The Lord God Has Given Me a Trained Tongue

The Lord God has given me
    a trained tongue,
that I may know how to sustain
    the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens,
    wakens my ear
    to listen as those who are taught.
(Isaiah 50:4, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I recently hit upon a passage in a newsletter by a former Episcopal priest named Kerlin Richter that profoundly moved me. Richter was describing the role she had played in her congregation. “I was called to love them and continually point back to God,” she wrote. “I was called to be the person who said over and over again—through all the different seasons of our common life—that God is always with us, even when God is not obvious, and that God always, always loves us.”

Quakers don’t have priests, as I observed in Richter’s comments section, and most meetings in the branch of the Religious Society of Friends to which I belong don’t even do pastors. “We do believe in the calling to ministry,” though, I added, and her words felt like a concisely wonderful (and wonderfully concise) description of the heart of ministry.

The Quaker antipathy toward priesthood goes all the way back to George Fox, stemming from his disappointment in the personal and spiritual shortcomings he saw in the clergy he encountered during his period of spiritual crisis. He came to scorn those he believed had made a trade out of doling bits of the Bible out to their congregation every Sunday in exchange for their financial support.

“All they that have the Scriptures of Christ, the Apostles, and Prophets, and are not in the Power and Spirit which gave them forth… but stop their Ears and close their Eyes to it,” he decided, “these cannot Worship God in Spirit, these cannot Pray in Spirit, nor Sing in the Spirit[;] these are out of the Fellowship in the Spirit.”

Instead, Fox wrote, “the Ministry is the Gift of God, and is to be Ministred (sic) freely.”

Faith in continued revelation assures Friends that God can select any one of us to receive the gift of ministry, at any time—and when we get that tap on the shoulder, we must share God’s message without seeking reward or compensation.

The earliest Friends had a model for that kind of ministry, in the voices of the prophets recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Their example calls to us as well. I particularly like the lines from Isaiah quoted above, although I had to sit with them for a while before I truly understood.

Consulting some different translations helped. In the Good News Bible, also known as “Today’s English Version,” Isaiah says, very straightforwardly, “The Sovereign Lord has taught me what to say, so that I can strengthen the weary. Every morning he makes me eager to hear what he is going to teach me.”

Robert Alter, who spent years translating the Hebrew Bible as a solo venture, has Isaiah write that God has given him “a skilled tongue,” but notes that the literal Hebrew phrase is “the disciples’ tongue.” Consequently, Alter’s Isaiah also listens as “the disciples” do, rather than “those who are taught.”

I like that phrasing a lot.

I like the idea of connecting Quaker ministry to a discipleship of the Spirit, but even more than that I like the idea of ministry as a boost for the weary, a reminder that “God is always with us, even when God is not obvious, and that God always, always loves us.”

The continued revelations we receive from God as individuals give us hope—sometimes they scare us at first, steering us in a direction we neither anticipated nor asked for, but ultimately they point us toward a life of testimony to the possibility of… grace? the kingdom of heaven on earth? Call it what you will.

Our ministry, then, must extend that same hope to those who have not yet experienced the gift of revelation for themselves, or who have experienced it but may need a reminder. (And sometimes we may need such a reminder from someone else!) This world and its conditions grind so many people down, often to the point of physical and spiritual exhaustion. Even a small bit of ministry, in word or action, delivered at the right moment, could help them find the strength to carry on.

So when the Lord God, or whatever you wish to call it, opens your ear, follow the example of Isaiah and George Fox: Do not rebel, and do not turn away. Listen as the disciples do, and—at the appropriate moment—share what you learn. If it happens during meeting for worship, well, moments don’t get much more appropriate than that. If not, Spirit will surely make things clear to you in time.