I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.
But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel would not submit to me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
to follow their own counsels.
O that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
Then I would quickly subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes.
Those who hate the Lord would cringe before him,
and their doom would last forever.
I would feed you with the finest of the wheat,
and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.
(Psalm 81: 10-16, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
Does the name Larry Norman ring any bells?
Readers of a certain age, or particular religious backgrounds, may remember Norman as the first prominent Christian rock star. One song in particular, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” became sort of an anthem for Rapture-conscious evangelicals. I don’t subscribe to that worldview myself, but as expressions of the prophetic imagination go, the song has a certain haunting quality. (Norman recorded different versions for each of his first two albums; you can watch a fan-made video for the original track on YouTube.)
As I listen to it these days, verses like “Life was filled with guns and war / and everyone got trampled on the floor” or “Children died, the days grew cold / A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold” call to mind the current situations in Ukraine and Gaza… and make me anxious about events here in the United States as well.
In 1653, James Nayler took stock of England and declared, “The people to whom oppression and unrighteousness hath been a burden have long waited for deliverance, from one year to another, but none comes, from one sort of men to another.” He believed the nation’s rulers had chosen to ignore God and follow the counsel of their own stubborn hearts, and he blamed such willfulness for the descent into disorder. “Are not these the choicest of thy worthies who are now in power?” he asked, perhaps somewhat sarcastically. “Hath it not been the top of thy desires and labors to see it in their hands? And are not they now become weak as other men, and the land still in travail, but nothing brought forth but wind?”
I read early Quaker tracts like Nayler’s, and it almost feels like reading the news.
Blaming the government seems too easy, though, especially in a country like the U.S., where citizens choose their leaders in democratic elections. Our desires and labors—well, not mine, and probably not yours, but you know what I mean—delivered the nation into these people’s hands.
We didn’t just abandon the covenant overnight, though. Society has been chipping away at it slowly, not just for years, or decades, but centuries. The secular world hasn’t merely taught us to celebrate an individual’s accumulation of wealth and prestige and comfort at the expense of others. It tells us that “God helps those who help themselves,” and frequently leads people into confusing their own desires for God’s. In some cases, I fear, that confusion has even seeped into our Quaker meetings.
Some cases! Overall, I think the Religious Society of Friends does a great job of following the guidelines documented in Scripture, along with Spirit’s continuing revelations of how those guidelines apply to our ever-changing circumstances. But nobody gets it right all the time. If we did, we wouldn’t have to argue in meeting for business over which local charity will receive a donation, or whether to open our doors to our undocumented neighbors, or whether to make sure our queer attenders feel safe among us.
We hold meetings for business not to decide what we want, but to listen for Spirit’s calling.
Some Friends might ask if Spirit really cares, say, who we hire to mow the lawn outside the meetinghouse. Shouldn’t we just make sure we get the best deal we can? Already, though, if we approach this question purely transactionally, only concerning ourselves with saving money, we’ve started to shift our goal from establishing the Blessed Community to maintaining a prosperous community. And Jesus has assured us we don’t need to ruthlessly count our pennies. “Do not store up for yourselves on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal,” he advised the crowds who came to hear him speak. “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21)
If we focus on our testimony of the Blessed Community promised to us, God will make sure we have what we need to thrive—not what we think we need, nor what a capital-driven society tells us we need. Thus Friends ground even the smallest of decisions in our discernment of Spirit’s leadings, training ourselves to make the big decisions that way as instinctively as we breathe.
“There’s no time to change your mind,” Larry Norman sang. “The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” I’d guess most Friends don’t hold such a pessimistic view. Instead, we believe Spirit remains with us and has never stopped inviting people to fix their hearts and resume walking in God’s ways.
The other day I was listening to an American in a group voicing his distress about the current leadership, to which the (compassionate) response was that he himself had similar issues, that very many Americans, while choosing not to be violent themselves, also feel that violence to protect them or their country or the ‘righteous’ is appropriate. He was also told that there are major flaws in both ruling and opposition parties in all countries. I know my own arrogance and sense of superiority, my own desire for recognition, my own feeling of fear of attack are no different to those of many countries’ leaders.
The recommendation was to work on one’s own issues, and always this is do-able if we sincerely ask for God to help us. This and only this will lead to real change in the outside world. Your opening quote about God subduing our enemies says exactly that, in a metaphorical sense. If we sincerely seek to follow God, to change within so that we come to love as God loves, then we can have faith that eventually ‘our enemies will be subdued’ – for eternity. But it’s so important to start that internal work now.