The Stone That the Builders Rejected

The stone that the builders rejected
    has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing;
    it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day that the Lord has made;
    let us rejoice and be glad in it.

(Psalm 118:22-24, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

A Quaker business meeting relies upon the discernment of its clerk to ascertain whom Spirit has prompted to speak; a regular meeting for worship does away with even that bit of gatekeeping. In either situation, God might choose anyone in the room to deliver the message needed at that moment. You might hear from someone who’s come to that meetinghouse every First Day for decades, or a Friend visiting from another meeting five or five hundred miles away. For all you know, Spirit might give rise to an insight from somebody who just learned about the Quaker meeting in their community earlier in the week and came to check it out.

Friends do not—or should not, at any rate—dismiss a message because it hasn’t come from the “right” person. I hope you’ve never witnessed such a scene in your meeting. It can destabilize the safe space of communal discernment upon which Friends rely; others may come to doubt their own leadings and hold back Spirit’s messages for fear of similar rebuke. That kind of repressive spiritual atmosphere does nobody any good.

We’re talking about a foundational principle of Quakerism here.

Ellis Pugh, a Welsh Friend who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1687, spent the last years of his life writing A Salutation to the Britains, hoping to persuade “those that are of a low degree like my self” to embrace Quaker faith and practice. He described what happens when Friends gather to “give [their] Heart and Mind to wait upon the Lord… to refresh their Souls” in meeting for worship:

“[W]hen God sees meet to put a Word into the Mouth of any one of them, he is to speak what the Lord hath revealed and taught him (I Cor 2:4). So is he to give it forth in Demonstration and Power, and in the Vertue and Life of the Spirit, that it may be to edification in the church; for Deep calleth unto Deep, and Life reacheth unto Life, and the Congregation go together to the Waters to drink freely (Ps 42:7).… because that spiritual Liberty is in the true Church, for every one to speak as they are moved by the holy Spirit, and as the Lord pours upon them the Spirit of Grace and Supplication, they are to pray with the Spirit, and in the Spirit, as God reveals to them the Wants and Necessities of the Congregation.”

As we meet in the spiritual liberty of communal worship, we don’t speak to reassure ourselves that God has chosen us above others. We give messages, when led, to address “the Wants and Necessities of the Congregation” as we do what it takes, along with our neighbors, to make the Beloved Community manifest. This doesn’t mean we accept everything said in meeting willy-nilly. Sometimes, we may find upon discernment that a message contains more human concern than Spirit-led revelation. But we don’t say, “That message came from So-and-So, therefore we can ignore it.”

Jesus, citing the 118th Psalm, named himself “the stone the builders rejected.” 

From Peter onward, ministers have reinforced that identification for nearly two thousand years. I won’t dispute this, but I’d like to offer another suggestion—one based in Friends’ original contention with, as Pugh put it, the “idolatrous Churches” of seventeenth-century England “which have deck’d themselves with a Set Method, Service, and Worship.”

In those churches, the priestly caste held all the spiritual and temporal power. As Friends began openly challenging this state of affairs, the “builders” of Protestant England’s institutional infrastructure—which included the government—rejected those “stones,” openly mocking the spiritually led men and women whose bodies quaked as they spoke. Rather than fall into despair, though, Pugh tells us how these “Quakers” came together to “worship in Spirit even in God, who dwelleth in his People, and makes them a Temple for himself.”

Some of us today know the sting of rejection from our churches of origin. 

Maybe we had the “wrong” politics, or the “wrong” sexual orientation or gender identity. Maybe we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe wholeheartedly in Jesus’s resurrection or God’s triune nature or the inerrancy of Scripture. At their best, Friends don’t care about any of that. Even Christ-centered Friends tend not to overly concern themselves with what anyone else believes about Jesus, as long as they show some sign of striving to listen to their Inward Teacher, however they comprehend it.

If we come prepared to help build the Beloved Community, Quakers won’t turn us away or view us with hostility or suspicion. Instead, they welcome us to join them as they renew their strength in waiting silence, that they might freely accept our contribution as Spirit calls on us to make it.