Tag Archives: Esther Greenleaf Murer

Dec 04

Unlikely Messengers

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It some­times strikes me that the Lord some­times picks some might­ily unlikely mes­sen­gers. We are all flawed in our ways, true, but it’s easy to think there are those flawed more than our­selves. In part this is the whole beam in the eye prob­lem of per­spec­tive we find in Matthew 7. But the para­ble of the Lost Sheep recorded in Luke 15 sug­gests that some are more lost than others:

What man of you, hav­ing an hun­dred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilder­ness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoul­ders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he cal­leth together his friends and neigh­bours, say­ing unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that like­wise joy shall be in heaven over one sin­ner that repen­teth, more than over ninety and nine just per­sons, which need no repentance.

One of the best-known exam­ples of the formerly-lost sheep is the apos­tle Paul of Tar­sus. We first learn about him as Saul, a Phar­isee who actively per­se­cuted the early church. The story of the the light of heaven inter­rupt­ing his jour­ney to Dam­as­cus is really key to under­stand­ing Friends under­stand­ing of the Light as judge and instruc­tor (it’s also the source of one of my favorite line in the Johnny Cash oevre “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”!).

But I always won­der what the other Chris­tians made of the post-conversion Paul. We get a lit­tle of their reac­tion from Ana­nias but I imag­ine there was lots of talk and anger, jeal­ousy and con­fu­sion all swirling with what­ever joy they could muster that another soul was saved. A man who had “slaugh­tered” them was soon to present him­self as a major leader, tak­ing sides in the great debates over how Jew­ish the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity needed to be.

How do we react when God uses an unlikely mes­sen­ger to spread the good news? None of my blog read­ers are likely to have seen their brethren slaugh­tered but it’s safe to say we’ve all been wronged and mis­treated from time to time. One of the great mys­ter­ies I’ve expe­ri­enced is how God has seem­ingly used other’s dis­obe­di­ence to do His work. Know­ing this requires a scale of love that’s hard to imag­ine. Peo­ple do wrong can still be some­how act­ing of God. Peo­ple who have done wrong are some­times espe­cially cho­sen of God. Heaven rejoices more for that one saved sin­ner than all the rest of us try­ing to mud­dle along in faith. Even secret anger is akin to mur­der.

We Friends are rightly inspired of 17th Cen­tury New Jer­sey Friend John Woolman’s excep­tional com­pas­sion and abil­ity to see out­side the prej­u­dices of his day, but even this “Quaker saint” con­sid­ered him­self the unlikely mes­sen­ger, the lost sheep of  the Luke story. He wrote of a dream:“Then the mys­tery was opened, and I per­ceived there was joy in heaven over a sin­ner who had repented [Luk 15:7] and that that lan­guage John Wool­man is dead meant no more than the death of my own will.”

How do we hold tight to love, even for those we don’t like? When we greet even those who have dis­ap­pointed us, we need to bear in mind that they might have trav­eled their own road to Dam­as­cus since last we met. They might be one of those God chooses to teach.

(Thanks to Esther Green­leaf Mürer’s Quaker Bible Index for the Wool­man connection.)

Jan 20

When Isaac Penington, Margaret Fell and Elizabeth Bathurst join the reading group

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Not some­thing I’ll do every day, but over on Quak­erQuaker I cross-referenced today’s One Year Bible read­ings with Esther Green­leaf Murer’s Quaker Bible Index. Here’s the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus’ para­ble of wheat & tares and pearls. It’s a par­tic­u­larly rich read­ing today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an inter­est­ing para­ble about let­ting the faith­ful and the unfaith­ful grow together.

As if know­ing today is Inau­gu­ra­tion Day, Isaac Pen­ing­ton turned it into a polit­i­cal ref­er­ence: “But oh, how the laws and gov­ern­ments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their ref­or­ma­tion, whose com­mon work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!”

Mar­garet Fell sees the wheat and tares as an exam­ple of jeal­ousy and false min­istry: “Oh how hath this envi­ous man got­ten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bun­dles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seeds­men come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, … & so it was easy to stir up jeal­ousy in you, you hav­ing the ground of jeal­ousy in your­selves which is as strong as death.”

We get poetry from the sev­en­teen cen­tury Eliz­a­beth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that “the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appear­ance (even as the morn­ing –light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in bright­ness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the fir­ma­ment at noon-day height.”

The para­ble of the tares became a call for tol­er­ance in George Fox’s under­stand­ing: “For Christ com­mands chris­t­ian men to “love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their ene­mies [Mat 5:44];” and so not to per­se­cute them. And those ene­mies may be changed by repen­tance and con­ver­sion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels’ work to burn the tares, and not men’s.”

A cen­tury later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and wor­ried about reli­gious edu­ca­tion and Quaker drift: “But for want of keep­ing an eye open to this pre­serv­ing Power, a spirit of indif­fer­ence hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a ten­dency to choke the good seed; those ten­der impres­sions and reproofs of instruc­tion, which would have pre­pared our spir­its, and have bound them to the holy law and tes­ti­monies of truth.”

I hope all this helps us remem­ber that the Bible is our book too and an essen­tial resource for Friends. It’s easy to for­get this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is get­ting our Bible fix from main­stream Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian sources whose view­points might be in pretty direct oppo­si­tion from Quaker under­stand­ings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B’s post on The New Calvin­ism or Tom Smith’s very rea­son­able con­cerns about the lit­er­al­ism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and rec­om­mend). On the other hand, it’s not uncom­mon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our reli­gion as “Quaker,” down­grade Chris­tian­ity by mak­ing it optional, unmen­tion­able or non-contextual and turn­ing to the Bible only for the oblig­a­tory epis­tle ref­er­ence.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the mar­gins in the mod­ern edi­tion of Samuel Bow­nas’ “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions Nec­es­sary to a Gospel Min­istry,” which were pep­pered with the Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences Bow­nas was casu­ally cit­ing through­out. On my sec­ond read­ing (yes it’s that good!) I started look­ing up the ref­er­ences and real­ized that: 1) Bow­nas wasn’t just mak­ing this stuff up or quot­ing willy-nilly; and 2) read­ing them helped me under­stand Bow­nas and by exten­sion the whole con­cept of Quaker min­istry. You’re not read­ing my blog enough if you’re not get­ting the idea that this is one of the kind of prac­tices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talk­ing about at the Con­ver­gent work­shop next month. If you can fig­ure out the trans­port then get your­self to Cali pronto and join us.