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Last Sunday, Daniel Smith-Christopher gave a sermon, "Disciples of the Sacred Story Tellers," at Reedwood Friends Church, that touched on, among other things, one of the recurring contrasts in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible:
We're all familiar with many of the difficult and troubling and sometimes violent attitudes in some of the passages of the Old Testament. It's why so many people have asked me over the years, "Old Testament! What's a Quaker doing studying and teaching the Old Testament? Aren't you a bit out of place?"
I enjoy sharing my thoughts as to why I don't think I am out of place at all. So, here's the strangely compelling part: sacred storytellers whose names we will never know in each case, sacred storytellers in the Old Testament seemed to keep offering gentle, loving, sometimes compassionate stories in the face of terribly violent texts.
Daniel gave several examples of the way the Bible's storytellers provided this kind of contrasting content alongside some of the warnings of divine violence coming from various biblical prophets. See the video; he gives three interesting examples of prophets and storytellers.
It seems to me that this fits in with the divine dialogue that the Bible invites us into. That dialogue is what I try to enter into when I am particularly challenged by something in the Bible, something that seems contradictory or strange, something that I just don’t understand. Sometimes the participants in the dialogue are the biblical record and me, and sometimes I’m imagining a dialogue between different voices in the Bible itself.
In this post, my example of contrasting messages compares the psalms of praise and the warnings of the prophet Amos. Fifteen psalms include the imperative verb Hallelu (that is, "praise") followed by a short version of God’s name, Yah: so, Hallelujah. The last five psalms in the Bible are all part of this group of Psalms, but they vary in their descriptions of whom they’re asking to praise God, including the monsters of the deep sea. Psalm 150 keeps it simple … where, why, and how to praise:
Psalm 150
1 Praise the Lord.
Praise God in God’s sanctuary;
praise God in God’s mighty heavens.
2 Praise God for God’s acts of power;
praise God for God’s surpassing greatness.
3 Praise God with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise God with the harp and lyre,
4 praise God with timbrel and dancing,
praise God with the strings and pipe,
5 praise God with the clash of cymbals,
praise God with resounding cymbals.
6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord.
On a Sunday last spring, one of our Camas Friends Church attenders gave a brief opening message, what we call the "First Word," and his text for that message was one of these last five praise psalms. As he read that psalm with dignity and reverence, I felt like a thirsty cactus getting a needed rainshower. If there’s one temptation some of us Quakers sometimes give in to, it’s the temptation to overthink things. Sometimes maybe we just need to let go and praise.
(By the way, that First Word speaker also talked about the reason we praise. It's not because God has an inferiority complex and needs our reassurance that the Creator of the Universe really is the Supreme Being. Now God might demand that we must not look for other gods, idols, and cultish substitutes, but goodness knows we can praise with our lips while drifting away with our souls. At our best, we praise because that is the soul’s natural response to the gift of life. If we’re responding to our being loved into existence by God, and, as Spokane Friends' John Kinney says, we realize that the stones will be rolled away from our own tombs as well as Jesus’s, our gratitude as expressed in praise seems like a natural and unforced expression.)
Contrast this imperative of praise in the psalms with what Amos is saying in the mid 700’s BC. Maybe you remember the context here: Amos has been reading the riot act to the people of Israel, particularly to the Northern Kingdom, accusing them of the same crimes of idolatry and oppression that he has seen in the surrounding Gentile nations, and saying that God demands the same purity and the same ethical standards of all of them, Israelites and Gentiles alike. He warns Israel that the woes that will fall on those Gentiles will also fall on his own audience. You can’t mock God. Judge for yourself:
Amos 5:12-24
12 For I know how many are your offenses
and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes
and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.
13 Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,
for the times are evil.
14 Seek good, not evil,
that you may live.
Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you,
just as you say God is.
15 Hate evil, love good;
maintain justice in the courts.
Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy
on the remnant of Joseph.
16 Therefore this is what the Lord, the Lord God Almighty, says:
“There will be wailing in all the streets
and cries of anguish in every public square.
The farmers will be summoned to weep
and the mourners to wail.
17 There will be wailing in all the vineyards,
for I will pass through your midst,”
says the Lord.
18 Woe to you who long
for the day of the Lord!
Why do you long for the day of the Lord?
That day will be darkness, not light.
19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him.
20 Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—
pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?
21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
I wonder if you were as struck as I was by the apparent condemnation of the praises commanded in David’s time and now banished from Amos’s gloomy vision. The God of Amos doesn’t appreciate their festivals and assemblies. “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.” This seems to me to be clearly a different voice.
By the way, it does not scandalize me that the Bible has voices that don't always agree with each other. The Bible is much more credible to me with these awkward juxtapositions than it would be if some ancient public relations copy-editors had made sure that nothing odd stuck out at us from these sixty-six-plus books. The Bible was compiled by a mixed process of prayer and church politics, and the end product did not conceal the different sources and different points of view of the authors. I believe that the Scriptures are God-inspired, as Paul said to Timothy, but God’s inspiration acts in the assembly process as well as in the writing process, and takes full advantage of the varieties of human temperament.
Along with Amos’s impatience with pious sacrifices and praises, he has some interesting things to say about “the Day of the Lord.” Quakers have traditionally had two related interpretations of this phrase. One concerns the end of history, when the Lamb of God has the victory, when redemption rules, and the New Jerusalem is revealed. The other is our individual Day of the Lord, our Day of Visitation, our invitation to accept or reject God’s free offer of grace and redemption. Most early Quaker theologians assumed that this offer would be made to everyone, whether or not they had had outward access to the Christian gospel. In other words, culture and geography were not barriers to salvation. (See the quotation from Robert Barclay here.)
Amos paints the Day of the Lord with his usual gloomy colors. “Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord. Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?” This is Israel’s destiny if they do not give up the sin and injustice he spends nine chapters condemning. There is an alternative in these same verses: “Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say God is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.” This is the boundary line between Amos’s stern gloom and the promise of the New Jerusalem and its life of praise: We won’t just say God is with us, and assume that nothing needs to change, but we will wake up to the reality that following God has content and consequences, so that, if we have anything to do with it, justice will roll on like a river and righteousness like an everlasting stream.
What does that justice and righteousness look like? Here's a glimpse from George Fox’s experience of what he called the "restoration." (Page 27 of his Journal, Nickalls edition.)
Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell.
In case you think that Fox was referring to himself as a special case, he has some specific instances of what this will look like for everyone in the restoration—for example, specifically for men and women:
[Speaking to the men, now… same Journal, p. 667]
And thy ruling over thy wife and eldership [over her] is in the Fall [that is, the capital-F Fall of Adam and Eve], for thou art in the transgression and not an elder in the image of God and righteousness and holiness, before transgression and the Fall was, nor in the restoration where they are helps-meet in the righteousness and image of God, and in the dominion over all that God made. …
And on p. 668,
I was moved of the Lord to recommend to Friends, for the benefit and advantage of the Church of Christ, that the faithful women who were called to the belief of the Truth, being made partakers of the same precious faith, and heirs of the same everlasting Gospel of life and salvation as the men are, might in like manner come into the possession and practice of the Gospel order, and therein be meet-helps unto the men in the restoration, in the service of Truth, in the affairs of the Church, as they are outwardly. That so all the family of God, in civil, or temporal things, women as well as men, might know, possess, perform, and discharge their offices and services in the house of God, whereby … all the members of the spiritual body, the Church, might watch over and be helpful to each other in love.
Fox has a fascinating understanding of what the Day of the Lord means here. At some time, the whole of creation will be like this, but we are not to wait! We ourselves are to go back through the flaming sword. When we ourselves experience all things being made new, and the creation giving forth a new smell, beyond what our words can utter, we will have a sense of what right praise is, and I predict that we will give way to it with great freedom and joy. The world is a long way from this New Jerusalem, and it may certainly be that our beloved, suffering planet will undergo a time of darkness as Amos predicted for Israel. (See "The long defeat, part one.") Darkness seems to be descending in various places even now. But at this very time, maybe it is given to us, and to faithful communities everywhere, to live out a discipleship of justice and righteousness, just as Amos said we might and must.
What does that discipleship look like in the community? What steps do we take so that, in George Fox’s words, “all the members of the spiritual body, the Church, might watch over and be helpful to each other in love”?
Eighteen years ago I taught a course in American studies at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal. The photo shows me in front of the class, with a diagram of the life cycle of a movement.
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On the first day of the class, I gave my very oversimplified theory of history to the students: History is something like a constant debate between idealists and skeptics, or to put it another way, between optimists and cynics.
Whether it’s in the councils of state or in your typical church fights, they’re usually guaranteed to get on each other’s nerves. I think in the short run, skeptics usually win, but in the longer run, idealists have a fighting chance to prevail, if you’ll excuse the expression. In any case, when the idealists and the skeptics actually meet and converse, they have a real opportunity to bless each other. Each one, no matter how crazy or sensible, centrist or extreme, an ecstatic praise-giver or a gloomy prophet, is a child of God, and if they can, even for a moment, glimpse that of God in each other, they can move closer, together, to that river of justice and righteousness that, deep inside, both of them want.
This blog post is partly based on a message I gave at Spokane Friends Meeting last spring.
Two items from Facebook... Colin South, former director of the Ramallah Friends School, writes to the Israeli embassy in London and to the Israeli prime minister. And David Goode passed along this interesting item from Brian Drinkwine: little Charlies or little Christs?
Timothy Snyder on the virtues of a certain movie superhero. (I may have to see the film after all.)
Kristin Du Mez on life on the eve of finishing a book-length manuscript. (Includes some good links.)
"Walk in Beauty": Remarks by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at Fordham University last Tuesday.
In the courtyard of the high priest's house, Peter denies knowing Jesus but is unmasked by his own Galilean accent. In a classic post by our late friend Stan Thornburg, he wonders whether we Christians have lost our accent.
Ever get this feeling? "No Rest." Chris O'Leary Band.
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