At Monday's unveiling of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile, director Željko Ivezić promised,
... At the end of presentation you will get the link [to this site/application] and then you can spend the rest of your day enjoying these ten million galaxies.
Ivezić made this promise as he presented stunning initial images from the Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope and its world-record-sized digital camera. In the hour and a half news conference I linked above ("Monday's unveiling"), his wonderful presentation, given with both awe and humor, starts here. If you are a space or cosmology nerd or a fan of science journalism, you'll want to see all of the rest of this video, but if not, Scientific American has done you a great service by summarizing the presentation, and selecting several shorter videos, in their article, "Majestic First Images from Rubin Observatory Show Universe in More Detail Than Ever Before."
Most news headlines these days don't give us much joy, but I found this Rubin Observatory presentation and press conference, clunky as it was in places, very inspiring. Željko Ivezić's enthusiasm, and the heartfelt comments from the news conference panel (question-and-answer portion starts here), gave a wonderful human dimension to an otherwise tech-heavy theme and the staggering cosmic scale of the images themselves.
You might ask what distinguishes this earth-bound observatory from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes in space. Those amazing space tools can focus on very specific places, at distances that take us close to the apparent origins of our universe. The Rubin Observatory, on the other hand, will photograph the entire sky that's visible on its mountain, through full revolutions of the earth, over and over. These high-resolution images will be compiled over a ten-year period. Scientists and other viewers worldwide will be able to gain access to the images, including celestial movements and changes, and evidences of dark matter and dark energy. The compilation is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Here's how it compares to other astronomical survey projects and catalogs, but one of its main advantages is simply the combination of the unprecedented speed of its repeating image-capturing cycles, without losing high resolution.
Rubin in 1963 using Kitt Peak National Observatory's 36-inch telescope with Kent Ford's image tube spectrograph attached. (Source and description.)
Instead of spending the last two days just looking at ten million galaxies, I've enjoyed reading about Vera Rubin and some of her contemporary colleagues, such as Kent Ford, Geoffrey Burbridge, Margaret Burbridge ... and following up some of the numerous links on their Wikipedia pages.
In case you see politics in everything, as I tend to do, notice that several of the initial speakers in the long video puffed the USA's role as the world leader in science. That made it all the more interesting to notice the incredible variety of immigrants, international participants, cultures, and languages involved in the Rubin Observatory program.
It's also interesting to note that the press conference press handler turned away a question about future funding in light of federal budget cuts. (One earlier projection estimated running costs of $40 million per year.)
Now, back to the images .... Or as Željko Ivezić says, "Warp One, engage!"
A few more words about the Rubin Observatory: here are the project's four main science goals.
"Racist is a tough little word," wrote linguist John McWhorter in The Atlantic. "Many of us think its meaning is obvious, but it has evolved quite a bit from its original signification over the past several decades."
What would you say? What are useful current definitions of "racism," "systemic racism," and "racist," based on your own experience or on sources you trust and recommend? In a brief survey, I'd like to ask you five questions that may help me write a related blog post, but, if that happens, nobody's comments will be attributed without permission.
Citing COVID-19 restrictions dating to 2020, city authorities in Moscow are not allowing protests (not even single-person picketing) at the site of the restored Joseph Stalin sculpture at Metro station Taganskaya. It reminds me of the scandal that surrounded restoration of a quotation lauding Stalin in the rotunda of Kurskaya station back in 2009, a time when we often passed through that station. (You can see part of that quotation in my photo: "Stalin raised us to be faithful to the people, and he inspired us to work and to perform great deeds.") Back in 2009, protesting didn't seem to be all that risky.
An urgent question (and an offer of practical resources for local Friends meetings) from Wess Daniels: Who gave us Guilford College?
Joseph and his brothers: Tom Gates continues his series on Quakers and the end of scapegoating.
Micah Bales on the Gerasenes and their unhappy reaction to a healing. (Context: Luke 8:26-39.) And how would we react?
Our reading this morning leaves us with no doubt: Healing is hard. True healing disrupts as much as it restores. The transformation that Jesus brings ripples out from those who are being healed to touch the whole fabric of society. When we get healed, we’ll find ourselves in a new kind of trouble. Holy trouble.
“One thing that I just don’t vibe with in modern American society – there’s an entire thing about safety. And I’ve lived my life in a way that safety was the last thing that I would care about,” she said. “This is a thing I think about a lot lately. We need to be less safe, be ready to offend ourselves and other people. Otherwise, Maga people are just going to keep winning, because they’re not afraid.”
At least the second time I've ended with this clip: Gino Matteo and Jason Ricci ... "I need Jesus to walk with me."
Sierra-Cascades founding session (2017, George Fox University); and 2018's annual session (Canby, Oregon).
In my first Stepping out of the boat post, I gave a personal account of our new Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting's early development as an independent Quaker association of churches.
Among the tasks still ahead of us (I said at the time) was the development of a book of discipline—a book that many yearly meetings call Faith and Practice. Such books often combine content that helps express the spiritual commitments and culture of the community, with content that describes organizational details and processes.
Six years later, we are still working on how we will describe our spiritual values in this book of discipline. However, several of our committees have been hard at work developing polices and practices that will eventually be collected in our book, so our overall progress is encouraging. And our experiences and mistakes as a yearly meeting—and as individual churches—are also contributing to our task, as we build our to-do list of areas we need to work on. For example, we have done a lot of work on the recognition and recording of ministers, but have not done as well as we would like in supporting our existing pastors and others who offer public ministry.
In that earlier post, I summarized the balance that we (at least in my personal view) seek in daring to describe our spiritual culture and commitments:
Step two, building our identity: Here we really had to decide whether we as a body were in fact walking toward Jesus. Some of our churches are uncomplicatedly and unaffectedly Christian, culturally indistinguishable from other evangelical Friends congregations, except for the refusal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. None of our meetings identify as non-Christian, but some have more experience providing spiritual hospitality to people who have survived encounters with authoritarian religiosity. Those churches are particularly careful not to use Christian language in ways that could come across as glib and domineering. At our Canby sessions, this issue came up in considering what to require of applicants for membership. Rather than asking applicants to use specific language about themselves, we agreed to describe who we are—a Christ-centered community—and leave it up to applicants to decide whether this kind of community was something they wanted to join.
After a number of false starts and after many, many conversations, here is a sneak preview of what our Faith and Practice Committee will lay before our 2024 gathering in eight days. Among our challenges to ourselves: we wanted to draw on the values we explicitly expressed in our founding years' business minutes, and we wanted to be brief and use plain English. I'd be glad to hear your comments, and to know that you'll be praying for us as we consider this latest draft:
Your Faith and Practice Committee proposes the following paragraphs as an introduction to the draft Faith and Practice we will be compiling with your help. We plan to present it (with some background information) on Friday of our annual gathering, with time scheduled for your comments on Saturday.
The Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends is a voluntary association of Quaker meetings, churches, and individuals whose worship, ministry, and service are centered in Christ, guided by Quaker testimonies and experience, and committed to the full participation of LGBTQ+ people in all aspects of the life and leadership of the Yearly Meeting. We see these three values as interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
We understand the Quaker testimonies as a call:
to live simply and sustainably;
to seek nonviolent responses to conflict, and refuse participation in war and preparation for war;
to speak the truth and keep our promises;
to make common decisions based on our community’s practice of prayer and discernment rather than majority rule or force of personality;
to regard each other—and all people—with a commitment to equality and equity, rejecting all false distinctions based on social, cultural, or economic status;
in the wider world, to support, advocate, and initiate efforts toward peace, justice, care of Creation, and relief of suffering in ways that are consistent with these testimonies;
in all things, to put Love first.
As we set forth these values and commitments, we acknowledge that they are to some extent aspirational, not an inventory of our successes as of today.
We also understand that we have a variety of faith languages and experiences among us. We do not require of each other, or of newcomers, any standard interpretation or test to be part of our community. We are committed to listening and learning together, building trust in God and each other through the ways that we worship, conduct business, guard each other’s reputations, and resolve conflicts tenderly.
Anyone who feels drawn to our community based on these values and testimonies, and the ways we live them, will be joyfully welcomed.
We keep hearing new reports of people in Russia getting arrested for what seem like almost trivial expressions of dissent. The British organization Rights in Russia has a new program to support dissenters in prison: Write to Russia. And Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen talks about the consequences of getting onto one of those punitive official lists ("foreign agents" and worse) in this episode of the radio program This American Life. "Act Two," Gessen's part begins at 32:35. Thanks to Norma Silliman for the link.
"To me, writing is listening." Friends Journal's Sharlee DiMenichi interviews Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2023.
A Live Coal (Isaiah 6:1-8): Ashley Wilcox's message last Sunday at the celebration of the recording of Wess Daniels as a Friends minister.
Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston, USA, is looking for a Program and Engagement Manager. If interested, look into it right away; they'd love for this new staffer to begin this summer. Much of this person's responsibilities were among the things I did when I was on the staff of Beacon Hill Friends House back in the late 1970's.
Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Roman Catholic calendar and some other confessions as well. This feast reminded me of the years of protests that were set off when the U.S. Navy decided to name a nuclear submarine Corpus Christi. I mentioned those protests in this post: Worship and protest.
Here's a rerun, a video we used in class in Elektrostal. Wonder if we could do this now....
THE Truth of God, being received into the inward parts, is found to be of a living, powerful nature, working mightily there for the cleansing and redeeming of the hearts. Yea, this is certainly witnessed, that as the mind joined to deceit is thereby defiled, so the mind joined to the truth of God is, by its power and virtue, purified.
Now, having felt this, and being filled with the love and good-will of God to the souls of others, how can we but testify it to others, who stand in need of God's truth (and its cleansing property and virtue) as well as we; especially being thereunto moved and drawn by the Spirit of the Lord?
— Isaac Penington, published posthumously in 1680; source. (My italics.)
In our meeting, we're frightfully private.
— Member of an unprogrammed meeting in Britain Yearly Meeting.
Yesterday I had my second cataract surgery this year, and I'm still getting used to the results. To reduce screen time on blog night, the solution is obvious: repackage an old post. So the second half of this post is an item I published back in 2016, near the beginning of our last academic year in Russia.
What reminded me of that post, "Barriers," was a conversation just a week ago with a British Friend. We were talking about whether Friends in her meeting felt freedom to reveal their faith. From her comments I gathered that, whatever the reasons, this kind of sharing rarely took place.
It may have been small comfort, but I replied that this sort of diffidence was not unique to unprogrammed Friends. (For a brief definition of "unprogrammed," see the sidebar here.) I particularly remember our beloved First Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, forty years ago, discussing how to grow their rapidly-shrinking congregation. "What we need are young couples," someone said. (I'm sure I've told this story before!) My internal reaction was, "No!" What they needed was more confidence in their identity as God's people. It was a congregation with many mature disciples who had done amazing things with their lives. We found out accidentally that one of the harmless-looking older members had been a worker for racial justice in the South in the late 1940's! We were in great sympathy with the Sunday school teacher who asked those older Friends, "Some of you have been Quakers for 60 years—why can't you tell us more about why you became Friends and what you've learned about God in those years?" One of the answers she got was, "Our generational culture is very private."
In the first generation of the Quaker movement, there was little or no social incentive to be among us; you'd be risking legal danger and possibly mob violence, and you'd certainly earn the disapproval of the religious establishment. Either direct experience of God's power, or the desire to be among people who persuasively testified to such a direct experience, might overcome those dangers and lead you to throw in your lot with those despised Quakers.
What attracts people to us now? I've known Friends who reflect this same power, joy, and convincing conduct, but in my experience, our most attractive feature for many is a social atmosphere of gracious idealism and doctrinal vagueness that draws in seekers who are much like the people already among us. There are variations, of course; some of our churches echo the cliches of the (American) evangelical culture, but however pointed the preaching may be, the ethical consequences of that preaching (discipleship, or if you prefer, the Quaker testimonies) are often weak or absent altogether. If this seems unfair, let me know! (And what drew you?)
One explanation for our reluctance to testify to a powerful faith might be that we simply aren't experiencing the spiritual outpouring that shaped the first generations of Friends. The torch has been passed to others in the Christian movement who are living out a reality that we'd rather read about at a safe distance, for example in quaint ancient Quakerese.
But there's another explanation that may be less pessimistic. We have developed a barrier, an inhibition, that keeps our mouths shut. Maybe, if we dared, we might be free to share words and deeds (according to our gifts and temperaments, and always subject to the discipline of knowing when to speak and when to listen!) that would convey the love of God and the demands of justice.
I'll leave it at that. Here, with some minor edits, is that original "Barriers" post.
"How can I explain something to you if you don't even watch TV?" A meme found on vk.com (original scene from late-era Soviet film Heart of a Dog, which I recommend).
When I was around eight years old, the subject of God came up one day in my grade school classroom. (There weren't the same restrictions on God-talk in public school then that there are now; that's another discussion.) Our teacher said, "Why should we be afraid to talk about God?" I was startled and panicky—in fact I was afraid to talk about God, and couldn't even imagine making my mouth emit the word.
I made a mental note of this reaction, but didn't analyze it at the time. Later, I connected it with the fact that, in my family, any mention of religion was absolutely forbidden, along with any mention of disease or death. Whatever the roots of this barrier, it blocked me from communicating with anyone about a huge part of what it means to be human.
Obviously, something happened between grade school and my decades of working for the church! But I'm glad that I remember that block. These memories came back to me the other day when I was talking with some colleagues about expanding our students' access to informal English-speaking opportunities. "Some of my students do a great job with grammar and vocabulary," said one colleague. "But when it comes to speaking in a group, they just can't open their mouths. There's that old psychological barrier."
These young people aren't exactly facing the same barrier in speaking English as I encountered in talking about God. (Or, rather, not talking about God.) There's no actual danger in overcoming the language barrier, but there are several hazards in crossing into God-talk territory. For me as a child, there was a safety issue within the family. But, on another level entirely, do we want it to become too easy to talk about God? Is there a place for some reluctance to become glib about the Ultimate?
We Quakers have a number of indirect ways of referring to divine realities—terms such as the Inward Light and the Seed, used generations ago to avoid an unseemly familiarity with holy realities, much as biblical Hebrew and its readers made substitutions for the Name. In my early years as a Friend, I remember hearing vocal ministry that referred to "the Author and Finisher of our faith" rather than naming Jesus explicitly. Nowadays Quaker terms such as Inward Light can mistakenly be used in the service of weakening our ties with Christianity, but that old impulse to curb our verbosity when referring to God still seems valid to me.
Even so, "faith comes from hearing the message," so there is something to be said for not letting psychological barriers get in the way of that communication. Part of our evangelistic task might be to confront the false barrier of cultural piety. Are we marked by a gooey sentimentality, a cloud of goofy cliches, or any other signals that you must, to gain entrance, turn off your critical faculties?
In John Updike's novel Rabbit Is Rich, there is a fascinating scene where the Episcopal priest, Archie Campbell, attends a family meeting to discuss Nelson's and Pru's intended marriage. The minister mildly defends "our brand of magic" while everyone else is trying to negotiate how much or little churchiness is necessary to accomplish the desired outcome—a respectable wedding. Rabbit's own defense of faith is not exactly zero ("Hell, what I think about religion is ... is without a little of it, you'll sink") but the church-wedding discussion is mostly about appearances, not reality.
As long as it seems that the religion industry is just selling one or another form of respectability, people will find their "magic" elsewhere. And rightly so. Maybe it's not a psychological barrier that blocks the audience from yielding—maybe it's a healthy boundary!
What exactly is the alternative that evangelists with integrity are offering? I think that there is no formula, no doctrine, no scare tactic, no magic that equals meeting someone who looks at you with God's love in their eyes, who offers access to a community that is shaped by trust in God. Some people in that community will know how to communicate this invitation quietly, with an assurance that doesn't depend on using loaded words. Others will know how to communicate with contagious enthusiasm, with generous love that covers a multitude of incautious cliches. There are infinite variations on this spectrum, and somewhere in God's economy, they probably all meet some blocked person's condition.
Along my own route, several people and incidents helped me overcome the barrier. Studying Asian civilizations in high school introduced me to whole cultures not shaped by the assumptions of Western materialism. The anti-war movement brought me physically into churches for the first time in my life. (It wasn't as weird in a church as I thought it would be. Specifically, it was the Ebenezer A.M.E. Church in Evanston, Illinois.) My high-school fascination with writers such as Dostoevsky and Alan Paton played their part. But I remember a much earlier crack in the barrier: a tract I happened to pick up off the floor of our apartment building's lobby, not so long after the incident with the teacher. This tract described someone's conversion. In the process of getting to know God, this writer would walk way outside of their normal routes to pass a church that had Christ's name on it. That Name had such an attractive power for the writer. Hmmm, that's interesting, I thought. Even though I didn't understand or respond to that tract's invitation at the time, I somehow understood even then what the writer was feeling.
If I have any ability at all to represent the Gospel effectively, I believe that in part it's because I still vividly remember being a non-believer who couldn't even say the word "God." But I am not permitted to define my path or emphasis as the only one. I'm glad to share the responsibility of communicating God's welcome with many others, some of whom have very different approaches to removing barriers.
(Originally published on September 7, 2016. To date there's one comment, from the late Vail Palmer, referring to Adria Gulizia's then-new blog: "That blog about suffering and God's suffering with us is so profound. What else would a God who truly loves us be up to?")
Sam Adams (Slate) asks why A24 is burying its January 6 documentary.
The Fines have called their film nonpartisan, and in a less toxic political climate, its premise, that an election should not be disrupted by mobs in tactical gear assaulting law enforcement officers, ought to be one both sides could endorse without pause or equivocation. But....
“My power is great, greater than you believe, and I have gold and silver in abundance.” That was [Robert Bly's] Iron John’s promise to his acolyte. It is also Trump’s promise to MAGA and the manosphere. Thus do hordes of Redditers, Snapchatters, Xers, Instagrammers and sundry other amo-packing denizens of incel message boards feel the pain of the billionaire who now stands trial for hiding hush money payments to a porn star. And here, too, Trump will rely on truths Bly articulated decades ago — that much like infants, his followers will “refuse to remember ugly facts”, that they will “look away from disorganisation, abuse, abandonment."
Monday, July 3, by a resolution of Portland's city council, was Buddy Guy Day in Portland, Oregon. Most of us at the Waterfront Blues Festival didn't find out until the day was almost over--when the hour came for Buddy Guy's performance at the Festival.
His performance at our festival was billed as Portland's turn at hosting Buddy Guy's Damn Right Farewell Tour. If those 75 minutes were indeed part of a "farewell" series, he is ending his touring career strongly. He stood upright for the full performance, and aside from his blazing guitar work, he was up to his old tricks--playing his guitar with one hand, generating sounds with a drumstick, a towel, even his clothes, all with his trademark look-at-me smile or one finger pointed at the audience. All he left out was his walkabout among audience members. As usual, he rarely played and sang a song from beginning to end, preferring to merge one song into another, as long as it illustrated one of his constant concerns, to give credit to the legacy he felt privileged to carry on as one of the few remaining representatives of the generation that shaped this music.
As he tells Gary Graff in the guitarplayer.com article, he may not be saying an absolute farewell to us, even though he turns 87 this month. He may still play occasional festival, and I selfishly hope that Portland remains on his list. But this farewell tour seems as good an occasion as any to say "thank you."
Buddy Guy, Waterfront Blues Festival 2011.
Elsewhere on my blog I've talked about the music of Buddy Guy and his genre-defining contemporaries, and how important it was to me in my years of growing up in a racist and dysfunctional family atmosphere. The honesty and ecstasy that I heard in my earliest exposure to those musicians still came through to me in this year's festival, and for that I will be forever and unapologetically thankful.
Thank you, Buddy Guy, for the more than fifty years I've personally enjoyed your music, starting with your collaboration with Junior Wells. And thank you for helping me remember where and how this music came to be.
I'm on the road and need to post this, so just one link this week, from Mark Pratt-Russum with thoughts from our recent Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends annual sessions.
The cunning nature of Screwtape speaks to the twisted ways in which evil squirms into our lives, presenting as love, or service, but which actually has, at its root, some kind of self-fulfillment that requires the exploitation of another person’s labor, resources, culture, or humanity.
Here are some glimpses of this year's Waterfront Blues Festival. (All photos, whether good or fuzzy, are mine.)
William Barber, preaching his last regularly-scheduled sermon at Greenleaf Christian Church, referring to the book of Isaiah, says: "I bring justice in the earth through the broken. I bring justice in the earth through the bruised reeds." Screenshot from source.
Last month I promised to re-read John Yungblut's On Hallowing One's Diminishments. The promptings to do so keep piling up, so today I sat myself down to read it.
Among the diminishments John Yungblut discusses are bereavements. There have been a lot of those recently, inside and outside our extended family. In addition to Eden Grace (whose memorial meeting will be at the Cambridge Friends Center on July 22), we heard just three days ago that Lonnie Valentine died. Lonnie taught peace and justice studies at Earlham School of Religion for over 30 years, and there are people all over the world who consider him their mentor. A common theme of the comments following his unexpected death: It's hard to imagine life without Lonnie.
One way or another the grief must be expressed, the work of mourning accomplished, before one can get on with the business of living. If one cannot hallow the diminisment of bereavement by writing of it, one can bear witness to it with friends of the Spirit in an infinite variety of ways. But nothing can altogether relieve the pain that must be borne in solitude. — John Yungblut.
Yungblut also touches sensitively on the diminishments resulting from outward accident and the organic process of disease and aging. Personally I keep clinging to the not-altogether-fantasy that I'm very healthy, despite the fact that I need three specialists and eight daily pills in addition to my regular doctor. Maybe it's my curiosity about the future, as well as solidarity with friends and relatives, that has led me to participate in two long-term studies, one on Parkinson's and one on Alzheimer's.
Yungblut quotes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.
These words immediately called to mind William Barber's sermon of last Sunday, his last sermon as lead pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, USA. In the YouTube video of the service, the readings begin here, and the sermon begins here. (But I seriously recommend not skipping the part in between.)
Barber's theme: our disabilities (which I'm equating with Yungblut's "diminishments") do not disqualify us from being people of faith; in fact they serve God and us, in demonstrating God's power through us. "We work so hard to present how strong we are, and we think that’s faith.... God's grace and God's glory is most evident when we are weak."
Church people don't necessarily understand this, Barber says.
They don't understand. That's how God works. A bruised reed, [God] doesn't break it. Now if you go around religious folk and you're bruised, they'll break the hell out of you. ... But that's not how God is. That may be how you are, and you can live like that if that's what you want to do. But don't claim then to be Christian when you do that.
Barber goes a step further, and I see his logic even if I'm not sure I can follow him. He says that some people are "crippled by design." In the apostle Paul's case, for example:
Paul is crippled by design. He's crippled by the need for a spiritual governor. He has seen so much, and has been afforded by God so many revelations in the Holy Ghost that he can't afford to walk around in good health because he'd be too arrogant.
That gave me something to think about. Barber himself, diagnosed thirty years ago with ankylosing spondylitis, knows something about disability and constant pain. While sharing candidly about his life journey, he doesn't make himself out to be exceptional:
Every main character that you heard read [in the day's Scripture readings] from 2 Corinthians to Isaiah to Matthew to Samuel is crippled. Broken. Handicapped. Is that your story, too? Somewhere, in this room, there's not a person in here who does not have some crippling reality.
Returning to John Yungblut:
I saw that the first step for me in learning to "hallow" the progressive diminishments in store for me was a deep-going acceptance. But the acceptance would have to be a positive, not a negative one, if it were to be a real hallowing. I must learn to do something creative with it.
I practiced imagining acceptance of the diminishments as if they were the gift of a companion to accompany me on my way to the great diminishment, death. As one day my body should undergo "rigor mortis" I began to tell myself that the progessive Parkinsonian stiffening could be undergone as if it were a kind of "rigor amoris"—a stiffening by love since it could be understood as part of the process by which I shall ultimately die into God.
I read Yungblut as advising and practicing a kind of double approach, both acceptance (even a humorous acceptance at times) and grief. Along the way, there are occasions for practicing penitence, and to give and receive the ministry of "substitution," as advocated by the writer Charles Williams—a mutual and prayerful willingness to bear one another's burdens. Ultimately, Yungblut urges us to become acquainted with the most fertile of all solitary disciplines: contemplative prayer.
How do I picture the threshold of this kind of prayer after William Barber's sermon? He began by recalling the story of Jonathan's young son Mephibosheth from 2 Samuel, disabled by an accident and unable to walk. Years later, when King David asked whether anyone remained from Saul's household to whom David could show God's kindness, and he was told about Mephibosheth. David invited Mephibosheth to have a permanent place at the king's table. (2 Samuel, chapter 9.)
With whatever diminishments and defects I might have, I picture myself being received at God's table, where you and I have a permanent place.
I copied the entire text of Murray Gurfein's decision in U.S. v New York Times Co. (the Pentagon Papers case, June 19, 1971) in my "Our Times" notebook. (More from that notebook here.) The case made a huge impression on me.
What follows is a sermon I presented at Spokane Friends Meeting via Zoom on April 23 during our month in London. I dedicated it to Eden Grace, who had just received very difficult news from her medical team. Remission of her cancer was no longer a realistic possibility. By the time I gave part two of this sermon at Spokane Friends on May 28, Eden was no longer with us. At least not in the ordinary sense.
Good morning! Grace and peace to you from God, our gracious loving Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me start out with these two Bible passages out of the dozens I could have chosen:
Ephesians 2:8. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God….
2 Peter 1:2-4. Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
In two weeks, here in London, Charles the Third will be crowned king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If the model of the two previous coronations will be followed, at some point during the ceremony, Charles will be anointed with holy oil, while the choir sings, “Anoint and cheer our soiled face / with the abundance of thy grace.” In fact, God’s grace will be invoked several times during the coronation. What is this grace that they’re singing and talking about, that is apparently essential to sealing the deal for Charles to be the king?
When I was in seminary, I had Tom Mullen as my preaching professor. I have lots of Tom Mullen stories, and maybe some of you do, too. He was an excellent speaker himself, so of course we students were all eager to do well in his course, and at the same time knew we had a hard act to follow.
I think HE thought he was making it easier when he told us, “There is really only one truly Christian sermon theme, and that is ‘grace’—but that gives you enough material for a lifetime of messages.” I suppose I should have been comforted by the idea that I really don’t have to search for new topics every time I speak, but there really is a problem: thinking about “grace” is a little like looking directly at the sun. It seems much safer to skirt around the issue than to dare to look directly at God’s unconditional love poured out on us.
When I was a pastor at Reedwood Friends Church in Portland, I don’t think I gave a single sermon that was focused completely on grace. Well, maybe one—and that was a children’s message. Sometimes, when I gave children’s messages, I used my friends Garfield and Lamb Chop and Dima the Bear. You all know Garfield, right? How many of you remember Shari Lewis’s puppet Lamb Chop? Usually, when I speak to you from our home in Portland, you see Lamb Chop peeking out from the bookshelves on my left.
Dima the banker, Lamb Chop, Garfield.
In my storytelling world, Garfield and Lamb Chop are friends, and they were the main cast members of the stories I used to tell our kids at bedtime when they were young. Later I used some of these same stories for the kids at Reedwood. One of the stories, for example, was a fable to explain the Trinity. But the one I’m recalling today involved the lasagna restaurant that Garfield and Lamb Chop opened in Kokomo, Indiana.
They needed a bank loan to finance this project. Their friend Dima the banker gave them the money they needed. Dima explained to them that if they couldn’t make their loan payment on the day it was due, they had a 30-day period of grace, during which they could sell enough lasagna to make the payment. During those thirty days, they could focus their energy on making lasagna, not the debt. Dima was a good banker and a good friend, but he wasn’t God. God has no time limit on grace.
Tom Mullen’s students weren’t the first to be dazzled by the theme of grace. Theologians of higher rank than Dima and Lamb Chop have been trying to filter it into manageable size for millennia. I thought I knew what the word meant: God’s unmerited loving power and care, that enables us to be in relationship with God and to act in the world on the basis of that power and that relationship. It is ours for the asking; there’s nothing we have to do to earn or deserve it. It’s so overwhelming, so total, that of course we humans had to figure out how to manage such generosity intellectually.
Some early theologians thought that, though grace was supposedly universal, we humans are so rotten to the core that God has to select a fixed number on whom to bestow mercy, and then they would continue to need grace to maintain the relationship. Others, particularly in the Eastern church, protested that grace was unconditional, and we human beings, all of us, are always at liberty to choose to receive it. Eastern Orthodox Christians have their own ways of interpreting the word, and often it involves the idea that grace is the primordial, uncreated energies of God. When we receive grace, we are potentially participating as much in God’s own nature as it is possible for a creature of God to do.
Listen again to Second Peter:
His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature….
No wonder we need strong sunglasses to even think about what God offers us in grace.
Now, church as human institution, church as power structure, might not want us ordinary people to have direct access to these promises without some kind of supervision. Now I don’t mean to make out that the church necessarily had bad motives. Somehow these incredible promises had to be conveyed to people who were not yet aware of them, and so, those who had the gift of conveying them, were also given the responsibility to communicate what God was promising. We can see in Acts and the New Testament epistles how this was going on. Paul starts out most of his New Testament letters with the words “grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
(Parenthetically, I could comment that “God our creator” or “God our parent” instead of "Father" would work just as well for me. This is an important point, which we could talk about another time. I don't want to go there now, but I also didn't want just to blow right past it.)
And, along with that gracious introduction, most of Paul’s letters then end up greeting the various people he knows in those places he’s writing to; these are the men and women who are actually proclaiming and showing grace in their house churches and communities.
The vocabulary of grace got more elaborate as time went on, and as the church’s intellectuals grappled with such questions as “are we sinners capable of receiving grace unless God intervenes somehow to open us up to it; and, if such intervention is necessary, does it happen to everyone or just some of us? And does it depend on us or does it depend on God’s choice?” Along with that set of questions comes the politically weighty question of “who decides?” Who operates the gates of the church, signaling to us which of us are acceptable and which aren’t?
And then there is the equally political question of how grace, once it's satisfactorily defined, is conveyed from God to God’s creatures. Once again, in simplifying these questions, I have no desire to mock the church in its humanness. Communication is always a challenge, and choosing the most effective words and symbols for the early church was often done with care and beauty, drawing on the resources of the Jewish communities that gave birth to Christianity. Passover, for example, helped shape the sacrament of communion, both being intended to convey God’s promises to God’s people. Only later was communion defined as one of a limited number of sacraments that were codified as the way grace is communicated to the people. Sacraments were supposedly the way that our souls and our affections are drawn into cooperation with God. And far be it from us Quakers to look condescendingly on the outward sacraments if we have not ourselves found an equally effective way to be reminded of our need for grace and our standing invitation to open ourselves up to it.
Some theologians came to see the Bible as another vehicle of grace, but, then, can we church leaders risk letting ordinary people read the Bible for themselves, or is this channel of grace reserved for the leadership? For centuries, giving the wrong answer to this question could get you burned at the stake.
Where politics and conflict came in, of course, was not in the good motivation of developing vocabularies and symbols to communicate grace. Thank God our ancestral mentors in faith cared enough to do that. But with the passing of generations, that motivation may have been overshadowed by the tradecraft of sacraments, which after all require licensing—that is, who is authorized to perform them and get compensated for their performance. And there has to be quality control—how do we know when the ceremonies are being correctly performed in all the various settings where churches arise? If grace is promised, how do we know that the promise is effectively kept? The history of Western Christianity is a nearly unbroken series of arguments about these sorts of complications.
Then along came Quakers, who claimed to cherish the Scriptures equally with their contemporaries, but who didn’t seem to require the traditional channels for conveying the grace promised in those Scriptures. As William Penn explained in his defense of Quakers against what he called the “perversions” charged against them:
Of water baptism and the supper
Perversion 14: The Quakers deny the two great sacraments or ordinances of the Gospel, Baptism and the Supper.
Principle: Whatever is truly a Gospel ordinance, they desire to own and practice. But they observe no such language in the Scriptures as in the reflection. They do confess the practice of John’s baptism and the Supper is to be found there; but practice only is no institution, nor a sufficient reason for continuation. ... [T]hey were then proper, they believe, when the mysteries lay yet couched in figures and shadows. But it is their belief that no figures or signs are perpetual or of institution under the Gospel administration, when Christ, Who is the Substance of them, is come.
When it comes to theology, we Quakers have another peculiarity. Historically, we haven't spent much time on trying to understand or describe the mysteries of faith, preferring to describe the functional outcomes of faith. To put it another way, metaphysics isn't one of our strengths as a people. So, for example, here's William Penn again, from the same tract I just quoted from, treating the subject of the Trinity:
Of the Holy Three, or Scripture Trinity
Perversion 9: The Quakers deny the Trinity.
Principle: Nothing less. They believe in the holy three, or Trinity of Father, Word, and Spirit, according to Scripture. And that these things are truly and properly one; of one nature as well as will. But they are tender of quitting Scripture terms and phrases for schoolmen’s, such as distinct and separate Persons or substances are, from whence people are apt to entertain gross ideas and notions of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And they judge that a curious inquiry into those high and divine revelations, or into speculative subjects, though never so great truths in themselves, tends little to godliness and less to peace, which should be the chief aim of true Christians. Therefore, they cannot gratify that curiosity in themselves or others. Speculative truths are, in their judgment, to be sparingly and tenderly declared, and never to be made the measure and condition of Christian communion. [Penn went on to write...] Men are too apt to let their heads outrun their hearts, and their notions exceed their obedience, and their passions support their conceits, instead of a daily cross, a constant watch, and a holy practice.
So, not surprisingly, we Friends have not prioritized describing exactly how grace is conveyed from God to us, and in what order, and under what conditions, but we love to see it in operation as people grow closer to God and to each other, and our lives reflect what we're learning daily about living with God at the center.
However! (There always has to be a however!) ... If other Christians say that grace is conveyed through Word (with a capital W) and Sacrament, and we say, those are well and good but not necessary, because those are all types and shadows and we have the substance, Christ, we better mind our manners. Those "types and shadows," so-called, have visibly been effective for many generations of dear people who were never abandoned by God, even if church authorities became over-controlling or, on the other hand, began phoning it in because it all became so routine. AND, also, do we in fact have the substance we claim to have? Do we functionally know what it is to live with Jesus himself at the head of our meetings, and our yearly meetings, or are we too just as vulnerable as everyone else to falling in love with our own clichés and conceits?
The good news for this morning, and for all mornings, is that God's promises are true and unconditional, and we can claim and reclaim them at every moment. Every time I visit you, I get glimpses of that functional grace that even peering at each other through Zoom can't dim. As you ask for prayer, and pray for each other, I see grace in operation. I see grace in the fascinating material you put in your newsletters. I love how grace is reflected in the music that you choose for worship, because I know that making those choices is a talent I wish I had, but don't.
But maybe there's someone here this morning, or online, who's not feeling much grace at the moment. It happens. It's happened to me. I just have two points in conclusion: first, God is pouring it out on us now and always, whether or not we're in a place to be as aware as we'd like. And, second, sometimes we do need a channel for that grace to touch us. That's where the community comes in. Today I may feel lost and without a sense of grace, but you as a body are remembering God's promises on my behalf. Tomorrow, I might be far more ready to receive this reassurance, and carry it on your behalf. Together, step by step, sometimes in fits and starts, God's grace is helping us, just as Peter's letter promised, grow into the Divine nature.
So, when companies began to demand that workers return to the pre-pandemic status quo, the question, ‘how much work is enough?’ prompted another: ‘enough for what?’ To earn a living? To meet our employers’ productivity expectations? To support our pursuit of happiness, or perhaps to retire? The answers vary, depending on who asks and who responds.
Brad Vaughn proposes three different paradigms that respectively "represent how most people understand their local church (and the church more generally)." The third closely matches how I understand Quakers.
Restoring my perspective in complicated times: reading about the mysterious cosmic threads that are intriguing scientists.
Helicopter pilot Prince Harry's "hover monkeys" and "head squirrels" ... and what they suggested to Nancy Thomas about the dangers of aging.
It's been about two years since we lost the great James Harman, "a full service blues man since 1962." Here is Nathan James with an affectionate tribute video:
