Friends as a "Chosen People" - Continued -- 5
V. The Care And Feeding of Peoplehood
I’ve been reflecting some more on how I came to this idea of studying peoplehoood. I mentioned finding that 1660 pamphlet which spoke of Quakers as a people five times in the first paragraph; but I now think the genesis of this leading came earlier, at Pendle Hill.
I had two research interns working with me then on the recent history of the Quaker peace witness, and a comparison of Quaker peace work with that of the Mennonites and Brethren. One of these interns prepared a detailed chronology of all the Quaker peace work we could find out about in the twentieth century. One reason I wanted to have this chronology was because I have often felt discouraged about Quaker peace work, especially with the decline of the 60s style activist movement, and after ordeals like the Gulf War.
But when the chronology was done, we found that it ran to 60 pages, single spaced, and it showed that the Quaker peace testimony has been and continues to be an amazingly fertile source of, productive, varied, creative work, and often courageous witness. Furthermore, while the Mennonites and Brethren have done some excellent work in this field, our comparison suggested that Quakers, though there are far fewer of us than there are Mennonites and Brethren, have done more peace activities in this century than both of these other peace churches put together. At least so far.
Now this information, which had not been collected before, left me feeling more encouraged about Quaker peace work. But it did more than that. It was a key in sparking my suspicion that there was more involved here than just a worthy tradition. It persuaded me that there was something living here, something beyond and underlying individual achievement.
Maybe I can compare it to a fertile plot of land planted with hardy perennial flowers. When winter comes, a particular plant may wither; but when spring returns, a new stalk of the same variety will appear, different and yet similar. (Or think of Paul’s root that supports us in Romans 11:18.).
That’s a pretty good metaphor; but the main biblical image for what I thought I was perceiving here was the experience of a chosen people, or "peoplehood," so that’s the concept I felt needed to be explored further.
Now, if my notion that Friends are one of God’s chosen peoples has any validity for Friends, and let’s suppose for the moment that it does, I’d like to spend this last section looking at some passages which relate to the care and feeding of a peoplehood. Because if the story of the chosen peoples of the Bible shows us anything, it is that these people can’t take their condition and success for granted.
So first I’d like us to look at Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is the longest psalm, with a section for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, for a total of 176 verses. But don’t worry–we’re only going to look at one section, for the letter Mem, from verses 97-104:
"Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.
Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me.
I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes.
I have more understanding than the elders, for I obey your precepts.
I have kept my feet from every evil path so that I might obey your word.
I have not departed from your laws, for you yourself have taught me.
How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!
I gain understanding from your precepts; therefore I hate every wrong path."
This passage doesn’t lay down any rules, but it expresses an attitude that I’m trying to get at, an attitude that I think is very important to the survival and health of a chosen people, and that attitude can be summed up in two words:
Heritage matters.
The Law, remember was part of the heritage, the gifts that God gave to the Israelites when they became the chosen people. And the law was not just rules, which is why this passage uses so many different words for them.
Now the biblical heritage is also our heritage too; but we have our own special inheritance as well; Quaker history, Quaker ways, Quaker testimonies. These are worth meditating on, too. Their meaning and application change with time and circumstance and continuing revelation. To stay vital, they need to be both celebrated and reexamined, as well as lived.
Next are two pieces of advice from Jesus, in Matthew. First, 5:13-16:
"You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."
Or to summarize: Don’t hide your lamp under a bushel.
Doing so is one of the besetting Quaker sins. In too many places we are, de facto, the Secret Society of Friends. And as we work to put our lamp on a lampstand, the other advice comes from considering the public activity that Jesus did most of as recorded in the gospels. Anybody know what that was?
He told stories. We Bible scholars call them parables, makes them sound more important and weighty. There’s a list of Jesus’ parables in my study Bible, and the total is 51. They have another list of his miracles, and there are only 33 of them.
Now I haven’t found any place where Jesus actually commands his followers to tell stories. But it says in Matthew 13:34 that Jesus never missed telling a story when he was speaking to the multitudes. If Jesus’ example has any value for us, and I believe it does, I also believe that this is a big part of it: tell our stories!
After all, this is a part of Jesus’ work that’s within our grasp. I don’t know how to work a miracle. But I can tell a passable story. And so can you.
And so should we. Because if Quakerism is rich in anything, it is rich in wonderful, compelling, witnessing stories. And so many of them, shamefully, are untold. This is another contemporary Quaker vice. Most of us have heard a few tales about George Fox, or Elizabeth Fry visiting prisoners or Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad, and maybe a few others.
But I want to suggest to you that not all the best, most renewing Quaker stories are about people who lived two or three hundred years ago. Next time you’re in meeting, look around you – unless you’re alone, I guarantee the room is full of valuable, uplifting Quaker stories. Many of the others in the room will be there because they were trying to bear a Quaker a peace witness. Others were there because they have been through great personal suffering of one kind or another and found healing and hope through the working of the spirit.
These are not only personal experiences, they are stories. And telling these stories, to each other, to our children, to newcomers, and as way opens out in the world, is one of the most important ways of keeping the people called Quakers alive and well.
There’s more to this, which we really don’t have time for. But I want to quickly point to a couple of the passages which I believe offer important insights about the care and feeding of peoplehood:
This next one applies especially for our public witness; it’s Matthew 10:16
"Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."
To me this is one of the most important pieces of counsel Jesus offered, and it has a special relevance to Friends. I know many Quakers, and many meetings, who concentrate on the second part, trying to be harmless as doves, to the near-total exclusion of the first, being wise as serpents. I could give lots of embarrassing examples, because I did investigative reporting about Quakers for eleven years, and never ran out of material.
My experience confirms that Jesus knew what he was talking about: if you don’t pay attention to being wise as serpents in preparing for your individual and corporate witness, you don’t get to be harmless as doves. You can even end up doing more harm than good.
And next, there’s the one of Jesus’ statements that may be the hardest for many liberal Friends to hear, and you’ll find that in Matthew 16:24, though it’s repeated in lots of other places as well:
"Then Jesus said to his disciples, if anyone would come after me, he (or she) must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."
Now, I’m not a literalist about this, so if you have trouble with the crucifixion and resurrection and all that, fine, I’m not here to insist that you "believe" all that. In my experience, the cross works just as well as an archetype, an analogy, or a pattern of existence: You can even substitute for it a phrase like, say, "Deal with your problems," and that’s close enough.
What I think is relevant here, though, is that the cross comes to us not only individually, but as part of our peoplehood too. The history of the Jews provides the most vivid example of this: for two thousand years, people have been hated and persecuted and killed not because of any personal deed or misdeed, but simply because they were part of this people. The same has been true of Friends in the past, and we shouldn’t forget that. I don’t see such persecution on the near horizon, but you never know. After all, in the summer of 1990, I never expected that we’d face the Gulf War by year’s end, and that was a cross indeed.
In the meantime, there are lower order crosses to bear, some of them specifically Quaker ones. The work of keeping our meetings going, especially without a paid professional clergy to look after all the machinery, is one. Organizationally, I think Friends must hold the record for reinventing the wheel. (I’ve heard it said that you could get a liberal Quaker meeting to try anything, even human sacrifice, provided that it’s described as only an "experiment.")
So today a Quaker’s cross may look more like an endless string of committee meetings. And when you hear of a monthly meeting paralyzed for months or even years over an issue like same sex marriage, that’s one way the cross is coming to them.
So as far as the cross is concerned, like I say, I don’t bother much about whether we "believe" in it or not; I just hope we’ll get ready to carry ours when it comes, because it will.
And finally, I believe it’s important for us a people to keep our eyes on the prize. Jesus said it in Matthew (Maybe Matthew is really the Quaker gospel...) at 6:33: "Seek first God’s kingdom and its righteousness...." And what’s the prize? What does the kingdom look like?
One of the most haunting evocations of it is in Isaiah, 11:6-9, which begins: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them."
One of the most appealing visions of this Peaceable Kingdom is that of Edward Hicks, the Quaker painter who couldn’t stop seeing it and trying to make it visible. There’s something quintessentially Quaker about these works: they’re at the same time both impossibly naive, and to me at least, utterly convincing and irresistible, and I’ve seen almost all of them.
Well, there’s more of this that we could explore profitably, but this is enough advice giving for one essay. However you slice it, the care and feeding of peoplehood is an ongoing task, and one which I believe will mold our future as Friends.
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