Desperate and Broken-Hearted

As part of our gatherings at Capitol Hill Friends, we share a meal and read and discuss Scripture. This Sunday, we read the fourth chapter of John, which features the iconic story of Jesus speaking with the woman at the well. It also includes a brief story about a royal official who comes to Jesus seeking healing for his son who is gravely ill.

Superficially, the Samaritan woman and the royal official have virtually nothing in common. The woman is about as low as someone could be in the Jewish worldview. The very fact that she is a Samaritan should make her out-of-bounds for Jesus and his disciples. Jesus is a Jew, and Jews do not associate with Samaritans, who are considered essentially "untouchable."

Besides the fact of her being a member of an untouchable, outsider group, the Samaritan woman is a woman. Strike two. Women have no status in the ancient near-East, and it is scandalous that Jesus would approach her and speak to her in public. And if that is not enough, it turns out that this particular woman has been married five times, and she is presently living with a man she is not married to. Despite all of these barriers, Jesus approaches her and reveals his true identity to her. He changes her life, making her the first apostle of the Good News to the Samaritan people.

The royal official, on the other hand, is close to the top of the social pyramid of his day. Presumably he was the equivalent of a presidential adviser or diplomat. He had all kinds of connections to call on and commanded great respect. Nonetheless, he could not save his boy. His son was so ill that this wealthy, powerful, well-connected man approached an itinerant rabbi, begging him for help.

While it was Jesus who took the initiative in speaking with the woman at the well, the case of the royal official is different. In the former case, Jesus is the person with higher status, and he humbles himself to speak with the woman at the well. In the case of the royal official, however, Jesus has lower status. In his desperation to save his son's life, the royal official must humble himself to ask for Jesus' help.

The circumstances of the woman at the well and the royal official are vastly different, but their spiritual condition is the same. Both of them, high and low in the eyes of their society, are broken-hearted. Each of them knows that they are unable to meet the demands of this life on their own, and they find that Jesus is the one who can speak to their condition. Jesus knows them and loves them. He reveals God's love. Jesus can do this because these individuals are desperate for what Jesus has to offer.

In The Message paraphrase of the Scriptures, Matthew 5:3 is rendered, "You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you, there is more of God and his rule." During our discussion of Scripture at Capitol Hill Friends, we realized that we are a community of people at the end of their rope. Capitol Hill Friends is a place for the broken, the wounded, the screwed up, the desperate.

Capitol Hill Friends is a place for folks who are on the margins in a variety of ways. We sense that business as usual is not working in our lives. We know that we cannot make it alone, and so we reach out to God and to one another. We are learning that we cannot make it on our own, that we are dependent on Jesus and his Holy Spirit to guide us and fill us with his strength.

It is by imitating the humble brokenness of our crucified Savior that we find true strength. It is in opening up and making ourselves vulnerable that we discover God's love for us. God yearns to draw us close and heal us, if only we will accept this love. God's heart is broken for us. And as we turn to embrace him, we realize that God was there all along. Long before we realized our need of him, Jesus was desperate for us. He died for us.

We are waking up to our own desperate need of God's mercy. No longer acting as if we ourselves could save the world, we are catching glimpses of the boundless love that God has for us. As the Holy Spirit comes among us, we sense in our hearts the way Christ loves us. We experience the way he lays his life down for us, and we hear him calling us to follow him. Like Simon and Andrew, we are called to lay down our nets and join the Master in becoming fishers of people.(1)

We stand on the edge of a great decision as a community. Will we own up to our woundedness, presenting ourselves to Jesus for healing? Will we commit ourselves to the work of embodying the Reign of God, here in Washington, DC? Will we embrace Christ's call to boldness, inviting others to join us as his disciples? Will we let God transform our desperate hearts, making us people who yearn for the restoration and reconciliation of all people in Christ?

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1. Mark 1:17

Primitive Christianity Revised?

For most Christians, there is an assumption that the faith and practice of the early Church bears a certain special authority. Some communions express this in doctrines of "apostolic succession," in which the modern-day Church receives its spiritual authority as an inheritance, passed down from the first-century apostles to the present-day church leadership. In other denominations, the canonical Scriptures are understood as bearing this fundamental authority. The Scriptures transmit the story of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and they also provide us with a glimpse into the life of the early Church. The early Church, as we encounter it in Scripture, serves as a model for us today.

The Religious Society of Friends also gives priority to the early Church. The first-generation of Quaker preachers and evangelists understood themselves as a re-emergence of the true, spiritual Church of Christ. One of the principal slogans of the early Quaker movement was "primitive Christianity revived." Early Friends claimed that the Church had fallen into apostasy in the centuries since the events detailed in the Book of Acts, and they believed that the new Quaker movement represented not a new sect, but a rebirth of the first-century Church.

The interesting thing is, in many matters of practice, the Quaker movement diverged from the pre-Constantinian Church. The early Church practiced water baptism, for instance. And the Lord's Supper. Within the first few generations of the Christian faith, there were clear hierarchical lines of authority established within the Church spreading throughout the Roman Empire. There were priests and bishops, very similar in their function to the priests and bishops in the Eastern Orthodox communion today.

The Friends movement denied the legitimacy of a human priesthood, calling it a blasphemy against the true and eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ. The early Quakers rejected water baptism, claiming that it was a Jewish rite that no longer applies to those who are in Christ.

Similarly, Friends eschewed the ritual of bread and wine that is so central to most Christians. Jesus, they claimed, never meant to institute a perpetual ceremony for the Church to observe. While the early Friends movement undoubtedly bore the marks of spiritual anointing and apostolic authority, there were many differences between their practices and those of the primitive Christianity that they felt they embodied.

As a twenty-first century Christian in the Quaker tradition, this leads me to wonder about how we as a Church are to relate to our spiritual ancestors - whether they be the early Quakers, the Doctors of the early Church, the Apostle Paul, or the Twelve Apostles or the first-century Church in Jerusalem. How do we make sense of the differences in theology and practice among them? How do we decide who our ultimate guide should be?

If our object is to preserve undefiled the faith and practice of our spiritual forebears, we must first decide which ancestors have primacy. As Quakers, do we privilege the early Friends over the Doctors of the early Church? On what basis? And if we choose to privilege the more universally recognized teachings of the Doctors, how do we make sense of our own tradition as Friends, which certainly differs with the understandings of the early Church on several points?

Most of the denominations that have emerged out of the Protestant Reformation base their faith and practice on a particular interpretation of Scripture. The justification for everything they do is "the clear teachings of Scripture." Scripture trumps the teachings of the early Church - and certainly the teachings of the medieval Roman Church. For most Protestants, Scripture is the foundational bedrock where Christians can go to test all doctrines. Given the plethora of Protestant denominations today, it is clear that this did not provide a complete solution to the question of authority. Ultimately, each denomination stands on its own particular interpretation of what the Scriptures "really mean."

In many ways, Quakers are no different. We have particular passages that we like to harp on. The early Friends focused a lot on the book of James, Hebrews, John and Revelation. Our reading of Scripture is certainly particular, biased, sectarian. We have this in common with the Protestant denominations. The difference, though, is that Friends have always believed - at least in theory - that Jesus Christ is literally present with us in the present day. The foundation of our faith as Friends is not the example of the early Church, the early Friends, or even the Scriptures. It is Jesus himself. Here. With us.

Our experience has been that of Paul, who wrote that, "no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ."(1) The early Church, the Roman and Eastern communions, the Protestant reformers, early Quakers, Methodists and Pentecostals have all built upon that true Foundation. There have been many times that we have gotten it right, and plenty of others when we have messed up and missed the whole point. Jesus Christ, resurrected and present with us today, is infallible; we, his Church, are not.

Sometimes our spiritual ancestors screwed up. Think of slavery. Or the subjugation of women. Despite our failings, however, I believe that our spiritual ancestors have - by the grace of God - gotten more right than we could reasonably expect. We look back to them because they provide such a good example to us. We look back to their discernment, their sense of Christ's presence, the truth that was revealed to them, and we learn a lot. We do not always have to re-invent the wheel.

At the same time, even when the early Church and other spiritual ancestors have gotten it right, context matters. Things that were right for a particular time period may not be universally applicable. For example, I think about the early Quaker rejection of instrumental music, congregational singing, art and literature. I believe I understand why they stood against these things, given the corruption they saw in the institutional Church at that time. Music and visual art were a big part of the culture of entertainment-oriented church services. Nevertheless, I do not believe that the early Friends' rejection of these things is a universal truth for all times and places.

We face new challenges today. While some of the concerns of our spiritual forebears may no longer be applicable, we are confronted with so many issues that they could not have foreseen. Cars and cell phones, the internet and television, automobiles and air travel. We have a great deal of discernment to do as Christ's Body, and we are not going to get clear answers from our ancestors. Not even from the Bible. But we do not have to let this deter us from embracing these challenges. Jesus is still here with us, and he will show us how we are to live.

How might Jesus be calling us to live out "primitive Christianity revised"? How might the Spirit be upon us to re-think some of the old assumptions that were born of another era? Where are we now? How are we called to faithfully re-mix the gospel for our own era and cultural context? What does the love, mercy and justice of Jesus look like today, in twenty-first century America?

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1. 1 Corinthians 3:11

Ministers and Elders Retreat in Barnesville

This weekend, Faith and I traveled out to southeastern Ohio to attend a retreat for Friends with a call to gospel ministry or eldership. The retreat was held at the Friends Center of Ohio Yearly Meeting, near Stillwater Meeting House.

Our facilitators for the weekend were Brian Drayton and Jan Hoffman, both ministers from New England Yearly Meeting, and Susan Smith, an elder from Ohio Yearly Meeting. I really appreciated their work in helping us reflect on the distinctions between ministry and eldership. I was especially glad for their willingness to examine how these mysterious gifts manifest uniquely in each person. For the most part, we stayed away from one-size-fits-all definitions and sought to understand how God's gifts were at work in each of our lives.

Besides our leaders, there were twenty of us in attendance - the maximum capacity for Friends Center. Six attenders were from Ohio Yearly Meeting, four from New England Yearly Meeting and three from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The rest of us came from Baltimore, Illinois, Western, New York, Canadian and Pacific Yearly Meetings, as well as a Friend from Alaska Friends Conference. There was a wide range of experience represented. Some of us were seasoned Friends with decades of ministry/eldership experience, while others of us were still still emerging in our gifts. Some attended as a part of the process of discernment of calling and gifting.

I felt blessed to gather with Friends from a wide range of Yearly Meeting backgrounds under the explicitly Christian auspices of Ohio Yearly Meeting. While there were certainly a variety of perspectives and understandings present, it felt like we were brought together in Christ Jesus. Over the course of the weekend, we received God's word in our hearts and heard substantial, grounded vocal ministry. We were strengthened and deepened in our common walk of Christian discipleship. We received wisdom and teaching as we continue to seek God's purpose for our lives.

In our meeting for worship on Saturday evening, I felt that the word of the Lord to the group was that we are called to the baptism of fire that John the Baptist proclaimed and that Jesus offers us. We were reminded that we are born of water and given spirit/breath by our Creator. After these baptisms of water and spirit comes the baptism of fire, which is a spiritual circumcision. The baptism of fire is a cutting, a stripping down and cleansing of all rebellion and ungodliness. It is a baptism into holiness.

While we were called to pass through the crucible of inward spiritual baptism and crucifixion of self-will, we were also reminded that dying to self is the beginning of new life in Christ. We were exhorted to remember that the good news of Jesus Christ is not the fire, but the life, joy and peace that lies beyond it. As ministers and elders, we are called to act as midwives to the birthing of new, everlasting life in the Spirit.

I was grateful to have the opportunity to be present at this gathering of Friends. Over the course of the weekend, the Holy Spirit worked on my heart, bringing me to a clearer understanding of my own spiritual condition. In particular, I became even more aware of my own need to be humbled and yielded to Christ's lordship. I was shown that I am called to greater singleness of purpose in my life.

For years, I have run myself ragged, seeking to accomplish more, do more, be more. But this weekend the Lord deepened my understanding of what Christ asks of me. I saw that God desires not achievement but submission. The Spirit calls me to not greatness but yieldedness. To walk in the way of Jesus is to embrace not human honor and glory but anonymous love and self-sacrifice. I am convicted that my anxiety is a sign of my sin, not of my diligence. I am called to simple, childlike trust. Worry is not a part of God's plan for me, because the power of the Lord is indeed over all.

I am grateful for the work of the organizers this weekend, and for all of the ministers and elders who traveled to be with us. I give thanks for the powerful ways that God has moved among us, and for Jesus' resurrected presence in our midst. He continues to teach us, and I pray for the grace to yield to his instruction. I can trust his word to me. I know he loves me. My only job is to love him back, and share that love with others.