What is Our Path Forward?
A Message for Deep River Friends in the Occasion of their “Founders Day Celebration” and honoring their 270th year as a meeting. November 10, 2024
In John 15 Jesus says:
John 15:12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servantsa any longer, because the servantb does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Good morning, Friends. It is so good to be with you today.
I want to thank Phil and the rest of you for inviting me to join you on your Founder’s Day celebration to speak bit on the future of Friends.
The query before us this morning is: What is Our Path to 300?
Today may be the best worst day to be a guest preacher trying to respond to this query. I can kind of stick to the topic I’ve been given without feeling the weight of responding to all that is entailed with this week’s election, but I also know that this is exactly what we all are carrying with us this morning.
Spending my days at Guilford College, a very diverse campus in every way, I can tell you that there are many students there right at this moment, worried and scared for their own safety, and the safety of their loved ones and are wondering what will happen and where they will be able to turn?
So in brief, I do believe that “What is our path to 300?” revolves very much around who can turn to us in their own time of need and how shall we respond?
Who are you to be in this time?
I do not believe there is much use in reflecting on the glimmer of the past or 50 years into the future if we are not prepared to handle today.
Some Hope?
I do a good bit of traveling among Friends speaking and preaching on renewal, and one of the things we talk about in renewal work is to ask meetings how connected they are to their local communities, their neighbors, and folks who are really struggling? And if they were to as a meeting vanish tomorrow, who in their surrounding community would notice that they were gone?
When I ask this question of meetings it is not meant as condemnation or to shame: It is said with deep hope.
As a Quaker minister, I believe deeply within my soul that the world needs faithful Quaker congregations right now.
There is no better time for Friends to regroup and strengthen our sense of commitment and call to the liberatory work of Jesus than right now.
My hope is not rooted in some pristine version of our history, where maybe we think we are special and therefore folks will just come and seek us out and we don’t really need to apply ourselves to outreach or showing up and being present to those suffering. The sentiment I sometimes see, “they will find us if they need us” is not the fruit of faithfulness or discerning God’s leading for our as communities.
Nor is my hope based on a pie-in-the-sky vision of Quaker community many years from now - if only we could do these things everything would finally be fixed.
When I was a pastor, I used to think, if only I could get more young families to prioritize coming on Sunday morning, then maybe we would finally arrive at some amazing place as a meeting!
Then we started having our own kids who wanted to be 10 different places on Sunday morning and most of them were not meeting!
My hope - and I think the start to answer to our query this morning - has to be rooted in the witness of the liberating Jesus who existed and resisted empire in his own time, and is still present with us, calling us to respond to the troubles of now in similar ways that he did then.
Our hope is in the Quaker willingness to be faithful no matter the cost. This sentiment is at the heart of every good Quaker story we lift up from history.
We must, like our Quaker ancestors, survive and resist the evils of empire. We must refuse assimilation on either side, and instead, keeping hand to the plow, caring for the least of these, serving our communities in ways that make them better and stronger for all people, remaining committed to nonviolence and a just world.
Drawing on Early Friends For Now
In the time I have left, I want to name some of the ways I see early Friends responses being helpful for us as we think about how we keep going.
Early Friends were present oriented.
They were way less interested in the past than we are as modern day friends. They were also way less interested in the future. They had a theology grounded in the reality of Christ’s presence now. One of the distinguishing features of Early Friends was that many believed that if there was not going to be a second future coming of Christ that it had already taken place spiritually.
Whereas Empire always leads people to believe there is some future victory still coming, if only we can finally rid or country of the necessary enemies. Quakerism teaches that the coming victory in Christ is already here. And if that is the case, our work is to not just be faithful and live into that reality, but stop structuring our communities in a way that is based on us vs them, but instead is based on a vision of “Gospel Order” or the blessed community as Thomas Kelly called it.
Total reliance on the past or preoccupation with the future extracts us from the present suffering of our neighbors.
Query: Therefore, What will it take for us as today’s Friends to become more fully present oriented?
Our Quaker Ancestors sought a Christianity before empire.
Early Friends spoke of Primitive Christianity Revived. Their understanding of Christianity that predated its conversion (and subversion) to the religion of empire under Constantine. Early Friends called this move the great hypocrisy of Christianity.
Today, a version of Christianity in America has once again become the religion of empire. White Christian Nationalism is an extremist religion that is not only a toxic aberration of the heart of the original Gospel, it is fundamentally perverse from the Christianity Quakers have practiced for almost 400 years. As Quakers, we must resist this kind of perversion, continue to call it out, and embody that radical primitive Christianity that the Good Shepherd taught and continues to be a relevant guide for Friends today when he said (in Luke 4):
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Query: What does it mean for us to seek a Christianity a Christianity before its subversion by empire?
Early Friends were committed to those who experienced injustice and sought ways to be in close proximity with those who were suffering.
It is an understatement to say that we live in a divided society, but consider the ways in which Social Media algorithms are designed to keep people siloed off from one another. One algorithm feeds one set of stories, images, “facts,” and suggest “friends” who are already locked in that same silo, while another does the same for a different group of people. If you ever talked to a relative and wondered what world they were living in or they felt that way about you that is because we now live virtual silos designed to keep us apart, keep us fighting, not to mention keep our attention so we spend money.
We are more are more and more “sorted out” and separated out from each other for many reasons - whether it is our mobility as a society, technology, or designed communities meant to keep certain people out.
But I am struck by the close proximity of Earlier Friends with those who had their backs against the wall. Many early friends, including George Fox and Margaret Fell, co-founders of Quakerism, found themselves imprisoned in awful conditions with many others who no doubt shared their stories with Fox and Fell of what it meant to be poor and marginalized and quite literally be people who had their backs against the wall and forgotten.
As you may know, John Woolman, visited Quaker enslavers and interacted with those enslaved there, hearing their stories, sympathizing with them, and pleading on their behalf. He visited and held conversations with Native Americans like the Lenape to better understand their plight.
Abolitionist Levi Coffin wrote in his autobiography that at the age of 7 his “sympathy with the oppressed” began after seeing a coffel of enslaved Africans, hearing from them that they had been separated from their children and spouses, forced to labor, and beaten badly. Coffin later worked in partnership with Freed Blacks and Enslaved Africans like a man only known today as “Sol” who helped to find and interview those seeking freedom in order to connect them with Levi and the UGRR.
I think about the prison reform work of Elizabeth Fry who was inspired after spending countless hours in a women’s prison and hearing from the women their experiences and needs. And our examples could continue, like Clara Cox, who was a white Quaker preacher from this area in the early 1900s. Clara was deeply committed to the poor and was president of the South Women’s Anti-Lynching League at a time when making those stands were incredibly dangerous. Those commitments came out of her own close promising and relationship with those on the margins.
Friends - we must be neighbors to our neighbors. We must draw close even though the designs and structures around us are forcing us a part. Even though it may be scary or hard. We must know the suffering of our friends and enemies alike if we are to truly follow the way of Jesus who himself not only supped with the poor, but fed them, offered them free health care - healing them, organized them, and was poor himself.
The meeting house must no longer be a safe haven only for us. It cannot be a hideout where where the Quaker tradition goes from being a movement to a museum. We must like our ancestors - in faithful courage - journey into the world, extend our relationships, show up to support others, and build networks of trust if we are again to build networks of freedom.
Query: Who are those we must be in relationship with? Who is suffering that we are not yet connected to?
Our call is to come out of empire in every age. To resist it. To be faithful to the work of Christ and Christ’s kingdom alone, work that is nonviolent, rooted in love and justice, committed to the seed of God in every single person on this planet, and building an alternative community that has no need for enemies or scapegoats.
I believe that you, that we, not only can do this, but are called and therefore will be guided and strengthened by Christ who is present with us now. This is our path forward.