Let Yourselves Be Built Into a Spiritual House

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture:

“See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
    a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
(1 Peter 2:4-6, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

We live in a culture that, whatever noise it makes about “society” or “the nation,” valorizes the individual. The principalities and powers that hold dominion in this world promote certain forms of social organization—namely, democracy and capitalism—as the environments in which individuals can become the best possible, “freest” versions of themselves.

Religious institutions indulge in this way of thinking as well. 

Many Christian communities place great emphasis on congregants’ “personal relationship with Jesus,” and some go so far as to promise material prosperity along with spiritual and emotional well-being. Even some Quaker meetings, perhaps especially in the United States, present themselves as places where “personal liberty” and “individual conscience” are not forced to conform to “dogma” and “creed.”

When George Fox called on Friends to let their lives answer “that of God” in all whom they encountered, he spoke of a divine grace resting within each of us—a grace that could lie dormant, or thrive, depending on whether we choose to live in sin or to heed the call out of that darkness into God’s marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9) We do not possess this grace as individuals, but as part of God’s creation. God certainly wants each of us to prosper, but not for any of us to prosper at the expense of another. We must prosper together, loving God and our neighbors as ourselves.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus came to remind the people of Jerusalem and its neighboring towns and cities of the terms of God’s covenant. If they wanted to shake off the yoke of Roman oppression, he said, they needed to turn inward, and learn to truly love others. The local authorities heard Jesus’s call to extricate oneself from the imperial way of seeing the world as a threat to their power, and dealt with it as empires do. But they could not kill the message, and so his disciples spread across the land, urging first their fellow Jews and then anyone else who would listen to let themselves be built into a spiritual house, where Rome could no longer hurt them.

Empire can crush individuals, but a people can thrive in resistance.

“Self-optimization,” the German sociologist of religion Hans Joas warns in Why the Church?, “is what becomes of self-realization when it has lost its communitarian dimension.” When we seek to advance our own fortunes at the expense of our neighbors, we embrace Empire’s way of thinking. We may think we’re reaching our fullest potential, but in reality we’re betraying ourselves as well as those we push past on the path to success.

Joas describes Christians as “people whose sense of life is permeated by the experience that God loves humans and his entire creation, that Jesus Christ embodies this divine love in human form and that his example invites us to follow and emulate him within the scope of our human capabilities.” The earliest Quakers understood the reality of this, and even today most Friends get it in their souls, whether or not they embrace its Christian dimension.

“You are my friends if you do what I command you,” Jesus told his disciples—not servants, who obey orders without understanding their purpose, but friends, “because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John 15:14-15) In case the disciples required further clarity, Jesus added, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” (15:17)

This discipline binds those who embrace it in solidarity. “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people,” Peter (or someone using his name) wrote in his first letter. “Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Peter 2:10) In that state of mercy, a blessed community comes together, defying all of Empire’s logic.

We cannot explain this mercy’s effect; we can only demonstrate it.

As Joas observes, “We are more likely to succeed in converting others if we convert ourselves, if we live the faith that we are proclaiming, and that we need—rather than explaining to others why they ought to need it.” He’s writing about Christians, but even Friends without a Christ-centered faith can recognize the truth here. People admire the Quakers—to the extent that they know we still exist—because we have a record of walking the walk as boldly as we talk the talk. Our continued survival depends on leaning into the mercy God has shown us and preserving the Religious Society as a “spiritual house,” a living example of the possibility of escape from Empire’s clutches.