Spokane Friends Meeting

Some of the scariest perspectives in all contemporary Christianity find their foundation in these concluding parables of Matthew’s Gospel.  Some of the people who are into “the end of the world as we know it” to quote one of the Mutant Ninja Turtles, believe that all the signs that have to be accomplished before we witness Christ’s return in power, the rapture and eternal damnation of the unbelievers, have been accomplished with one exception – the renewal of Jewish ritual sacrifice on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  And what makes this so scary is that they sincerely believe that we should do all we can to bring about the destruction of the worship center presently on the Dome of the Rock and under the control of Islam so construction on a true Jewish Temple can begin, so ritual sacrifice can be resumed – so the end of the world can come – soon. 

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Recently on This American Life, a program on National Public Radio, they addressed our current economic climate in a valiant attempt to make understandable to a dummy like me such arcane things as “credit default swaps” and “stock infusion plans.” I’m sure most of you understand these financial instruments.  When we read this parable it’s easy for these kinds of economic tools to come to mind.

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November 9, 2008

On October 2, Governor Sarah Palin made a statement of genuine importance that demands analysis.  She said “But even more important is that world view that I share with John McCain. That world view that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal. And that is democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights.”

The conception of America as the “city upon a hill” was not the handiwork of Ronald Reagan.  To a small number of Puritans preparing to disembark from the ship Arabella in 1630, John Winthrop, founding governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, first voiced this conviction that God had summoned the people of the New World – or at least those settling in New England – to serve as a model for all humankind.

He announced “The eyes of all people are upon us.”

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November 2

A Time of Change

Was it Halloween? Or just all the leaves I’ve been mulching. Maybe it is the return to Pacific Standard Time. Maybe it is that it is election time.  Every year at this time we’ve got something local on the ballot. Every two years we vote for Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and that generally involves some degree of change.  Every third year we have another Senatorial election and every fourth year we cast our vote for a President, which even in years of re-election, bring new changes to a national Administration. An election presumes the likelihood of change.  I guess we will all be interested in the outcome of Tuesday’s balloting.

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Today is the day of our visitation. Barclay, later in his Apology, reminds us that while the day of our own visitation lasts there is never a time that God is not near us and his Spirit is not wrestling with us to turn us inward, to turn us around. To personalize and paraphrase, Barclay said:” If we will merely stand still, and forego our evil thoughts, the Lord will be near to help us.” That Friends is good news.

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It is too easy to point toward the Pharisees and shake our heads. Perhaps this talk of vineyards and slaves and owners is about once upon a time instead of here and now. Such a strange story seems a long way from the stillness and expectancy of unprogrammed worship. And maybe since we Quakers opted out of the closed versus close communion discussion and whether it’s wafers and wine or saltines and Welch’s we think we can avoid the implications of this parable. Yet God has left this parable on the Meeting House doorstep and it won’t go away.

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September 28, 2008

 In preparing this week I couldn’t shake the way these very different scripture passages seemed to coalesce. The focus is always on the character of God as trust worthy.  The refusal to repent is simply a refusal to trust God.  It challenges, again and again, our rugged spiritual individualism, our intense need to trust ourselves.  The pendulum of Christian confidence has swung into arrogance and presumption.  We pray as though God were a magical ATM dispensing what we ask or we assume that God has a plan to which we have special privy.  These notions have nothing of fear and trembling in them.  They suggest that God is static, fixed and man-ip-u-lat-able.  Such a god is no God at all. We have even come to think that our salvation is based in what we believe rather than on the grace of God. 

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Matthew 20:1-16

September 21, 2008

Our Gospel reading for today tells us that there were labor disputes in Jesus’ day.  Just like today there were problems between labor and management like the recent teachers strike in Bellview and Boeing’s machinists, who, by the way, reportedly average in salary, overtime and benefits a little over ninety-one thousand dollars a year.  The question of equity in the work place seems to be a perennial one. 

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The word forgive comes from a Greek word with a rich constellation of meanings that extend to financial, relational, and physiological matters. It can mean to remit, to give up a debt, to keep no longer. We can translate it as leave behind, let go, forsake, even divorce. One of the most powerful uses of the word is in Matthew 27.50.  It is what Jesus does with his spirit; he gives it up, releases it.  Forgiveness is a powerful idea that speaks of loosing our hold on something or someone, to renounce our claim to it.  So it was a matter of real fascination for me to learn that of all weeks in the lectionary year, this week of September 11, our Gospel reading is Matthew 18:21-35.  

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“They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others.  Their hearts were rent as well as their garments, and they knew the power and work of God upon them….And as they freely received what they had to say from the Lord, so they freely administered it to others.  The bent and stress of their ministry was conversion to God, regeneration and holiness, not schemes of doctrines and verbal creeds or new forms of worship, but a leaving off in religion the superfluous and reducing the ceremonious and formal part, and pressing earnestly the substantial, the necessary and profitable part, as all upon a serious reflection must and do acknowledge”.   William Penn’s Preface to George Fox’s Journal, 1694

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