Messages

Christ promises in the gospel of John: “In the world you will face persecution. But take courage, because I have conquered the world!” It helps me to have faith in that promise when I consider the long arc of the moral universe. Reading those words, I’m reminded of a message Chuck Fager has given to several Yearly Meetings, calling on Friends to embark on a hundred year Lamb’s war for peace. We need a long range vision, he said. Instead, we keep ourselves distracted by believing that every blip in the news is a major battle. The shorter the vision, the larger the obstacles seem; the longer the vision, the clearer the perspective. If I look for peace in an arc, if I see my own actions as some very small part of a Hundred Years campaign for the common good, maybe the courage that requires of me doesn’t have to be so extreme.

The only way I can imagine leaping—with joy—into the unknown is to know that God leaps with me. To know God’s presence is not necessarily to know certainty—to the contrary, to know God is to embrace the mystery of not knowing, not to escape that mystery.

In Sunday School, we have considered that the groundhogs that Fairview Meeting has not been able to displace from the basement may be showing us the way. One of the reasons it is difficult to evict groundhogs is because they have so many different tunnels leading away from their main chambers, and some of these tunnels have exits at least a quarter of a mile or further from the burrow. So we have been talking about this Christian colony in the cave of the winds, with Niagara Falls thundering at the entrance, but with tunnels leading away from the cave allowing passage into the world of empire. Then the question becomes what will these incognito Christians do in the world of empire to begin to light the darkness? I am wondering whether the very little, possibly almost inconsequential actions, of saying—not something like this, but precisely THIS—thank you and good job, could, in fact, be the beginning of colonizing empire with love.

I think about Koinonia Farm and Habitat for Humanity, I think about rust-resistant barley, I think about mustard seeds, I think about God’s time versus human time. It is true that terrible things keep happening in our world. How long does it take a mustard seed to become a tree? But eventually it does.

As I’ve thought about the difference between the calm that comes with knowing we’ve done what we could, and not knowing what we can do, I’ve remembered the Hebrew bible instructions like, “You shall not wear cloth made from wool and linen woven together. You shall put tassels on the four corners of the cloak that you wrap around yourself.” Maybe these are the things God gave them to do to assure themselves that they were faithful, that they had done, at least, what they could do. Maybe we need the same kinds of things in our life. Not tassels. Not separating wool from linen. But other things. What would it take for me to feel as though I had been at least a minimal amount of faithful?