Spokane Friends Meeting

To John the Baptist’s consternation, Jesus, of whom he had said, “I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals,” lines up to receive a baptism of repentance. It is an upsetting question for John the Baptist and many of us. Did Jesus need to repent? Unless his submission was just an empty gesture, apparently he did.  So just as did Jesus, we need to take his baptism as a baptism of repentance seriously.  Jesus’ mission is to establish the Kingdom of God – a new world order.  We discover that ‘repent’ means more than ‘be sorry for your sins’.  It means a complete change of life, of values, of priorities.  It means a total re-orientation of life – a renouncing of the past and the embracing of the Kingdom.

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While Luke describes Zechariah and Elizabeth in glowing terms (“righteous … living blamelessly”), Mary is simply “a virgin.” She is not described as extraordinarily holy but a rather ordinary person like each of us. Mary’s life was moving along a quiet, ordinary path of an arranged marriage. God, however, works wonders in every place, at the centers of power and in distant corners, at center stage of the world’s attention and on what we would call the margins. Ashley Cook Cleere writes: “The tendency to think that leading unassuming lives in out-of-the-way places isolates us from the extraordinary is debunked by Mary’s surprise visitor.

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Advent II “Here is Your God!”

It is at this time each year that our attention is drawn to the Messiah by George Frederick Handel. Combined with the libretto prepared by Charles Jennens, which is more or less Old and New Testament passages from the King James Version of the Bible, the Messiah is perhaps the greatest and most widely recognized aesthetic expression of spiritual truth ever created. Its slow, soothing first strains open with poetry from Isaiah: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned” (Isaiah 40:1–2).          

It underscores that our God is not merciless or vindictive, stingy, strict or severe. Nor is God aloof, detached, indifferent, or unconcerned. No, Isaiah’s God exudes kindness, solicitude, and affection toward all.

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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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