Taboos, Judgment, and Provision: The Ravens and Elijah

Preached at Klamath Falls Friends Church
April 28, 2013

I was driving through Newberg on a side street and came upon what is called “a murder of crows”—6 or 7 dragging a squirrel carcass to the side of the street to enjoy a free meal. Crows are in the same general species as ravens, birds that eat everything and are particularly drawn to carrion.  The crows I drove by illustrated the verse from Job 38: “Who provides food for the raven when the raven’s chicks cry unto God, when they wander for lack of meat?” This question is answered in Psalm 147, which says, “Sing thanksgiving to the Lord, sing praises to God on the harp…he gives food to the beast and to the young ravens which cry.” And then Jesus wraps up this thought by reminding his followers, “Take no thought for your life, don’t worry about food; don’t worry about your body, about what you will clothe yourself in.  Life is more than food and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens.  They neither sow nor reap, they have neither bank account nor pantry; and God feeds them.  How much are you different from these birds?”

So the dead squirrel was God’s provision for the crows that day.  And God subtracted one squirrel from the total also, since God pays attention to both sides of the food chain, to prey as well as to predator; God listens to both the vulnerable and the strong.

But that’s not the meat of what I want to talk about.  I’ve been thinking about Elijah in hiding from Ahab and how God sent him meat via Raven.  This story is in 1 Kings 17.  In order to explore its implications, we need some background in ravens.

First, avoiding ravens is a sign of obedience to God.  When God led the Hebrew people out of Egypt and slavery, God provided them with community laws they were to live by, what we call the Mosaic Law. In the Mosaic Law, ravens are unclean animals, ritually taboo.  Here is what the Law says:  The Lord has chosen you specifically; you are set apart from all other nations for the Lord your God.  You shall eat no abominable thing. 

You may eat the cow, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the antelope, the gazelle; every animal that has cloven hooves and chews the cud you may eat. 

Do not eat the camel or the rock badger or any animal that either has cloven hooves but does not chew the cud, or chews the cud but does not have cloven hooves. Do not eat pigs, and don’t even touch their dead bodies. 

You may eat fish with fins and scales; don’t eat anything else that lives in the water.

You may eat clean birds, but none of the raptors, whether eagle or owl, none of the vultures, none of the ravens, none of the fishing birds.  Don’t eat bats or most other things that both creep on the ground and fly. Don’t eat weasels, mice, tortoises, lizards, snails, moles. However, you may eat locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers.

And don’t eat anything that dies on its own.  If you even touch the dead body of an unclean animal, you are also unclean for the rest of the day. You can sell it to foreigners and feed it to outsiders, but don’t eat it yourselves.  You are separated unto the Lord.

Some of the prohibitions may relate to the uses of various animals in the worship of idols. Some may relate to healthfulness. The instruction to sell or give the carcass to a non-Hebrew with no penalty for the Hebrew seller or the non-Hebrew buyer (and eventual eater) suggests that these dietary restrictions help identify the Hebrews as set apart from other nations, as peculiar in every sense of the world. 

Even though the actual translations of the Hebrew words may include animals that are no longer around or that we don’t understand, these instructions are quite clear.

Second, ravens are signs of the judgment of God.  Isaiah 34 depicts God saying, I will bring my sword upon Edom and judge them for their quarrel with Israel, and the slaughter will be great… the raven shall dwell in this land.  In Proverbs 30:17, the result of mocking one’s father and despising one’s mother is that one’s eyes are plucked out by the ravens.  This likely means that dishonoring parents bends one’s steps toward death rather than life.  In both cases, the ravens are present to clean up the carrion.

So two things about ravens as background to Elijah’s story:

The Hebrews are forbidden from eating them; eating ravens is abominable. Even touching a dead raven makes a Hebrew unclean.

And ravens show up when sin has resulted in death.

So here in 1 Kings 17 is the story of Elijah and the ravens. King Ahab married the pagan princess Jezebel from Sidon and built an altar to her god Baal and angered the Lord more than any king before him.  Elijah stood before King Ahab and prophesied that God would withhold rain from Israel because of Ahab’s sins.  Then Elijah took off for the wilderness.  We pick up where God hides him by a brook and sends him meat by ravens.

“And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and in the evening, and he drank of the brook.  When the brook dried up, God said to him, Go into the land of Sidon and live in Zarephath.  I have told a widow there to take care of you.”

What an interesting story, full of challenges to the ways we think God ought to obey the rules.  First, God’s own prophet lives from day to day on unclean food, food brought him by unclean birds, meat that may well be from an unclean animal, certainly one that died “on its own.” (See Lev. 7:24, 17:15.) Elijah leans into the provision of God, even though it comes unconventionally, even though God breaks God’s own food purity rules. When he goes to Sidon and lives in the house of the widow, all the food she prepares is likewise unclean because she herself as a non-Hebrew is unclean. Yet Elijah eats it.

This reminds me of two other moments in the interaction of God and God’s messengers:  the priest and prophet Ezekiel cried out in pain when God told him to cook his food over a fire fueled by human excrement, saying, “I have never broken your laws; please don’t make me do this.”  (See Deut 14:3, 23:13.) God lessened the sting by allowing Ezekiel to burn animal dung instead.  Yet what God asked of him was still outside the laws governing priests.  The other moment is the vision of Peter when a sheet of unclean animals was lowered from heaven and God said three times, “Peter, kill and eat.” Peter’s argument with God ended with God saying, “What God has called clean, let no one call unclean.”

Jesus said this about the good news he came to bring.  John 3:  You must be born anew, born of the Spirit who, like the wind, blows wherever the Spirit wants to blow, descends on whomever the Spirit chooses, and distributes gifts as God wills, not according to rules.  You must worship in that Spirit and in your own spirit and in truth—actual worship that looks like the way Jesus worshiped—by listening to God our Father and doing what God says to do each day, each moment.  Where you worship is irrelevant because God’s Spirit, God’s Truth, God who is Truth, is everywhere. 

The founders of the Quaker movement among Christians witnessed to this by simply recording the gifts of ministry among them.  This witness allows God to choose, to gift, to pour out God’s spirit on young and old, men and women, Jew and Gentile, slave and free.  God provides all we need and has more where that came from.  There is no scarcity in God’s love or God’s Spirit.  Our boxes and restrictions ought not to be applied to things that are God’s prerogative to choose, not only because we are out of line when we do this, but because God looks on the heart and knows what we do not know. 

We can trust God to lead us in the uncertainties we face.  If we don’t know what to do, what is wise, we can ask God, who gives what we need to us liberally—generously and freeingly—without ever scolding us for not knowing in advance. 

The raven, the bird associated with judgment and uncleanness, is also a sign of God’s providence.  As Jesus said, “Take no thought for your life, don’t worry about food; don’t worry about your body, about what you will clothe yourself in.  Life is more than food and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens.  They neither sow nor reap, they have neither bank account nor pantry; and God feeds them.  How much are you different from these birds?”

Think about this.  God provides even for ravens, unclean birds, and how much more God will provide for you what you need.  So ask God for wisdom, then be quiet and see what rises in your heart and mind.  Try acting on that in faith that God is being generous to you.  Keep track of what happens.  You will find that you can rely on God in more than a theoretical way, that God actually lives in you and sends you what you need to live a free, whole, redeemed life.

Listen, Learn, Obey

Preached at South Salem Friends Church

April 21, 2013

Mary and Martha, Radical Faith

Luke 10: 38-42

Jesus went into Bethany, a town close to Jerusalem, and was invited in by a woman named Martha, who had a sister named Mary (and a brother named Lazarus, as we remember from a later story).  Martha was hospitable and busied herself with serving everyone—the word is diakonia, root of deacon, by the way—and Mary sat at Jesus’s feet to hear what he had to say.

Martha was weighed down by her work, distracted and driven to do it right.  She came to Jesus and said, “Master, Messiah, don’t you care for my distress? I am drowning in work, and Mary is doing nothing to help me. Tell her to work alongside me and help me.”

Jesus replied, “Martha, Martha.  You are full of cares and disturbed about so many things.  But only this one thing is a duty, is required. Mary has chosen what brings health and is useful and honorable.  No one will be allowed to take it away from her.”

We don’t have the next bit of the story, which is where, perhaps, Martha sits down also, her worry smoothed away, and lets the words of Jesus soak into her.  We can see that there must have been some time when she did so, because she is the one who runs to meet Jesus when he comes to comfort them after the death of her brother Lazarus.  In John 10, she says, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died, and I know even now that God will give you whatever you ask.”  When Jesus responds that Lazarus will rise again, she says, “I know that he will rise again at the last resurrection.”  Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me, though he die, still lives. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She replied with as decisive a statement of faith as any in the Bible:  “Yes, Master, yes Messiah, I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, come into our world just as you were meant to.” This belief is the foundation on which the church is built.

Clearly, Martha had done some listening, too. 

South Salem Friends are making this next year a holy experiment.  Though I know you are sad about being unable to keep Jim as your pastor, your elders have a vision of how to move forward in this next that can transform your lives individually and as a congregation.

Let’s think first about your call to be ministers, deacons, servants to your neighbors through your Tuesday evening dinner.  This is an awesome ministry, and the fact you find it still invigorating and fun means you are doing it right.  Hospitality is high on the list of Christian values, as is generosity, another aspect of your ministry.

At the same time, this ministry is grounded in a vision of Jesus, the resurrection and the life.  Jesus is in our world, just as God means him to be, and his Holy Spirit walks with us every day to teach us what we need to learn and tell us what we need to do.  The work of Jesus in the world is to reconcile the world to God.  Reconcile means that you once again bring yourself face to face, eyebrow to eyebrow, with God.  You look God in the eyes and let God look you in the eyes.  What do you see?  What do you sense that God sees in you?

Let’s take a few minutes to sit with this picture.  You look directly into God’s eyes, reconciling with God.

Write down for yourself or to share what you saw in God’s eyes.

Part of the reconciliation is letting God see into your soul through your eyes.  God sees all that is there, alive, dead, beautiful, ugly, clean, dirty.  God loves you and wants you to be whole and holy.  What does God see in you that makes God happy? Write this down so you remember it.

What does God see in you that God wants to clean up, beautify, or resurrect? Write this down so you can remember it.

Please give God permission to fix what needs fixing and to love you into a life of resurrection.

Now, this is the business of sitting down to listen to Jesus, the Son of God, sent by God into our world to show us what God is like and what perfect human life is.  Jesus said about himself, “I do what God tells me to do and say what God tells me to say.”  Jesus's kind of life lived in connection with God wasn’t because Jesus was so different from us; this is what human beings are made for. Jesus came to teach us how to live this way.  It is a life of listening and risky obedience.  It can get you out of trouble with others and into trouble.  And it is not simply an individualistic way to live.  Whole congregations, like S. Salem, can live this way.

Many years ago, when I was in high school, a Lutheran minister named Bill Vaswig came to Newberg Friends.  Bill taught me to ask God for help, listen, and then try to do what I heard to do.  It was very simple.  I observe many times that I ask desperately for help over and over and never sit still long enough to hear what God says.  I also observe that sometimes when I get a nudge, I fail to recognize it as God and thus do not obey it.  I also notice that sometimes I ask, I do what I hear, and God is in it.  I don’t always even have to ask. 

How do I know it is God I’m hearing from?  The Holy Spirit turns out to be quite practical a lot of the time, and most often very matter of fact, and sometimes quirkily funny.  And what I’m told is not a violation of spiritual truth but instead advice about how to implement it in my life.

I may have told this very story here before, but it is a good one, so I’ll tell it again.  I spent about 10 years working to forgive someone who had wounded me so deeply it affects my life to this day.  I said to God over and over, "I know I am supposed to forgive, and right now, all I can do is say to you, ok, if you forgive this person, I will forgive you for doing it.  You can let him into heaven if you have to be so scandalously gracious.  This is the best I can do."

Then one day I was driving with the radio on, and I heard in my spirit the words, “Becky, you can do better than that.”  “Ok,” I said. “You’re right.  Please forgive this person.  Please let him into heaven.” 

Well, I can tell you that listening and obeying and saying what God wanted was so freeing to my spirit. The person had died, and I felt in my car a spirit that was grateful for my forgiveness. I believe my forgiveness set that other person’s spirit more free to receive God’s love also. 

At least twice when I have been so angry at God, I have been very frank in expressing my feelings about how things are going.  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I have cried out in outrage and despair.  My experience is that in the quiet following those cries, God talks back.  This is the crucial teaching of the book of Job.  Job rails against God, and God shows up to talk. And Job says, “I talked a lot, and now I see you, and I regret what I said, I choose God over myself, and I repent and am comforted here in my dust and ashes.”

Jesus comes to help us when we ask.  We need to have the faith of Martha to say, “We know you are sent by God, God’s Son. What you want to do, you can do.  What do you want us to do next?”

As you experience a year where you are caring for each other as pastors, it falls on each of you to prepare for worship together by asking God if there’s something you need to sing, pray, or preach, or if there is someone you need to bring to Jesus as the congregation meets. If anyone lacks wisdom, just ask God, who gives wisdom liberally and without scolding. 

Jesus is here today to teach you himself.  Jesus is the head of the church universal and local.  Jesus is smart, capable, and strong and well worth listening to, obeying, and following around.

Soil Preparation

Preached at Marion Friends Church, June 10, 2012

The story of the sower collected from Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8

Here is a picture of the secret of the way God governs:

Listen up! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” ... The sower sows the word.

What is “the word”? It can legitimately be a number of things: a story, an event, a doctrine, an instruction, an explanation; for a follower of Jesus, it is speaking what God tells that follower to speak.

Some don’t understand what they hear, so they instantly forget it; some receive it with joy but don’t let it go deep in their lives, so they lose interest when times are hard; some allow the cares of the world, the lure of money, the desire for other things, the desire to be important, the need for affirmation to choke out any growing they might do, so that they don’t see any results from their belief; some are open and ready and honest; these take it seriously and act on it, and they see lots of growth and results. 

Jesus says to his disciples then, and to us now, pay attention to what you hear.  The more you listen to what God says and act on what you hear, the more you will hear; if you don’t act on what God tells you, you’ll lose the little ability to hear that you have.  God doesn’t whisper things to you so that you’ll keep them secret, but so you can disclose them to others. 

And be encouraged: the kingdom of heaven grows quietly under the surface—your obedience will have results in due time.  Trust God to tend the seeds you’ve sown. And the little seed you have sown will grow into a tree.  Trust God to make this happen.

And if you see that some weeds grow up in the field, don’t worry about it.  Let God separate the weeds from the grain.  If you try to pull them up, you’ll pull up the good plants also.  God can handle this in God’s own time.

The most obvious teaching here has to do with sharing the good news that Jesus has brought the Kingdom of God, the area where God rules, right down among us and within us. We can publish the truth of what God has done for us, and then trust God with the results.  God has set us free, has given us permission, to tell what we know of God’s love and mercy and to bring healing and freedom and forgiveness to others, just as Jesus did.  God is closer to us than the air, eager to help us live life well and joyfully, and present to carry with us the things that weigh us down.  We can tell people about this by how we live and also by what we say, both of which we are doing in obedience to the government of God.

But there is more here in this story.  I know because of how I used to read it and how I read it now.  I used to read it as four different kinds of people. But I came to realize that I have all four of these soils in myself.  I have the part that doesn’t understand what God is saying to me, so it slips out of my mind.  I have the part that doesn’t get into my deep soul, so it dies under pressure.  I have the part that doesn’t affect how I live because I am worrying about money or job or who did me wrong.  Thank God I also have the part that eagerly, honestly, openly welcomes God’s word and lets it affect how I think and behave by obeying it. 

So is there anything I can do about worrying, shallowness, or simple hardness of heart? (For the following, I use Richard Foster’s The Celebration of Discipline as a general framework.)

The stories I’m going to tell you are simply all illustrations of the fact that God honors us when we take our small, ineffective efforts to inch nearer by blessing us and others through them. I want to encourage those of you with hearts that long to be more and more open to the spirit of God to hear what follows and take the parts that speak to you. These are my stories, and they are not all for everyone here.  But I hope at least one will be for each of you.

Praying

The writer Flannery O’Connor ("The Enduring Chill") has a priest say to an agnostic young man who doesn’t pray, “Well, you will never learn to be good unless you pray.  You cannot love Jesus unless you speak to him.” A number of times in my life, I have kept a prayer journal.  At times I’ve written out my prayers, at other times, I have just kept a list of the requests I’m praying for and written down when there was closure on them.  The latter was more helpful to me in learning to trust God as I saw God answering so many prayers.  Praying about little things and seeing that God cares and answers gives me faith to pray about big things like war, famine, dying children, injustice, politics. 

Frank Laubach, a missionary in the 20^th century and the founder of an effective literacy program, said that perhaps we were put on earth to pray for our neighbors.  I have yet to have someone say, “No, don’t pray for me,” even if they themselves are not able to have faith.

The 50 days of prayer in preparation for YM came out of a concern from a whole bunch of people.  I hope you are participating in this because as a denomination we want to hear from God and do what God says, we want to learn to be good and to love Jesus.

Studying or Paying Attention

Several years ago, I read the book of Mark all at one sitting for several weekends in a row to see how the readings might change. It blew my heart open to Jesus.  You try it.  Jesus leaps off the page when the whole story (all 20 pages) zips by. You can see why people dropped everything to follow him and hear him speak.  You can also see why people got mad at him, and you see why St Paul says that if Jesus is not resurrected, humans are completely miserable.  The universe without that person in it—not much of a place, really, particularly once you’ve seen him in action.

Listening and Obeying

In Quaker worship, there is often a spell where people sit silently and wait for God to speak.  I started feeling moved by God to speak in high school, and I was so honored, and still am so honored, that I want to be obedient.  Often, one or two people will tell me that what I said spoke to them, and that is confirmation to me that I was supposed to share. 

When I was in college, Bill Vaswig came to speak in our church.  Bill was a Lutheran minister who was preaching about obeying the Holy Spirit.  He said, why not trust in those impulses to do good.  Call that person on your heart; do that next good thing you’ve been thinking of.  See what happens.  So one thing to do is to listen and do what you hear.  George MacDonald wrote that God always makes clear the very next good thing we are to do, even if what we are to do after that is still unclear.

Dallas Willard taught me in The Divine Conspiracy that God is closer to me than the air I breathe.  Paul teaches that we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit as if we were a house.  I cannot be separated from God.  Thinking about that fact, living in that truth, what an awe-inspiring honor to carry God from place to place.  My car is often a place where God corners me and nudges me to grow up.  One of my most amazing experiences of forgiving another person took place in a car, with the radio on even, because God was right there also, pushing me to move a little closer to true forgiveness.

Confessing

I really hungered for someone to confess to at one confused and desperate point in my life.  I confessed everything to God, but I really wanted to tell another person.  I did have a spiritual director/counselor at that time to whom I was mostly transparent, and that was helpful.  However, I hungered to hear someone tell me that my sins were forgiven. 

Almost accidentally, I was able to tell someone this truth—someone said to me, why do I feel so miserable about the past? And I said to her, you know, your sins are forgiven.  She witnessed to me a week later that those words lifted a burden from her heart she had been carrying for years. 

Giving

For me, this started with giving my tithe to the church back when I started working for money in high school.  Then as time passed, I read C.S. Lewis’s suggestion that giving ought to cramp your style a little.  When I got a dog, I felt convicted that if I could afford dog food and vet bills, I could afford to give money to the hungry.  Mark and I give money to people working for parachurch organizations because I’m a missionary kid, and to social causes or organizations I believe in because I’m a US and world citizen.  It does cramp my style a bit—but it helps weed my heart of love of riches and possessions.  I want to be thankful without being grabby.

I have also repeatedly given myself as completely as I know how to God, and I have discovered that God believes I mean it.

I find the next two attitudes enormously difficult and linked by the necessity of trusting God to give me what I really need.

Fasting

I don’t think I’ve voluntarily gone without food for decades and maybe never.  I have friends who witness to me that this is one of the ways God works with them.  I get migraines when I skip meals, I get faint and cranky and I can’t think straight.  So I don’t go without food.

However, C.S. Lewis wrote that sometimes we think we really need something (like food, but maybe something else) and we don’t have it, and this is a fast God has sent us.  Like if I miss a meal, I can embrace that as a fast God has sent me, and offer it to God as a gift.  Or if I think I need praise or affirmation and none is forthcoming, I can embrace that absence as the fast God has sent me.

Submitting

This is the hardest for me—I don’t trust easily, not even God, and to take the events of my life as expressions of God’s will for me requires very hard work on my part.  I try to start small by saying when I am impatiently waiting at a RR crossing, this is God’s will for me.  I am practicing for when life goes nothing like what I expected in big ways—it is an act of faith for me to take this as being from God and trust in God’s love despite disappointment.  And the part about letting anger go, letting my rights go, not insisting on being vindicated—that’s very hard.  Jesus said we need to take up our crosses daily.  This is what that word means to me.

One final way to get to know God better is by Celebrating.

The kingdom of God is compared to a party at least as often as it is to a garden or field.  When I hear God, I can risk being obedient; being obedient produces joy.  When we celebrate, we can get over ourselves—we can be holy fools—we can play games—we can sing out loud—we can do cartwheels or pump our fists in the air because God’s team just won the championship—we can shoot off fireworks to celebrate our freedom to love God; and we can invite others to join us.

So if, like me, you recognize that you have all four soils in you, and you want to see more results from believing Jesus’s message of good news, try praying, try listening, try obeying, try confessing, try studying, try accepting, try celebrating what God gives.  We don’t make God love us more by doing these things; we just make it easier for ourselves to know God’s love.

Isaiah 55:10-11, 1-2

As the water falls from the sky and does not return to the sky until the earth is wet so that seeds grow, buds form, and plants flourish and yield seed for the gardener and food for the eater, so my word (says God) goes out from my mouth and does what I want it to do.  My word does not return to me empty.

All who thirst, come drink the water; you with no money, come buy and eat; buy wine and milk without money and at no cost. Why do you spend money on what doesn’t feed you? Why do you work for what doesn’t satisfy you?  Listen to me (says God), listen to me and eat what is good for you and your soul will be filled with delight.

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How Paul Got to Philippi and What He Did There

Preached at South Salem Friends, Feb. 26, 2012
Acts 16

This chapter is about the first journey of Paul after the Council of Jerusalem where the headquarters of the church embrace Gentile believers as co-heirs of the Gospel without requiring them also to become followers of Moses. Then Paul and Barnabas disagree sharply on whether to take John Mark with them, and they end up parting ways. Paul and Silas journey through Asia Minor (now Turkey), while Barnabas and John Mark sail to Cyprus. Paul and Silas pick up Timothy along the way. So today, we’re going to talk about how Paul got to Philippi and what happened there and what we can learn from these events. This is Paul’s first preaching visit to Europe.

Background on Philippi—in the Balkans area of Macedonia; grew up around a gold mining area, prosperous beyond its size; then a place where Roman veterans went to retire and later Roman colonists—mixed bunch of ethnic identities, but enthusiastically Roman.

As Paul and Silas traveled through Asia, the Bible says they were “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” When they attempted to take a right turn into Bithynia, “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” So they took the left to Troas. In the night, Paul had a vision of a Macedonian man pleading with him to “come to Macedonia and help us.” Paul’s response was to set sail immediately to Macedonia, and one of the leading cities there, Philippi.

What is interesting about this is the open-endedness of Paul’s trip planning. Suppose you and I were on a road trip, and we thought we would stop and visit people along the way, and Jesus told us not to. And then when we got to a coastline, we planned to turn right and Jesus told us not to. This seems easily a parable for the journey of our lives as well. When do we preach? “When Jesus tells us to.” Where do we turn our attention to next? “Wherever Jesus calls us.” What do we say when we get there? “Whatever Jesus tells us to say.”

So it is obvious that the most obvious characteristic of anyone who wants to be God’s agent in the world is listening to and obeying the Spirit of Jesus.

That’s one of the central messages of George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement: Jesus Christ is present to teach us himself (George Fox’s Journal, ch. 1, and elsewhere). Behind that statement is acceptance of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection in history, and within it is faith that the Spirit Jesus promised to send is in fact here and in conversation with us.

What is Jesus saying to you personally today? Or to your congregation? How can we make space for Jesus to tell us whom to reach out to, what area to focus on, what to say to those folks?

Then in the story, Paul and his companions sought out a spot the local Jewish people might gather to pray. They found a group of women, and they spoke to them. At a slight distance, apparently, was Lydia, a worshiper of God. She came originally from Thyatira, over in Asia, so was perhaps something of an outsider. She was also a prosperous merchant. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what Paul said, and shortly she and her household were baptized and she brought Paul and company home to stay at her house.

What is interesting here is that Paul thought he should start with the Jews in the proudly Roman town of Philippi, and he tried, but his first convert was a Gentile, and judging from the names in the book of Philippians, most of the others were non-Jewish also. Another interesting thing is that Paul did not insist on speaking with the men; he spoke to those who had gathered to pray, and it appears not to have mattered to him that they were all women. Another interesting thing is that a socially powerful woman was his sponsor in Philippi.

So we can infer that when we obey Jesus, go where Jesus says to go, there will be someone ready to hear us. That work is God’s work—getting the audience ready to hear. Lydia was spiritually ready to hear the Gospel—and the Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly and accept the good news.

Another central vision of the Quaker founder George Fox was that God showed him “a great people to be gathered…a great people in white raiment by a river’s side coming to the Lord.” On a First-day shortly after, Fox went to a meeting of Seekers, recognized them as the people in white raiment, and “gathered them in the name of Jesus” (GF Journal, ch. 5).

Who are the people we know who are ready to hear us? Who has God been preparing to hear the Gospel? What if those who are ready to hear aren’t the same as the ones we anticipated talking to? Can we be open to accept those God is calling?

In the next part of the story, Paul and Silas were harassed by a slave girl who shouted over and over, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She followed them, shouting, for many days. Paul got annoyed, and he ordered her spirit of divination out of her in the name of Jesus Christ. This got him into a heap of trouble, as we will see.

But what is interesting is that she is telling the truth about them. She is free advertising for them, pointing them out in every crowd, shouting like a barker at a carnival. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, come see one of the WONDERS OF THE WORLD. And Paul hates this. Why? Perhaps her shouting makes it impossible for him to actually preach. Perhaps she gathers people’s attention to him, rather than to the gospel. Perhaps he pities her compulsion to shout and is angry at her owners who use it to get rich.

What we can learn from this is that it is ok for the gospel to be preached quietly without a lot of fanfare. Further, getting a lot of attention can actually interfere in our ability to share the good news. We can’t be motivated by the desire to be the center of attention; we have to be motivated by the spirit of Jesus to share what Jesus wants us to share. And it did no one any good to know Paul had good news to share if he couldn’t be heard over the advertising.

How can we clear a space for the gospel to be heard? How can we not be distracted by praise for our efforts or other kinds of advertising? How can we keep our own and every one else’s attention on the good news that Jesus lived, died, and rose again, and is present with us to teach us himself?

In Paul’s story, the next events look like disaster; Paul and Silas were falsely accused of Jewish proselytizing in a Roman town, mobbed, stripped, beaten, thrown in jail and into stocks. He and Silas prayed and sang hymns through the night. An earthquake shook the foundations of the prison, opened the doors, and unfastened everyone’s chains.

This is such a great picture of the freeing force of the Gospel; literally, it is an earthquake and a jail, but symbolically, it is Paul’s and Silas’s obedience to God and rejoicing in hard circumstances breaking open the whole system of imprisonment. This is a small picture of what is happening in Philippi in the spiritual realm. Even the jailor becomes a believer.

How can we see that as we obey Jesus, adversity is opportunity for a great shaking that will break open our imprisonment? Charles Wesley wrote, “Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night; thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I rose, my dungeon streamed with light; my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee” ("And Can It Be"). As George Fox wrote, “I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness, and in that also I saw the infinite love of God” (GF Journal, ch. 1).

As we take time to listen for God in order to follow God’s leading, let’s ask these questions:

What is Jesus saying to us today? How can we make space for Jesus to tell us whom to reach out to, what places to focus on, what to say to those folks?

Who are the people we know who are ready to hear us? Who has God been preparing to hear the Gospel? What if those who are ready to hear aren’t the same as the ones we anticipated talking to? How can we be open to accept those God is calling?

How can we clear a space for the gospel to be heard? How can we not be distracted by praise for our efforts or by other kinds of advertising or press coverage? How can we keep our own and everyone else’s attention on the good news that Jesus lived, died, and rose again, and is present with us to teach us himself?

How can we see that as we obey Jesus, adversity is opportunity for a great shaking that will break open our imprisonment?