Our Mother

I’ve been the silent partner in this blog, for the most part — I think the only posts I’ve made have been silly ones about Talk Like a Quaker Day.

Something suddenly prompted me to post the following prayer/poem, which I completed on August 18, 2007, at Powell House.  It seems to have spoken to both Christians and Wiccans of my acquaintance.  That’s what I was hoping it would do!

Our Mother

Our Mother,
who art among us,
holy do we name thee.
Thy home be here,
thy grace appear
in Act as it does in Spirit.
Prepare with us our daily bread,
and heal us of wrongdoing
as we learn to free those that wrong us.
Test us not beyond our ability,
but keep our souls from destruction,
for in thee is our home,
and our strength,
and our beauty,
now and always.
Amen.

Completed at Powell House, August 18, 2007

Peter Goes Fishing

I did some research that now makes Peter’s fishing expedition in the 21st chapter of the Fourth Gospel a little more vivid to me. First of all, Peter’s “I go a  fishing” (as the King James Bible has it) was hypago halieuein in the Greek, something like “I’m going down a-salting,” reminding me that Peter was going fishing in a freshwater lake and speaking in Aramaic, in which the activity of fishing (unlike the Greek word for it) didn’t imply having salty fingers. The Sea of Tiberias was one he might have drunk from, cupping the water in his hand.

If Jesus was crucified in the year 33 C.E., the month of Aviv would have begun at sundown on April 17 (by the modernized Julian calendar), the approximate time of the first new moon after the Spring Equinox. So Passover, the 14th day of Aviv, would have begun at sundown on Thursday, April 30, the night of the Last Supper, and Jesus would have been met His death on May 1. The stone would have been rolled away from His tomb under a moon that reached perfect fullness during the dark early hours of Sunday, May 3. On the evening of May 3, according to the Evangelist, the resurrected Jesus appeared to all the disciples but Thomas Didymus and Judas Iscariot. Then on May 11, eight days later, He had Thomas put his fingers into the healing wound in His side – a wound then ten days old.

Psalm 22 and Beethoven’s Ninth

A friend sent me the text of a sermon he delivered on Good Friday. It was a powerful sermon, painting a vivid picture of Jesus’s physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering in Gethsemane and on the Cross. It was a message about abandonment and finding the everlasting arms to lean on again. And I was moved, not only because of its eloquence but also because I have some sense of the personal challenges my friend is facing right now as he looks toward a difficult future.

As I thought about my friend’s life and the sermon he delivered out of it, I was humbled by a new awareness of how Jesus meets us exactly where we are, offering us exactly what we need.

Where I am in recent weeks is engaged in musing on whether Jesus was taking a nazirite vow when he said at the Last Supper that he wouldn’t touch any more wine until he’d completed his task. He keeps his word and also refuses vinegar–equally a product of the grape. I don’t know what I’m to do with that musing, other than to share it here, but I’m sure I’ll know by and by.

For me, right now in my life, I have the luxury of not identifying with those last words as a cry of abandonment. Today I can hear “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” as, at one and the same time, a statement of what looks like fact to the eyes of others, an act of self-comfort in quoting Scripture to himself, and Jesus’s final message to the world as he speaks aloud for all to hear, despite the terrible physical state he is in, the first words of Psalm 22.

It’s a psalm that fascinates me. The first twenty-one verses describe both Jesus’s Crucifixion and our own mundane times of crisis and suffering. But then, with no transition whatsoever, verse 21 switches in midstream and flat-out states that rescue has happened. Period. No explanation.

Save me from the mouth of the lion! From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me. (NRSV)

In the King James Bible the transition is so abrupt as to require mythical beasts:

Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns. (AV)

It reminds me of the place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony where the brooding, mournful instrumental music is stopped dead by a human voice singing, “O friends, not these tones!” and then the astounding, irresistible Ode to Joy chorale begins.

That’s what happens in Psalm 22. Both Psalm 22 and Beethoven’s Ninth give me a model of faith as a choice. Turn around and face the other way. Sing another song. Just do it!

Here is the new song of verse 22:

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you. (NRSV)

I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. (AV)

And I’m fascinated by verse 29, which seems to be saying that even the dead will worship Yahweh. It’s a wonderful comfort to me to think that I can go to Meeting for Worship from the grave.

To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. (NRSV)

All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him: and none can keep alive his own soul. (AV)

From where I am in early April 2008, I can experience those last words of Jesus as his last teaching to me. “Pay attention,” he’s telling me. “I’m leaving you with this psalm. Go look it up. (Study Torah.) It’s all in there.”

My friend, who began my consideration of Jesus’s last words with his Good Friday message, can find a personal companion to be with him as he faces his physical and spiritual challenges.

Both of us have found our shepherd. We shall not want.

The Night Jesus Washed His Disciples Clean

3/21/08. I can’t forget that today is called Good Friday, and that Jesus, on the day of His crucifixion, may have had to use all the mental discipline He could muster to keep His focus on the present moment and prayerfully on the presence of God. Could the Man who stilled the wind and the waves also still the adrenalin, the rage, the fear in His own body? How did He cope with the pain of the nails, the crown of thorns, the blood trickling down into His eyes? More importantly: what can I do for Him and His mission today, right this moment?
 
Reading from the Gospel of John this morning, I noted that the Evangelist prefaced the story of the foot-washing with a seemingly irrelevant parenthesis, John 13:3: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God:…” – what is this? Something Jesus was just becoming aware of, or something He knew for a long time? If for a long time, why mention it here? The only sense I can make of its placement here is that the writer is using it to put a frame around a part of his narrative he finds particularly important – perhaps the whole Passion story, but  perhaps just this part about the washing of feet.
 
“Knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands:” after such a buildup, we might expect that Jesus then magically made tangerines appear on the supper table, or had the stars in the sky spell out the words “repent, everybody.” But no; He stripped naked and put on a bath-servant’s towel. And then He tells Peter that Peter won’t understand what He’s doing until some time later. There’s something profound going on here. Jesus, knowing that all things are in His hands, is about to do one of His greatest works. Humble Himself and play servant to His own servants? Well, yes, that, but something more: wash His disciples “clean every whit,” so that Peter, his feet bathed, will no longer need his dirty hands and defiled head washed.
 
I’d never seen this before: that was Jesus’ baptism of his disciples. With Judas we’re given to believe that this baptism didn’t “take,” John 13:10-11, but for the others I believe they were, at that moment, made sinless. This is the baptism that the apostle describes as “not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God” (1 Peter 3:21). If it had required a complete removal of the filth of the flesh, Jesus would surely have washed Peter’s hands and head, and maybe even sent him outdoors to gargle.

Sinless? I know that Peter then did a string of inappropriate actions, like cutting off Malchus’ ear and denying that he knew Jesus; and all the disciples fled from the garden, abandoning their Lord and Savior. How can we not think them still sinners? But we have the Lord’s own word that they had been washed “clean every whit.” And this is only fitting for souls of whom Jesus was about to say, first reminding them of their new-found cleanness (John 15:3), “I am the vine, ye are the branches” (15:5). Can members of Christ be unclean? The disciples might still err in minor ways – Paul would later rebuke Peter for dissembling, Galatians 2:11 ff. – but they now had consciences that sins would no longer stick to as they once did.
 
Unstainable consciences, while still capable of minor errors? It’s not as though the disciples had been given Teflon coatings, or – to use the language of Yoga, become jivanmuktas who could generate no more karma, bad or good, because they’d attained to direct knowledge of the timeless Atman and could identify no more with changeable nature – but rather, I think, Jesus gave them what Paul was later to call huiothesia, “son-placement,” translated by King James’ scholars as “the adoption,” Galatians 4:5-6 and Romans 8:13-17, whereby we call God Abba, “father.”

There’s no Teflon coating involved in this: we wash out our errors, as Peter did, only with our tears, and these are tears of real pain. It hurts to see our own laziness or cowardice or greed cause someone else sorrow. But there’s a good reason not to call such errors sin. For we now feel God’s parenthood, protecting us from falling so deeply into sin that we have to block off awareness of our condition with a fabric of lies. Moreover, we now have a heart that yearns to be corrected whenever it strays, rather than go on straying in happy ignorance. It is the heart of what Paul called “the new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 6:15).

That freedom from sin, I think, was the great spiritual gift passed on when Jesus washed Peter’s feet. It came to me seven years ago, just before I fell in love with Elizabeth, when I heard the Unmistakable Voice in my mind say, “I will not let you fall into sin,” so I know it’s a real thing, given to little people like me who are by no means jivanmuktas. It does not mean that I couldn’t spoil it all if I set my mind to becoming an evildoer, as I did for a time as a child when I thought I might be more impressive if I were one of the bad boys; the sinless life does require vigilance. Robert Barclay (Apology, Proposition 9, §II) comments wryly, “it is to no purpose to beseech them to stand, to whom God hath made it impossible to fall.” What I take my Lord to have meant is that I can trust Him absolutely, and that by His grace I can now, amazingly, even trust the new heart He has given me.

Ben and Jody Richmond Write from Western Kenya

Ben Richmond has been serving as interim dean of Friends Theological College in Western Kenya this past year on behalf of Friends United Meeting. His wife, Jody, is a therapist. Her training in trauma work is needed now, as you will read. 

Thursday, 24 January, 2008
Friends Theological College
Kaimosi, Kenya

 Dear Friends,

Since our last newsletter, a lot has happened, so we are writing again to update you and to ask you to redouble your prayers for Friends in Kenya.

FTC opened this week (as you will remember, we delayed opening for a week due in hope that the situation would normalize).  Today, about half of our students are back on campus. 

We last wrote that Kaimosi remained an island of peace.  Shortly after sending out that newsletter, clashes began in our area.  Houses have been burned just the other side of Cheptulu, our nearby market.  Quite a few have been injured with arrow and panga (long, sword-like knives) wounds, and are being treated at the Kaimosi hospital just down our road.  Some of the kiosks at the junction were burned the other night.  (Those of you who know Alex, will be glad to know that his kiosk is okay.)  Two people have been killed in the area:  one, the uncle of a recent graduate.  One of our groundsmen is “sleeping out” meaning that he and his wife are sleeping in the forest because homes near their home have been burned.  Other staff members are caring for relatives who have had to leave their homes. 

We should reassure you that the college and the mission compound in general have remained safe.  Last night, according to reports, things were calm in our area.  Perhaps, this is a good reaction to the Kofi Annan mediation efforts, and the response of the opposition leadership which called off plans for mass demonstrations today. 

Tuesday was scheduled to be our first day of classes.  Instead, the faculty decided to cancel classes and devote the day to sharing our stories and praying for one another and the general situation.  Those students who had been able to travel to the college, together with faculty and staff, gathered in the Dining Hall, and for three hours recounted the impact of the clashes in personal stories.  Some had experienced terrifying moments at roadblocks.  Others told of neighbor’s houses burned, or people killed.  Several pastors recounted how they had given refuge to members of targeted tribes.  Others recounted how family members had had to flee from their homes in the face of threats.  One mentioned that gunshots in his vicinity became so common that they almost began to seem normal.  Others reported that calm prevailed in their areas, but all were affected by seeing “a Kenya they had never seen before in their lives.”

Jody led that session, with Pamela Igesa, the College chaplain.  Ben preached from Luke 4 and Isaiah 61 about the healing power of the spirit and contrasted the heresy of a “gospel” that pretends God’s love is only for “our community” with Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom of God that embraces all communities.  One member of our staff shared an incident of this lived out, when a vehicle carrying refugees from violence-torn areas came through his village in the first few days after troubles began.  He was amazed and touched to witness a number of market vendors gave food to them freely, never asking for any money.  We’ll remember the image of street vendors tossing avocados into a truck full of their hungry “enemies”!

Ben preached again the next morning, at our regular daily worship, carrying forward the story in the Gospel of Luke to the sermon on the plain in chapter 6.  He drew on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1957 sermon on loving your enemies, in which he said, “So this morning, as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’” Later in the day, we held a convocation at which Mary Lord, a Friend from Baltimore Yearly Meeting with vast experience in peacemaking work, spoke.  She rooted the Friends’ peace testimony in our experience of the power and love of God, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  She then recounted stories to illustrate many ways in which Quakers have lived out the peace witness to demonstrate what a vast toolbox is available to peacemakers.  In the question and answer period, one of the teachers asked Mary to talk about the biggest obstacles she has faced and overcome.  Mary responded from her own experience the need to forgive violence she experienced as a child; and then told about how God had, unknown to her, used a conference she had organized in the 1980s about the effects of nuclear weapons, to impact Ronald Reagan and start the beginning of Reagan’s pulling back from nuclear brinksmanship.  Today, Mary spoke to Jody’s class on Peace and Conflict Transformation about the cycle of violence.  Students and faculty have been deeply engaged. 

In Quaker Theology, we have modified the syllabus to begin from an experiential basis to ask what theological questions rise out of our experience.  Ben and Jody have invited the students to think over the last weeks and ask what mental images come to mind, and then share why they are important.  Some of the images:  “people being slashed in nearby homestead; young kids, displaced from their homes in Eldoret walking by my place to find refuge; people burning down houses and looting; members of parliament on TV pouring out their anger, seeking power; a young child in the hospital with an arrow sticking in him; a member of the church, home from Mombasa, asking for prayer because he was being sacked from his work in a hotel, and facing an unknown future; women being fallen on by soldiers, and young men and even old men (“wazee”) and being raped.”  One image was of “a man being slaughtered, the way one would slaughter a hen.” 

Even if the Annan peace efforts succeed today, and peace returns to the land, and all the hundreds of thousands of displaced were able to go back to their homes (many of which are, of course, burned), there would still be a tremendous need for trauma healing.  There is fear, distrust, and deep uncertainty because people who seemed to be friends so easily became enemies.  What theological questions does all this raise? 

This is a testing time for the church in Kenya.  Will we be able to be bearers of Good News that is deep enough to bring healing and hope to those who have been traumatized, and reconciliation to those who have experienced the reality of enmity?  Will you pray for a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit? 

In the midst of these extraordinary circumstances, normal life also continues.  We are making progress on the design of a new administration building, and wrapping up final details on the new Meetinghouse.   To continue to pursue “normalcy” is a part of living the Kingdom of God in these times—proclaiming hope that God plans for a good future for Kenya.

Thank you for your prayers, and support.

Jody and Ben Richmond

Comfort ye, My people: a sermon

[26] And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
[27] To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. [28] And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
[29] And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
[30] And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. [31] And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. [32] He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: [33] And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
[34] Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
[35] And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. [36] And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. [37] For with God nothing shall be impossible.
[38] And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

- Luke 1:26-28 (KJV)

This is the story that’s come down to us of how the Virgin Mary came to conceive the Child Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Matthew, Mark and John are silent on this visit from the Angel, though in Matthew the Angel appears to Joseph in a dream after the conception of Jesus (Matthew 1:20-21). But a version very similar to Luke’s, accepted by Muslims the world over, is given in the Qur’an (3:42-51):

[Mary] said: “O my Lord! How shall I have a son when no man hath touched me?”
He said: “Even so: God createth what He willeth: when He hath decreed a Plan, He but saith to it, ‘Be,’ and it is!” – Al-i-’Imran, 47 (Yusuf ‘Ali, tr.)

Christians and Muslims disagree on some very fundamental things, but the great point in both the Christian story and the Muslim story is that with God nothing shall be impossible, to which I can only say, Hallelujah, and Amen. I pray that men, women and children everywhere might come to have trust in God’s power, particularly now, at this time when all life on earth seems threatened by man-made global warming and industrial pollution, when whole societies are threatened by the AIDS epidemic, when the United States Government has gotten itself into an unstoppable-seeming war in Iraq and might now even get us into another one with Iran, when you and I may be struggling with an unconquerable-seeming addiction, an intractable sorrow, an incurable disease, a mountain of debt – yet God loves us, and with God nothing shall be impossible. Let us pray for faith in God, and if we need more, let’s pray for more faith, as the disciples did (Luke 17:5). And God will answer our prayer in the way that’s best for us.

I want to take us from the situation of Mary to our situation. Consider Mary’s position as an unmarried pregnant teenager in a society that might stone (Deut. 22:21-24) or burn (Lev. 21:9) such girls to death, who in spite of that risk said to the angel, “let it be unto me according to thy word. ” Are we ready to take such a risk to have Christ born in our own heart? Because that’s what the celebration of Christmas is about, Christ in us, or else it’s about nothing, a crucified dead body that had no effect on us. Fortunately, the Lord is not asking us to take Mary’s risk; but He is standing at the door of our heart, and knocking (Rev. 3:20), asking us to let Him in.

What happens when we let Him in? What does it mean to invite the Holy Spirit to make us conceive, and become pregnant with Christ-in-us, and become, as the 18th-century Rhode Island Quaker Job Scott put it, the mothers of Christ? [see his Essays on Salvation by Christ, Quaker Heritage Press, 1993.]

It sounds weird, doesn’t it? But it’s no weirder, no harder than Jesus’ “hard saying” that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood (John 6: 32-60) if we want to dwell in Him and have Him dwell in us. This is the impossible thing that is possible with God: that we say “yes” and then let Christ grow in us, till our own proud, fearful, vengeful, desperate, envious, lust-driven, control-hungry animal becomes tame and cooperative with its rightful Master. Slowly, and with effort on our own part (though it is really God working in us, Philippians 2:12), we come to be born again (or, as the Greek may also be translated, “born from above,” John 3:3), so that even in this life we may become incapable of falling back into sin (1 John 3:9).

Then instead of making a fool of ourselves trying to show off our own cleverness and our own righteousness, we may open our mouths and speak forth Christ’s wisdom and Christ’s lovingkindness. Some people may still think we’ve made a fool of ourselves, of course, but someone who hears the words from our mouth will recognize them as the witness of God, for God does not waste effort (Isaiah 55:11: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it”).

Or if we are timid and lack courage, we may be surprised to find the courage of Christ rise up in us when we need it, and allow us to do and say things we’d never have thought ourselves capable of. Or if we’re easily angered, we may find a great calm settling over us – the peace of Christ – just in the very situation where we’d be most likely to fly into a rage. Are we restless and distracted and unable to concentrate? Christ’s one-pointedness will be ours the moment it’s needed. Does it depress us that our good will, attractive qualities and natural abilities are going unrecognized by an unappreciative world? Christ recognizes them and knows how best to use them. And at the end, when all our gifts are stripped away and we lie helplessly dying, Christ our Life (John 1:4, 9, 12-13; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 3:3-4) will be understood to have become Christ our very Self, the Vine in whom we have been branches (John 15), in Whom, and only in Whom, we have eternal life in oneness with God (John 17:3, 20-24).

This is what Paul called “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). I pray that men, women and children of all faith traditions discover it and rejoice in it, whether or not they ever adopt Christian language to describe it in. But Christ Jesus, who wills that all people should be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) and takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11) knows how to reach everyone that does not let himself or herself be unreachable.

I have prayed that I might be given words to touch your hearts, that might convey the Gospel, not just the Gospel that is the story of Jesus, but the Gospel that is the power of God to salvation (Romans 1:16, 1 Corinthians 1:17-18). With this Gospel comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God (Isaiah 40:1).

Preached at Manhattan Meeting, New York City, 12/16/2007