I Will Raise Up Shepherds

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
(Jeremiah 23:1-4, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

When the earliest Quakers read prophets from the Hebrew Bible like Jeremiah, they saw the world of seventeenth-century England reflected back at them. “This is evident in all the Scriptures, and in all histories since,” James Nayler wrote in Love to the Lost:

“…whenever the mystery of iniquity had spread over, and darkness had passed over [Christ’s] seed, and his people had broken his covenant and lost his word, then he in love to his people sent out some immediately who had his word in them, to bear witness to the Lord against all their backslidings and self-ways and formal worships, and to such the world’s ministers, or rather masters, were ever enemies, and sought to stir up the powers of men against them to devour them, always under the name of blasphemers and heretics, and destroyers of worship, and peace-breakers and enemies to authority.”

Less than a year after first publishing that, Nayler would find himself convicted by Parliament of blasphemy—publicly tortured and then thrown into prison. In his cell, I imagine, he might have thought that his persecutors were proving his point, that “the ministers of Christ are ever called out of the world and contrary to the world.”

Nayler held this belief consistently across his many writings.

In An Answer to a Book called The Quaker’s Catechism, published around the same time as Love to the Lost, he took apart a criticism of Quaker faith by the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter. “Will [it] be for the people’s profit to despise their teachers and guides?” Nayler paraphrased one of Baxter’s challenges. He then offered a sharp retort: “I say you who have despised Christ’s commands to set up your own lusts and pride, covetousness and false worship, must be despised.”

“…and wrath come upon you to the uttermost, being captivated by the devil soul and body, the god of this world having blinded the eye, so that the gospel is hid from you, and you lost, setting up the letter instead of it, having denied the light and erred from it, are got up into hardness of heart, imprisoning, beating, and making havoc like mad beasts.”

I look at the United States today, and Nayler’s arguments ring true, even when I don’t share the exact parameters of his Christ-centered faith. Many of the movers and shakers of our major institutions have set up their own lusts and pride as guiding principles, hardening their heart to the suffering of others and persecuting those who would dare remind them of it. As for making havoc, we just got through a month and a half of barely functioning governance; how do we think that went?

I spent a lot of time trying to move past this point by saying “We could use some God-raised shepherds right about now.”

As I wrote, though, I kept remembering examples of such shepherds already appearing among us. The day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, for example, the Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde urged him—and, by extension, the nation—to love our immigrant neighbors. “I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away,” she said. Trump dismissed Budde as “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” and one of his congressional flunkies called for her deportation.

At least she didn’t have her tongue pierced by a hot needle, or the letter B (“blasphemer”) branded into her forehead, like the Puritans did to Nayler. Although in the months since that sermon, federal agents have started shooting at ministers protesting outside detention centers, so who knows what the future holds?

Within the Religious Society of Friends, we have the group of Quakers who walked from New York City to Washington, D.C., this spring to remind Congress of its obligation to uphold the Constitution, particularly the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. We have many more Friends, in several meetings nationwide, who have filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security alleging that those rights have been violated. And we have countless Friends whose “small” testimonies of living in blessed community with others accumulate and gain power over time.

I love that Quakers’ anti-ecclesiastic tradition empowers any of us to follow our leadings and become the shepherds this world needs. That radical egalitarianism can make it difficult for others to see us as clearly as they will a collared minister taking a pepper ball to the head. That just means we’ll have to work that much harder at whatever tasks Spirit sets for us.