Through the Flaming Sword

I recommend Joshua Brown’s latest post on his excellent blog arewefriends, titled Have we learned anything? about the lessons we could be learning from the recent divisions among us. Josh has been close to the divisions in Indiana Yearly Meeting (2008–2013) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting (2016), both of which revolved around sexual issues and faith.

In my opinion, Josh’s analyses and comments have been consistently penetrating, respectful, community-building, and faithful. This post is especially good.

In every aspect of his being but one, Donald Trump assaults the sensibilities of liberal Quakers. His decadent moral character, his coarse, bullying personality, his utterly self-absorbed psychology, his willful and dangerous ignorance and lack of identifiable personal or political philosophy, his divisive and demeaning political tactics, his racism, xenophobia, and misogyny—all these things would make it really hard for a meeting to welcome him into membership.

But some Friend would inevitably pipe up and say, but there is that of God in Donald Trump.

Is there? The one thing left of Donald Trump’s humanity is his divinity?

How would we know if this is true? On what basis would we make this claim? Well, there is that of God in everyone, we would say; even him. This is the central article of liberal Quaker faith.

Okay. I do not know this experientially myself. To say that there is that of God in everyone looks to me more like a nice but very speculative metaphysical notion about human nature. But let’s say it’s true. Certainly, I do agree that anyone can commune directly with the Divine, whatever the metaphysics involved. (Though just because they can commune directly with the Divine doesn’t mean that they do.)

So there’s that of God in Donald Trump, whatever that means. What then? How do we answer that of God in Donald Trump?

The famous passage that Friends quote from George Fox’s Journal to say that there is that of God in everyone is a pastoral letter admonishing ministers to do their own inner work so that they may minister to others in theirs:

Bring all into the worship of God. Plough up the fallow ground. Thresh and get out the corn; that the seed, the wheat, may be gathered into the barn: that to the beginning all people may come; to Christ, who was before the world was made. For the chaff is come upon the wheat by transgression. He that treads it out is out of transgression, fathoms transgression, puts a difference between the precious and the vile, can pick out the wheat from the tares, and gather into the garner; so brings to the lively hope the immortal soul, into God out of which it came. None worship God but who come to the principle of God, which they have transgressed. None are ploughed up but he who comes to the principle of God in him, that he hath transgressed. Then he doth service to God; then is the planting, watering, and increase from God. So the ministers of the spirit must minister to the spirit that is in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one; that with the spirit of Christ people may be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits, to serve him, and have unity with him, with the scriptures, and one with another. This is the word of the Lord God to you all, a charge to you all in the presence of the living God; be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your life and conduct may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.

The minister who has done the “threshing” inwardly themselves “can pick out the wheat from the tares, and gather into the garner. . . . Then you will come to walk cheerfully” (in a way that brings blessing, not in a lighthearted mood) over a “world” that could not comprehend the light that was coming into the world in Christ (John 1:5, 9, 10)”. Do your own inner work, then you can answer that of God in others.

So. Assuming that Donald Trump has that “principle of God in him” (Fox), we must thresh out that chaff in our own hearts and souls before we can answer whatever that principle is in him. This means prophetic speech that has no hate in it or even disrespect, but only the power, the Spirit, of Love and Truth.

Hard to do. I find this very hard to do. I have come to think of Donald Trump as Jabba the Hutt, a toadish head of a criminal organization who yearns to lick the captive, scantily-clad princess with his oversized tongue. So I have some inner work to do.

But unlike Princess Leia, our princess must strangle him with the Word, not with a rope—not with counter-violence. We must embrace the third way, and choke Trump’s hatred with our love, not with counter-hatred. We must choke his lies with the Truth. We must protect the least of us from his assaults with ideas that lift everyone up, not just the rich. We must deny the worship of Mammon, for whom Trump is prophet, with Jesus’ proclamation of good news for the poor (Luke 4:18). And we must try for some measure of faith that the Truth will, in fact, prevail.

Then we can walk cheerfully over the world. But I don’t expect to be very cheerful while while waging this new Lamb’s War, or even afterwards. It will be a grim four years.

I really liked this blog entry from Brian Drayton:

Amor vincat: From the Quaker toolbox—Making a testimony happen.

Dear readers

I have created a page for this blog that aggregates the posts I’ve published on vocal ministry in one place. I plan to do some similar organizing for other series in Through the Flaming Sword, now that I’m no longer working full-time.

Here’s the link.

Steven

Assumptions of Christian Earth Stewardship

The earth stewardship movement arose 1900 years after the Christian tradition began. As we step outside the shelter of the church into the Silent Spring, we naturally wear the vestments of this ancient tradition. Traditional liturgies ring in our ears, the categories of Christian theology organize our thinking, the writings of our predecessors provide us with vocabulary, and, of course, in our right hand we carry the Bible.

These assumptions, these vestments, deserve to be explored. The relative failure of earth stewardship to transform church and society so far forces us to ask if our premises are valid. The urgency of the environmental crisis emboldens us to look deeper than the stewardship message itself to the underlying principles. Let’s look at how nine of these assumptions affect our earth stewardship thinking:

1. Christianity is a religion of history—of time—rather than of place.
2. It is cosmic and universal, rather than particular and material, with respect to both God and land.
3. It is urban rather than agrarian.
4. It is salvation oriented.
5. It is Christo-centric.
6. It is spiritually passive.
7. It is individualistic.
8. It is biblio-centric.
9. It is patriarchal.

Historicism

In his book God Is Red, Lakota philosopher, activist, and former Baptist minister Vine Deloria, Jr. shows how Christianity is a religion bound to time rather than to space, to history rather than to place. We speak of “salvation history,” of God’s unfolding plan for God’s people, including ourselves. Story is central to the tradition, embodied especially in the gospels and Acts. Characters and events matter much more than the stage on which they play. The story has a beginning, crucial turning points in the middle, and it will have an end, which is even prophetically pre-described.

For us as believers, what matters is our part in the story. Do we subscribe to the divine plan for history? Have we a relationship with its lead character? Where will we go at its climax?

Where we are geographically right now hardly matters. Nor does our relationship to the story’s original setting, let alone our own setting. For those communities who cherish “sacred space” at all, it is almost always in a building (like the cathedral at Chartres) or a place associated with people, with characters and story (like the Vatican), rather than with the landscape as such. Our relationship to place and the ecosystems of a place are secondary, if not irrelevant. Christian worship is almost completely without consciousness of the place of the worshipers.

The consequence for earth stewardship thinking is the dis-place-ing of the discourse. The goal—eco-sustainable Christian community—is placed in history, that is, in the future, rather than here, in the lower Delaware valley (or wherever you my readers may live). If we assumed a local here-ness, it would automatically evoke a corresponding now-ness and the action that immediacy with a place demands; whereas the hereafter-ness of our goal invokes expectation more than action.

Cosmic Universalism

Christian universalism runs hand in hand with Christian historicism. Christianity claims to have a message that is valuable and relevant—if not necessary—to all peoples in all places in all times. Twin to this universalism is a predilection for the cosmic. These emphases tend to denigrate the particular and the material. These assumptions deeply affect our approach to our tradition and to our environmental situation.

An example: In virtually every translation of the Bible, the often-quoted Psalm 24 reads: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Yet the Hebrew word for “earth”—eretz—can also be translated “land” and often stands specifically for eretz Israel, the particular land of Israel. Listen to how the psalm sounds with this new translation:

The land (of Israel) is the Lord’s, and all its fruits.

So also with the beatitude, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. At least that’s how we always translate it. But again, besides meaning “the earth” in some larger sense, and in addition to meaning (the promised) land (of Israel), eretz also means one’s portion, one’s ancestral inheritance—your family farm. “Meek” is not better a translation. In legal terms—and all the Beatitudes are midrashim on inheritance law—“meek” means without legal status among the council of elders. If you were poor—if you did not own your own land (because your family had lost its farm to foreclosure)—you could not represent yourself in court; meaning you could not defend yourself against suit or bring a suit to recover a debt yourself; you had to find an advocate, a comforter, a paraclete, to represent you in court. Combined with the bad translation of “meek”, which today means weak and reticent, we now have a Beatitude that is an empty universalist promise to a generic, undefined class of the oppressed. But this is what Jesus’ Aramaic speaking Jewish listeners heard when he spoke that promise: blessed are they who have lost their family farms through foreclosure and therefore can no longer defend themselves against predatory lenders, for they shall re-inherit their ancient portion, their proper inheritance, as a fulfillment of the Jubilee I declared at the beginning of my ministry (Luke 4:18). How much more powerful and personal is this promise than the universalized and cosmic promise of “the earth”—whatever that might mean in any practical terms.

Earth stewardship writers have shared this tendency to think in universal terms rather than the particular, and in cosmic terms rather than the concrete. We have gravitated toward the cosmic Christ passages in Ephesians, Colossians and Revelation, in which “all things are gathered in Christ,” rather than toward the particular land reform policies of Jesus’ earthly ministry, in which dispossessed peasants were reclaiming their particular family farms. We have tended to focus on global environmental problems, rather than on local ones, even though local case studies of struggle, victory, and defeat would be more helpful to our activist readers. Like the wider tradition, we have often assumed that an ecological Christianity would be the same in any particular place, rather than imagining that a local Christian community’s intimate engagement with the Delaware River, for instance, would produce a church life specific to its eco-niche, and distinct from that of a church in Death Valley or the Yukon valley.

What happens when we are not limited by our cosmic universalist assumptions? Are there precedents in our tradition for intimate spiritual engagement with our particular landbase? What are the implications of assuming that the place we live in matters in our faith? Could Christian religious culture be place-specific, as Lakota religious culture is? How would spiritual reinhabitation of the Delaware valley—or your valley—enrich and enliven congregational life and personal devotion to God?

Urbanism

The third sister to historicism and universalism is urbanism. Once the Jesus movement abandoned the small rural village milieu that was home to most of Jesus’ ministry and moved to Jerusalem; and especially after the ministry of Paul and the demographic shift of Christian community to the cities of the Roman empire, the worldview of its leaders and writers changed. Beginning with Paul, the first New Testament author, the tradition has been written and dominated by city-dwellers. Today’s earth stewardship writers are no different. Wendel Berry stands out as the remarkable exception, and his intimacy with farming and rural community help make his work uncommonly insightful and practical; it also makes him both more celebratory and more apocalyptic—he experiences the joys and the devastation of his landbase first hand, even in his own body.

Our urbanism determines our interests. This urban bias has kept much of the agrarian anthropology of the Bible invisible until recently. (To us, for instance, the parable of the sower is quaint, picaresque, and ‘meaningful’; it evokes nothing of the literally life-and-death struggle to feed your family in the highlands of first-century Palestine.) Now, as ecologists and agriculture specialists begin reading these texts, revelations emerge that are directly relevant to our concern.

Urban assumptions and preoccupations with urban social issues also determine not only what we can see in the Bible, but what the Bible doesn’t say. For instance, because Paul is ministering to urban dwellers, he never has anything to say about the land. What might he have given us if even one of his surviving letters had been to a cluster of small rural hamlets peopled by cattle herders? Or if one of the evangelists had been a tenant farmer in a Judean village? Only Jesus’ own ministry arose in a small rural village environment: Do his teachings offer us insight into country-city social and political dynamics and do they present a platform for agrarian reform that could guide us today?

Salvationism

In earth stewardship thinking, the ‘salvation paradigm’ keeps a lower profile than in the wider tradition, but it’s there. We name irresponsible earth stewardship a sin; we call for repentance; we pray for salvation. But some of the other categories of the salvation paradigm are less at home, or missing altogether in earth stewardship thinking. By this I mean judgment, punishment and reward.

Why are we ambivalent about just those aspects of salvationism that deal with accountability and community discipline, aspects that speak directly to our need for environmental regulation? In the popular tradition, judgment and consequence are relegated to the afterlife and the endtime. Are earth stewards doing the same thing, and, if so, how does this affect our approach to here-and-now community control of environmental threat?

We need to get off the salvationist fence. Do we find the sin and salvation approach to Christian life unhelpful or unfaithful to our experience of ecological practice and its consequences? If so, then let’s develop a new approach. Alternatively, what happens if we reclaim the concrete, material dimensions of redemption as defined by Jesus, not allowing ourselves to be limited to the spiritual salvation in Christ defined by Paul? How can the apocalypticism of Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the Christian Testament guide our own spirit of urgency and committed witness in ways appropriate to our crisis? For we face immanent judgment and punishment, however we define the agencies involved. The word crisis itself means judgment in Christian Testament Greek.

Christo-centrism and the Trinity.

A second element in our salvationism is our focus on Christ as savior. Earth stewardship writers have enriched our understanding of Christ by highlighting both the Christ’s role in creation, and creation’s role in Christ’s reconciliation.

Yet we have lost the intimate relationship with the Father/Creator that Yeshua enjoyed and that he taught to his disciples. As the Son has never stopped working toward our salvation, so the Father has never stopped working in creation. Earth stewardship writers and practitioners need to revitalize the spirituality of God the Creator.

Even more neglected is the Holy Spirit. Especially because the Bible provides us with so little direct guidance concerning our ecological practice, we must rely today on the Holy Spirit to teach us, to open the scriptures in new ways and to awaken in us directly a spirit of prophecy, healing, and witness. We know from scripture that Yeshua’s promise of the Spirit was fulfilled, at Pentecost, in Corinth, Rome, Ephesus… Why should he not fulfill his promise in Trenton, or Watsonville, or along the Monongahela River?

This is not to remove Christ from the center of our spiritual lives, but to open ourselves to the whole range of religious experience described in our tradition. We open to the Creator because the creation is our direct concern and the Creator never stops working there. We open to the Holy Spirit because the Christ specifically promised us revelation in the Spirit and has proved faithful to that promise in the past.

How would the search for deeper communion with the Holy Spirit and the Father affect our spirituality? How would this communion affect our earthkeeping?

Spirituality and worship.

Spirituality is the term we use for how we open ourselves to God; worship describes the spirituality of the community. Both deserve more attention from earth stewardship writers than they get. This works two ways: Our experience of God’s gifts of creation should anoint our personal and corporate spirituality with joy, praise, thanksgiving, repentance, commitment, and a sense of urgency. And we should use the spiritual disciplines to seek God’s presence in the world around us and Christ’s guidance for a life (both individual and communal) in ecological balance.

Earth stewardship has barely explored these areas. We need more personal stories, more first-hand accounts of people’s experiences of God and nature. We need more liturgies and other ceremonial forms. We need Bible study programs. We need retreats and approaches to spiritual formation and direction that include nature and the rich traditions of nature mysticism like that of Hildegard of Bingen, Jacob Boehme, John Wordsworth, and John Muir. Most of all, we need more prayer and more spiritual support of our ecological ministers, those servants whom God has raised up to guide us. We need a religious culture in which each parish waits with eager longing to recognize and support those whom God has called to act on behalf of God’s creation.

Do we as earth stewards have active personal devotional lives that are open to God’s energizing revelation regarding the land? How do we integrate communion with God into our ecological work, and vice versa? Does our earth stewardship theology come out of our heads only, or also from our hearts and “souls,” that is, directly from our experience of God? What models does our tradition offer for a land-based Christian spirituality?

Individualism.

The basic ‘unit’ of Christian religious life is the individual. The individual sins, and the individual is saved. Individuals are baptized and individuals receive the sacraments. Even corporate worship is little more than the worship of an aggregate of individuals in most churches.

Earth stewardship shares this individualistic assumption, not just with the wider Christian tradition, but with the culture as a whole, including secular environmentalism. However, the individual is not the basic unit of ecological impact—the household is.

Individual household consumption is somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of this country’s economic activity. The other 30 percent is corporate activity and the cost of developing and maintaining our infrastructure. If we transform all of our individual ecological impact, we have solved only part of the problem; we still have to restructure community life. Moreover, even our concerted efforts to reform our individual lifestyles suffer from the almost total lack of infrastructure and community support. Rather, the economy and the infrastructure determine individual household impact—this 70%—to a very large degree. Is there good, convenient, affordable public transportation to your place of employment from your house? Can you buy your favorite cereal in bulk, and carry it home in reusable containers? On the other hand, if we transform society, much of the individual impact is already taken care of.

For instance, we pay more attention to individual recycling efforts than to corporate recycling. We allow the attitudes and values of the individual consumer to dictate the terms of goods distribution, even though these terms degrade our shared environment. If we eliminated individual product packaging and sold from bulk, for example, a large percentage of household recycling would disappear. This would require new social values and expectations about shopping and product availability and a new infrastructure in the home, on the street, in the marketplace. (Would you be willing to buy your cereal in bulk?) In this way the community and our land suffer from our individualism, while the solutions lie at the level of corporate and communal activity. Effective earth stewardship must address this disconnect.

Just as community is the basic unit of environmental impacts, so community should be much more important in our religious life. The individualist assumptions of Christian faith are largely due to Paul’s influence and the Hellenization of early Christian demographics. As Jews, Jesus and his followers looked to the community as the locus and focus of religious life much more than we do and more than Gentile Corinthians did. Not only did individuals sin, but Israel sinned also; not only were individuals saved, but Israel as a people. For Jesus, redemption was sought in community and experienced in community as an essential element of religious life—“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also.”

Earth stewardship writers have begun to return to this ideal with the principle of covenant as context for earthkeeping. We need to develop this dimension of corporate religious life into a new vision of life on the land. This means a completely new identity and mission for the congregation, the basic religious community household. Out of this principle of covenant can evolve new forms of community life that directly address the problems of community environmental impact. If we remain limited by our individualist assumptions, our theologies and practical solutions will not address these deeper ecological problems arising from our collective social systems.

What are the implications for strengthened Christian community if we take our own interest in covenant more seriously? What does the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus offer us as a model for ecological Christianity? What forms would congregational life take if we took a more collective approach to religious life?

Biblio-centrism.

Protestant communities take the Bible for granted as the source of revelation and, to varying degrees, as the boundary of revelation. If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not likely to draw our attention. If it is in the Bible, we are reluctant, at the least, to contradict its testimony, or even to go much beyond its obvious implications.

Because environmental issues are so peripheral to the central themes of the Bible, earth stewards are forced to dig deep to find useful guidance and they are sometimes tempted to strain the meaning of the text if they want to remain centered in the scripture. The problem is exacerbated because Christian scripture has superseded Hebrew scripture to an extent, and, in doing so, we’ve relegated the richer source for environmental testimony to secondary authority.

There are churches for whom the Bible shares authority for revelation with institutions that could also provide new testimony on ecological concerns. For the Roman church, the Pontificate and the magisterium supplement the Bible as source and boundary of revelation, opening further possibilities for the church’s ecological witness. The belief of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in God’s continuing direct revelation provides opportunities for new light in the Holy Spirit. The same is true for Pentecostal communities, and through similar channels, for the Pentecostal spirit of prophecy is akin to the vocal ministry of Quaker waiting worship. These alternative channels to biblical revelation have not yet born very much fruit, though ecological ministry is growing among Friends.

For the mainstream of the tradition, however, the Bible remains determinative. Earth stewards will have to come to the Bible with renewed interest and creativity if we want to speak to the tradition from the tradition. The Christian Testament, especially, needs our best attention. We need an ecological testimony that is both deeply rooted in scripture and relevant to our present and pressing needs. And this testimony must come out of the heart of the gospel. If it is a forced overlay, or a false reading, it just won’t take root. In other words, it must be an inspired reading, guided by the Holy Spirit toward God’s revelatory truth.

How are we hampered by our dependence on the Bible? How are we liberated by new readings of the Bible that are guided by the Spirit? In particular, are seminaries and Christian scholars committed to opening the Bible for us to ecological revelation?

Patriarchy.

God is male in virtually all of his (sic) manifestations in the Bible. All of the key actors in the biblical drama are men. Virtually all the books of the Bible have male authors or they have been ascribed to male authors. The leadership of the historical church has been male from the apostolic age. The majority of earth stewardship writers are men. Both the biblical and historical traditions of Christianity have feared, blamed, constrained, silenced, and denigrated real women in their worshipping communities, though the tradition has idealized some of the female characters in the biblical story. Patriarchal attitudes toward women are deep, pervasive, and endemic to Christian tradition.

Many writers see strong connections between patriarchal oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. This eco-feminist critique has strong voices in the earth stewardship movement, but even here it is a marginal, external influence more than an internalized perspective shared by men and women alike.

The patriarchal character of the tradition goes deeper than just its direct treatment of women. At this deeper level, the dynamics that mark male domination and oppression of women color all our relationships, including those with our land. Thus patriarchy finds expression in:

• monarchical language for God and for human leadership;
• either/or thinking;
• the tendency to define God in terms of will and power, and human faithfulness in terms of submission and obedience;
• a moral paradigm made up of rules and oriented toward justice and retribution.

In earth stewardship, these values and perspectives find expression in:

• our insistence on God’s transcendence and majestic sovereignty;
• the acceptance of dominion as a human entitlement, tempered by obedient service (stewardship) to our (land) Lord;
• the legal framework of covenant as context for earth stewardship;
• a preoccupation with nature as property and with conducting our relationship with the land as paternalistic land management.

We need to open ourselves to the non-patriarchal perspectives in our tradition, many of which are manifest in the life and teachings of Jesus himself. We need to open ourselves to the ministry of women today, who are leading the way into new experiences of God’s love and truth. We need to own our own experiences of God, allowing the Holy Spirit to shape our understanding and sharing of this experience in organic ways, ways true to the movement of the Spirit, rather than unthinkingly overlaying them with traditional patriarchal categories.

What is our experience? Is God always our king and never our guide, friend, mother, nurturer, healer? Must our own religious, political, and environmental leadership be male, or hierarchical? Do we experience ‘both/and’ as a more inclusive and gentler way to think and live than ‘either/or’? Do more flexible roles work when rules don’t? Didn’t Jesus himself offer relationship and engagement in tension with legalism and enforcement?

Let me close this section by saying that this critique has not been a call to destroy or deny our tradition. It is a call to beware of assumptions. Assumptions are limitations as well as foundations. In the face of a new and violent threat to God’s creation, we do not want to limit the possibility of fresh experience of God and creative ways of living in the world. Do we?

One of the meetings in New York Yearly Meeting withholds the portion of its covenant donation that would go to Friends United Meeting because of FUM’s personnel policy, which forbids sex outside of marriage, defined as between a man and a woman, for its staff and volunteers, which affects single heterosexuals and all homosexuals. Thus it’s often perceived as discrimination against LGBT Friends.

I know of a meeting in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that restored a sizable sum to its covenant donation after recovering from the Great Recession, but a committee in the meeting has asked the meeting to restrict the funds to the support of the yearly meeting’s anti-racism efforts.

Several Friends walked out of a New York Yearly Meeting session some time ago when the body could not come to unity on an apology to Afro-Descendants.

I have seen individual Friends hold their meetings emotionally hostage in a business session, too, saying one version or another of: “If you do (or don’t do) ‘x’, I’ll do ‘y’.”

The first three of these examples could have several motivations, but the effect of these Friends’ actions is to hold their meeting hostage to their will; that is, to punish or threaten to punish the meeting for crossing their will.

Motivations. A number of motives could be at play, at least in the first three examples. These Friends could be expressing solidarity with a victimized group. They could be protesting. They could be standing for a testimony, feeling that their action speaks with a prophetic voice. But holding the meeting hostage is a form of withdrawal and that amounts to a form of violence.

Withdrawal—of financial support, physical presence, or spiritual commitment—says I will not participate fully in the life of the meeting. This wounds the meeting in a number of ways. Thus, it is a form of violence. Some might rationalize this by saying that the meeting does a greater violence with its action or its inaction. Such a rationalization/accusation might well be the truth—and it might well compound the violence. At the least, it kicks the flywheel of action leading to reaction; it is not the third way of love.

Love. Like withdrawal, love in our religious tradition is an action, not just an emotion. Love is a commandment, something we do most especially when we least want to. Love is laying down one’s life for one’s Friends, using “life” here in an expanded sense—love is sacrifice. Love is staying at the table, maintaining one’s spiritual commitment even in adversity and discomfort. Love is not treating others as we would not want to be treated.

Trust. These actions evince a lack of trust. A lack of trust in the meeting community, in Quaker process, perhaps in the skills and discernment of the presiding clerk, and ultimately,  lack of trust in the Holy Spirit. Now, it may well be that the community, with its present actions and/or its past history, does in fact deserve distrust, or that the clerk is in over her or his head. And we have all seen Quaker process go bad. In the face of these obstacles, it is hard to trust the Spirit, to really commit to worship instead of throwing ourselves into ceaseless wrangling.

The covered meeting. Friends tend not to trust the Spirit when they have never experienced a covered meeting, never seen the meeting break through into the Light against everyone’s expectations. You can’t blame them, really. This just doesn’t happen very often. You might attend a meeting for years before you see the dramatic in-breaking of the Spirit-reign. And even if you have had this experience, you can forget how holy it is and how we get there if you have a dog in the fight.

Faith is patience. Usually, the coming of revelation in a covered meeting requires faith. Faith means patience, and commitment to worship. It is our faith that we all can commune directly with G*d and that the meeting as a community also can commune directly with the Spirit of Love and Truth, and that revelation is, in fact, continuing. However, it can be very frustrating when it takes too long for others to see the light that blazes so brightly in your own mind. This frustration casts a shadow on the Light. This frustration is a cousin to anger, arrogance, and spiritual pride. It can be an ancestor of hate.

Forced agreement. Sometimes, a meeting submits to the coercion. This often happens simply out of exhaustion. Or sometimes, someone stands aside, or asks to be recorded as standing aside, either by name or not—we have a subtly gradated system for acknowledging disunity while still going forward. This gets into a difficult area of collective discernment and I have come to believe that it should virtually never be allowed, though I still have mixed feelings about it.

What to do? When Friends withhold themselves from the spirit of the meeting or when a Friend proposes to stand aside, the clerk needs to ask some probing questions. Have these Friends been given the opportunity to fully explain themselves? Do they fully understand their own feelings or leading in the first place? Has the meeting lost the spirit of worship? Can it be recovered?

If the dissenters have not really been heard, or if they have not really had a chance to hear their own inner Guide, more worship is required, just as we hold a clerk or recording clerk in prayer while s/he crafts a minute.

The bottom line. The question is this: are the Friends who seem to be holding the meeting hostage truly led by the Spirit or not (assuming the clerk and the meeting agree that s/he is neither incapacitated nor a jackass)? Is the Holy Spirit behind the withholding of funds, or the restriction of funds, or the stop in a Friend’s mind, or not?

How do you decide?

With worship. With love and faith.

Ultimately, either our faith in Spirit-led worship is genuine—or we feel that we can lead it better ourselves. If it’s genuine, then we pray and worship.

Through the Flaming Sword is not my first blog. My first blog is BibleMonster. I started that blog when Dick Cheney misquoted Benjamin Franklin to claim that God’s hand had blessed the American empire he was building.

So I started BibleMonster to deconstruct the way that right-wing evangelical Christians were torturing Scripture to say things they wanted it to say, to say things that it otherwise never would have said. Well, maybe it would have said some of these things; the Bible says some pretty unsavory things here and there. But it never said yes to empire.

Anyway, I found I couldn’t maintain two blogs at once. It’s hard enough to keep up with one. So when I was clearly led to write Through the Flaming Sword, I laid BibleMonster aside.

Lately, BibleMonster has been asking for more attention. This entry could be some kind of bridge between the two.

A meditation for Valentine’s Day:

Love and the Religious Society of Friends

In the beginning, Friends called themselves the Children of the Light and the Children of Truth, among other things. At some point, however, Friends settled into what is now our formal name, the Religious Society of Friends, and they rooted this identity in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, and especially verse fifteen.

This passage, in fact, the whole fifteenth chapter up to this point, is a sermon on the mutual in-dwelling of God, Jesus, and his disciples (among whom early Friends included themselves, and by extension, us), an in-dwelling made possible through the medium of love and reinforced with the constant repetition of the words “remain” and “abide in”.

Jesus starts with the figure of the vineyard. “I am the true vine and the Father is the vinedresser,” proclaims Jesus (Jn 15:1). “I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the same shall bear much fruit.” (v. 5)

But after developing this maschal, this “proverb” or figure of the vineyard, Jesus turns to love. I was not able to format this passage (John 15:9–17) the way I wanted, scanned to illuminate some of the elegant and poetic semantic structure of these verses, so I have created a pdf file that you can download here. This represents my own adaptation of the King James Version.

Early Friends knew not the ins and outs of the Greek that would have equated “friends” with “beloved” in their understanding, both of which are variations on “philos”, but they got the idea just the same.

So our identity as a movement they rooted in this idea of love as the sap that brings life to the vine, as the medium through which we dwell in Christ and he in us, just as love binds Jesus to his Father and his father to him. In this love, God’s truth is revealed. Out of this love, we bear much fruit, the fruit of love and service in the world.

This love is not (just) a good feeling that arises from good chemistry between friends, but a law, a commandment. It is something we do, even when we don’t want to.

Elsewhere, Jesus lays out the clauses in the law of love, quoting the law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: you shall love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Heart, soul, strength, and neighbor mean specific things in Torah, and not what we would expect, since the meanings we ascribe ti them come from a Greek understanding, rather than the Semitic, and from modern denotations of the English words we use in translation. But that’s for another sermon.

The point here is that this love in which early Friends chose to root our identity is not (just) an emotion in the worldview of Jesus and his disciples. It is a set of mutual responsibilities under the law, obligations that are quite thoroughly defined in the law.

Early Friends seem to have intuited this, while at the same time applying our modern English understanding, expanding “friends” to mean “beloved” and taking love as a commandment seriously while adding the emotional dimension we usually mean when we say “love”.

Caring, as is often the case, more for “institutions” and principles than for real people, Conservative Christians have decried the recent decision from the Supreme Court to declare same-sex marriage legal throughout the land. My mostly accidental exposure to their rhetoric for their opposition suggests arguments along two lines: a history-tradition argument that marriage has always been between one man and one woman and there must be good reasons for that, and a biblical argument that starts with Adam and Eve, not with Adam and Steve, etc. I have heard the two sets of arguments put together in talk about the constancy of God’s will.

However, God’s will has been anything but constant over the millennia recorded in the Bible. There is no one biblical ethic on marriage, sex, and family life. There may be a traditional ethic on sex and family in the history of the church, but that tradition rests on a rather narrow selection of texts in the Bible. As with virtually every aspect of biblical interpretation, everybody inevitably picks and chooses what they think supports their position.

For the accepted forms of family life have changed at key moments in the life of the biblical tradition. Some examples:

• First, the Hebrew Bible takes polygamy for granted. All the patriarchs had more than one wife. Furthermore, you can see a tension manifest in their marital relationships in which the tradition is seeking to impose patriarchal patterns over what were obviously more matriarchal—or at lease matrilocal—realities in these marriages. Sarah, in particular, has a power in the relationship that is uncharacteristic of patriarchal marriages. She does what she wants, most of the time, and, significantly, Abraham is buried in Sarah’s tomb, not the other way around. Some have made the case, by which I am swayed myself, that she, and possibly also at least one of Isaac’s wives, were priestesses who enjoyed some of the prerogatives bestowed on priestesses in some of the current ancient Mesopotamian cultures This provides the only believable explanation I have ever read of Sarah’s and relations with Pharaoh and Abimelech and Rebekah’s relations with Abimelech again.
• Who can you marry? The book of Judges, which covers the period during which the newly formed people of Israel settled in the highlands of Palestine, is full of both women and men who were murdered or sacrificed over changing patterns of family, including most famously, the story of Samson and Delilah. These stories often reveal divisions over marrying out of the covenant, and specifically, of marrying Philistines. Interestingly, most scholars think that Delilah was a priestess of Astarte, so Abram could marry such a priestess, but not Samson.
• Marrying out of the covenant. The book of Ezra recounts how the priest Ezra joined the small community of Jews who had returned to Israel from Babylon after they had been encouraged to do so by Cyrus of Persia and he found that they had been marrying the locals. Ezra made all the men who had done so divorce their wives. This is when it first became against Jewish law to marry outside the covenant.
• Divorce. Divorce was allowed under the instructions of Torah, but, at least by the time of Jesus, Jews disagreed over who could “sue” for divorce and why. Jesus himself gives perhaps contradictory answers virtually back-to-back, saying first, “What God has joined together, let not man (sic) separate” (Matthew 19:6); then allowing a man to divorce his wife for adultery (Matthew 19:9).
• Jesus and women. Jesus was unusually egalitarian toward women under the law in general, and the early tradition followed him—for a while. All the gospels give women the credit for understanding the resurrection first, even though women were not allowed to be witnesses under the law. A small group of female supporters traveled with him throughout his career. And women consistently outperform men when it comes to confessing his status. But the later tradition abandoned Jesus’ embrace of women.
• Paul’s accommodation with Hellenistic culture. Paul starts out agreeing with Jesus, declaring in an early letter that, in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, no master or slave, no male or female—in other words, that in the new covenant, women and men are equal. But then he begins to backpedal. The feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza tracks this drift in her groundbreaking book In Memory of Her. Paul and whoever wrote some of the later letters attributed to him (Colossians and Ephesians) and 1 Peter end up declaring instead that the husband is the ruler of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church. The pressures of Hellenistic culture on his formerly-pagan converts combined with his jettison of Torah evidently forced him to accommodate existing patriarchal patterns in family life.
• Polygamy in the later tradition. At no point in the scriptural tradition does God forbid polygamy or declare that marriage is between ONE man and ONE woman. Jewish culture evolved to espouse this arrangement as a matter of cultural tradition (though the Rabbinical tradition may have developed biblical arguments against polygamy—I don’t know it well enough to say). In other words, the religious tradition has come to take monogamy for granted without a clear biblical foundation.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with same-sex marriage. I am not arguing that the Bible supports or even allows same-sex marriage. I personally think that such a thing is essentially inconceivable. The real question is not what the Bible says about same-sex marriage, but what authority we give to the Bible on such matters in the first place.

My point is that, if God inspired all of Holy Scripture as conservative Christians claim, then he (sic) changed his mind a lot when it came to whom you could marry. Faithful religionists in the Bible are more or less constantly struggling with the question of whom you are allowed to marry. Furthermore, this conflict has come with a lot of pain and even sometimes blood. Both Jesus and Paul suggest, in f act, that it would really be better not to marry at all, Jesus because of the coming trials of the endtimes, and Paul for the same reason, plus the problems of being “yoked to unbelievers”.

There is no coherent testimony on who you can marry in the Bible and I think this makes the Bible an unreliable foundation for religious testimony on marriage today. If you insist on a God-inspired biblical foundation for a definition of marriage, you have to pick and choose which passages you’re using to back yourself up, and you have to gloss over the implications of an evident evolution in God’s own thinking on the matter.