A People Who Are Zealous for Good Deeds

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.
(Titus 2:11-14, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

When you look around your meetinghouse, do you see a people zealous for good deeds? 

I mean, really zealous for good deeds. Y’all don’t just like the idea of good deeds—you want to accomplish things! 

And everyone else in your community can see that passion. They know that when, say, a single parent has trouble covering the family’s grocery bills while waiting for the next paycheck, or a formerly incarcerated person wants to make their way back into society, or newly arrived immigrants need all sorts of basic household supplies… whatever causes your meeting has taken up, your neighbors know you stand ready to help those in need.

Or do you find yourself among Friends who discourage the meeting from launching such programs? They might deride them as “too much work” to set up and maintain, or tell you they don’t have any time to spare. Maybe those same Friends always manage to find reasons why the meeting shouldn’t give money to the charities other members suggest. Sometimes they’ve heard that the charity doesn’t really need the money; sometimes they’ve heard stories about the charity mismanaging its funds; sometimes they don’t even bother to cast aspersions on the charity, and just declare the meeting can’t afford to spend money on anything but itself.

Perhaps you even recognize yourself in the preceding paragraph more than you’d like to admit.

And what do your neighbors know about you and your Friends in that case? They might know your community still has a Quaker meeting. Maybe they could point the meetinghouse out if anyone asks about it. But they couldn’t tell anyone what you do—and what do you do, other than get together for an hour or two every Sunday morning and punctuate the silence with occasional complaints about how scary and unfriendly the world has become?

Such temerity flies in the face of God’s plan for us.

(For those of us who believe in God, and believe God has a plan for us. Everyone else, play along with me for a spell.)

When we treat the meetinghouse as little more than a safe haven, we ignore the holy charge that George Fox passed on to Friends in a letter he dictated from prison in 1656: 

“…be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.”

By living up to that mission statement, we help those around us recognize the grace underpinning their lives. “The world needs the church,” the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas has written:

“because without the church the world does not know what it is nor who God is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people.” 

In the community Hauerwas calls the church (which includes Quaker meetings, at the very least the Christian-oriented ones), we live our lives in such a way as to remind the rest of the world of the life available to them—a life where love matters more than wealth and prestige. We know our work cannot make everything right, but we go ahead and make the effort anyway, because we know God doesn’t expect that from us. “Charity is not about removing all injustice from the world,” Hauerwas says, “but about meeting the need of our neighbors right where we find them.”

Quakers’ zeal for good deeds, then, has nothing to do with boosting our reputation in secular society. We don’t want the world to think highly of us for our own sakes. Rather, we want people to look past us to the Spirit that motivates our actions, the same Spirit that led George Fox to exhort Friends to “bring all into the worship of God” by the example of our lived testimony. We can’t do that if we spend our “self-controlled, upright, and godly” lives sheltered within the walls of our meetinghouses. If we truly believe “the grace of God has appeared” and remains present, offering salvation to all right now, in this very moment, we need to let the world know what it’s missing out on. But simply telling them won’t do the trick. “We serve the world,” Hauerwas advises, “by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.”

**

(I got all the Stanley Hauerwas quotes from Jesus Changes Everything, a distillation and remixing of his most vital writings that will be published by Plough Books early next year. That slight spin on the word showing at the end, though, comes from me.)