See, the Home of God Is Among Mortals

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them and be their God;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

(Revelation 21: 1-4, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Since writing last week’s message, I’ve kept thinking about George Fox’s deep attachment to the Book of Revelation. When I was browsing the bookstore at Pendle Hill (the one just outside Philadelphia, not the one in England), I tried to find the Quaker historian and theologian Douglas Gwyn’s Apocalypse of the Word, which I imagine would have much to say on the subject. They didn’t have any copies in stock, alas.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Thinning the Veil, a new book by the biblical scholar Shane J. Wood. Wood grounds his analysis in the first words of the first verse in the first chapter: “the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Instead of trying to interpret every detail in John the Revelator’s ecstatic vision to elaborate an allegorical narrative, Wood reminds us, over and over, that Jesus revealed himself, and his presence in that moment, to John. “We offer bloodred moons predicting the end of all; Revelation offers Jesus,” Wood writes. “We sleuth presidential candidates for marks of the beast; Revelation offers Jesus.”

This gave me an unexpected insight into George Fox.

Wood wants us to remember that the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation didn’t come out of nowhere; everything in the book happened to John of Patmos. To understand why he had this life-altering experience, we need to recall that John, “your brother who share[s] with you the persecution and the kingdom and the endurance in Jesus,” had been sent to the small Mediterranean island “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” We tend to think of John as living in total solitude, but the island did have a Roman settlement—and the empire did exile a great many other dissidents to the region. 

John would have found himself among people, then, but—cut off from the seven churches of his own faith community—he might well have struggled to find any among them all that could speak to his condition. So he went to a cave in the mountainous terrain past the towns where he could pray—and there he learned, as George Fox would learn a millennium and a half later, that “there is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.”

Fox had not been banished from society as John had—but even in his homeland he felt out of place, filled with a spiritual yearning none of the local religious authorities could nourish. Can you imagine his reaction as he turned to Scripture and hit upon Revelation, finding in John a kindred spirit? Reading past the spectacle, and resonating with the soul that bore witness to it?

Like John, Fox realized Spirit has already come to guide us to the kingdom of the heavens.

For those of us who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, such intense prophetic imagination can ruffle our spiritual sensibilities. We may not want the new heaven and the new earth as John and Fox envisioned them. Perhaps we imagine our utopia as not quite so… Christian. Some of us may not even believe in the existence of a God that cares enough about humanity to dwell among mortals and “wipe every tear from their eyes.”

I get it; I have my own strong enthusiasm for a “fully automated luxury communism” model, with a slightly queer anarchic spin, as the means to excise “mourning and crying and pain” from this world and create a Beloved Community of justice and equity and peace. But the primitive Christians believed in all of that; so did the primitive Friends—and so, with some variation here and there, do the majority of Quakers worldwide today.

Other Friends, not identifying as Christ-centered, might struggle to put into words exactly what (if anything) they believe about God, might not even call the thing in which they believe “God.” I say this with confidence because in my own life I have absorbed a great deal of the mainstream culture’s skepticism and rationalism and materialism… yet I have also learned experimentally that, as Shane J. Wood puts it, “the veil between heaven and earth is not as thick as we assume.” 

Fox and other Quakers believed that faith depended on acknowledging this as truth, ideally through personal experience. Acknowledgment required more than verbal affirmation—it meant changing every aspect of your conduct in order to live in integrity with this sacred reality. A people who call themselves “Children of the Light” or “Friends of Truth,” after all, really ought to strive to live up to such names.

Figuring out how to do that can prove a lifelong adventure.