Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
(Philippians 4:4-6, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
When somebody says to you, “Do not be anxious about anything,” does that ever really help you not feel anxious? Especially if they haven’t (and maybe even can’t) do anything to mitigate all the circumstances that made you anxious in the first place?
And what happens when you can’t stop feeling anxious?
I don’t know about you, but I tend to get cross and irritable and very much at risk of becoming not so gentle with people. I find it easier to give into my snarkiest, most caustic self. I don’t even care that I’m pushing people away, because I don’t want them around. Not if they’re going to keep bugging me.
The weeks before Christmas seem to bring out that sort of tension in a lot of people. So much to do, so little time to do it all, so much pressure to get everything done “just right.” This year, those of us living in the United States can throw in some extra fear and trepidation about what will happen when we hand power over to what may likely prove an authoritarian regime. (“Join the club,” folks in other parts of the world might tell us.)
The scripture for this week’s message comes from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which he wrote from prison. “I have been put here for the defense of the gospel,” he mentions (1:16), and we aren’t talking about some minimum security facility. What the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible renders as my imprisonment, many other editions translate as my bonds or chains. Yet you’ll notice his upbeat tone: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
How could he maintain a cheerful attitude in such conditions?
Simple: Paul firmly believed “the Lord is near” and, as he writes a few lines later, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” That same conviction kept Quakers like George Fox, James Nayler, and Isaac Penington from losing faith while they sat in English jail cells and, three centuries later, nurtured Bayard Rustin while he spent more than two years in federal prison as a conscientious objector to being drafted into the U.S. military during the Second World War.
In all these cases, “the Lord is near” has a Christian dimension to it which may not resonate with everyone reading this message. We don’t have to worry about that right now. We can focus instead on the conviction shared by Paul and others throughout history that something spoke to their human condition—and on how that conviction inspired them to increase their gentleness until none could fail to recognize it.
(The Greek word Paul uses, epieikes, can also be translated as reasonableness, graciousness, kindness, or moderation.)
Making our gentleness known to everyone doesn’t always come easy.
It can become easier over time, as our spiritual conviction gains momentum. But we may find ourselves backsliding—how often have you been having a great day, loving the world and everybody in it, and then you run into one frustrating person, or you catch glimpse of one bit of unwelcome news, and all that good spirit evaporates? (The New York City subway system, for example, has provoked such feelings in me on more than one occasion.)
Some of us find it easier to cultivate our gentleness when we can keep some sort of end goal in sight, like Paul’s faith in Christ’s immanent return. For many Friends, whatever they may believe about Jesus, the ideal of “the beloved community” serves as such a beacon—and the meeting for worship becomes the home base for the beloved community.
But the beloved community must extend beyond the meetinghouse if we want it to truly prosper. If we show our gentleness to a handful of friends, but treat everyone else like garbage… in the long run, that only makes us afraid that everyone else will turn our unkindness back on us. That anxiety will eat away at us, and it will eventually affect even our closest relationships. I have even seen it break a Quaker meeting nearly to the point of dissolution.
Healthy Quaker meetings—healthy congregations of any faith—reach out beyond their core population, welcoming their neighbors into their version of the beloved community. They may not necessarily inspire others to become Friends, but their example compels others to see something in the Quaker way of living that promotes love and happiness—and gives all who take part in it cause to rejoice.
Thank you, Ron. I loved this. If you have yet done so, I would heartily recommend you read Alexei Navalny’s autobiography, “Patriot” — or even better, listen to it (it’s beautifully read). Navalny was an atheist until his first child was born, when he was so overcome with the miracle of the event that he became a Christian. Although he doesn’t mention it too often in his memoir, his faith is clearly a critical part of his ability to endure his increasingly brutal imprisonment with a measure of equanimity and humor.
Thank you for the hope that is hard to see and the mirror in which we see clearly