” It is ironically called the “great comma.” Everything Jesus did and taught, everything that happened between being born of the virgin Mary and suffering under Pontius Pilate, the world’s greatest life is reduced to a comma.

What follows is by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan.  It mentions Catholic stuff a lot.  For good or bad, Catholicism preceded, and has had an influence on, all other Christian denominations.

In the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and the Dominicans were the Catholic Church’s debating society, as it were. The Franciscans invariably took opposing positions in the great debates in the universities of Paris, Cologne, Bologna, and Oxford. Both opinions usually passed the tests of orthodoxy, although one was preferred. The Franciscans often ended up presenting the minority position in those days. I share this bit of history to show that my understanding of the atonement theory is not heretical or new, but has very traditional and orthodox foundations.  The alternative theory was never rejected.  It just wasn’t taught.

Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans agreed with the mainline position that some kind of debt had to be paid for human salvation. Many scriptures and the Jewish temple metaphors of sacrifice, price, propitiation, debt, and atonement do give this impression.

The common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus “died for our sins”– either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God the Father (Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109). Me:  Wait a minute.  So it hasn’t always been interpreted the way it is now?  It changed?  Interesting.

Anselm’s infamous Cur Deus Homo has been called “the most unfortunately successful piece of theology ever written.” My hero, Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), agreed with neither of these understandings. Scotus was not guided by the Temple language of debt, atonement, or blood sacrifice (understandably used in the Gospels and by Paul). He was inspired by the high level cosmic hymns in the first chapters of Colossians and Ephesians and the first chapter of John’s Gospel.

After Anselm, Christians have paid a huge price for what theologians called the “substitutionary atonement theory”– the strange idea that before God could love us, God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin-drenched humanity. With that view, salvation depends upon a problem instead of a divine proclamation about the core nature of reality. As if God could need payment, and even a very violent transaction, to be able to love and accept God’s own children – a message that those with an angry, distant, absent, or abusive parent were already far too programmed to believe. 

Duns Scotus firmly believed that God’s perfect freedom had to be maintained at all costs. If God “needed” or demanded a blood sacrifice to love God’s own creation, then God was not freely loving us. Once you say it, its inherent absurdity is obvious! 

ME: If to be loved you have to do x, y or z then it is not love. It is a transaction.  Do this to get that.  Love is not quid pro quo.  True love is totally unconditional.

Back to Rohr: If God is not violent, punishing, torturing, or vindictive, then our excuse for the same is forever taken away from us. This is no small point! And, of course, if God is punitive and torturing, then we have full modeling and permission to do the same. Does this need much proof at this point in Christian history?

The best way I can summarize how Scotus tried to change the old notion of retributive justice is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (It did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. God in Jesus moved people beyond the counting, weighing, and punishing model that the ego prefers, to the utterly new world that Jesus offered, where God’s abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary. Jesus undid “once and for all” (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10) all notions of human and animal sacrifice and replaced them with his new economy of grace, which is the very heart of the gospel revolution. Jesus was meant to be a game changer for the human psyche and for religion itself. When we begin negatively, or focused on the problem, we never get out of the hamster wheel. To this day we begin with and continue to focus on sin, when the crucified one was pointing us toward a primal solidarity with the very suffering of God and all of creation. This changes everything. Changing the starting point changes the trajectory!

Me: My simplistic theology for “Cur Deus Homo?”  is as follows: “Why did God become human? When God created us he was immediately head over heels in love with us and wanted to be with us in the most intimate way possible, in the flesh.  You want to be with the ones you love.  We also had a lot of warped ideas about God. Gpd wanted to show us what God was really like. Why the crucifixion?  Jesus showed us how to deal with evil without becoming it or resorting to violence, and Jesus is in solidarity with all of his children that have so grievously suffered over the centuries.  No one in pain and sorrow can say to Christ, “You don’t know what it is like.”  God is not exempt from human suffering and if humanity is forgiven for all that was done to Jesus, then there is nothing we can do to each other that cannot be forgiven by God and us.  Christ redeemed us, but not as a sacrifice.  St. Athanasius (298), “God in Christ became the bearer of flesh for a time so that humanity could become the bearer of Spirit forever.”

I found the following online: It was in the tiny community of West Nickle Mines that a man stormed into a one-room schoolhouse and shot 10 young girls, killing five. He then killed himself. In the midst of their grief over this shocking loss, the Amish community didn’t cast blame, they didn’t point fingers, didn’t hold a press conference with attorneys at their sides. Instead, they reached out with grace and compassion toward the killer’s family.  The killer was Charles Roberts. Roberts’ family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.   Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts’ widow, parents, and parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts’ sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him. The Amish also set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. About 30 members of the Amish community attended Roberts’ funeral, and Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of the victims.*

According to Substitutionary Atonement God can’t be like the Amish.  God has to fit into our box of judgement, justice and retribution.  Someone has to punished.  Justice demands it. 

But in Luke 23:34  Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  He didn’t say forgive them if they come crawling on their knees begging for forgiveness.  He didn’t say someone has to pay.  God’s mercy, love and forgiveness are unconditional.  Forgive seventy times seven times. 

Ps 145:8 The Lord is merciful and gracious,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
⁹ He will not always accuse,
    nor will he keep his anger forever.
¹⁰ He does not deal with us according to our sins,
    nor repay us according to our iniquities. 

Am I telling you that you are wrong if you believe in the god of Substitutionary Atonement?  No.  Am I encouraging you to consider an alternative that is just as biblical and orthodox?  Yes. I hope you will read through Rohr’s sections slowly and prayerfully and also the referenced scripture verses.

Today in the Catholic Church God is the God of Substitutionary Atonement.  Period.  Catholic Sunday service is the “Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.” Few know there is an orthodox alternative.

I feared the God of Substitutionary Atonement, but I could never love that god.  That God is vindictive, punishing and cruel.  What kind of parent would need the death of his son to be appeased? 

The God of At One Ment.  That God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  That God is like his son, Jesus the Christ. I hope to love both with all my heart.

*https//lancasterpa.com/amish/amish-forgiveness/

This message was given to Spokane Friends during Sunday morning worship on May 1, 2022.

References: Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, Convergent Books, 2021 (available at Auntie’s)