I want to start with a story from our Friends meeting in Russia. Some of you may remember us telling this story when we visited you about ten years ago. And Stas, a member of Moscow Meeting who’s online with us today, may remember this, too.
Here is the outside of the Building where Moscow Friends Meeting met.
After entering from the street, you came to another door
Then you went down a stairway and turned to the right.
Our unprogrammed, silent meeting for worship had been going for about half an hour. As usual, there was a candle and a Bible on the table around which we had gathered. Suddenly a man burst into our meeting room and loudly demanded to know what gave us the right to have and display “sectarian” literature. He demanded, “Remove this stuff immediately and stop your sectarian activities.”
The word “sect” in Russian has overtones close to the word “cult,” and this identification could spell political or even legal trouble for us. I couldn’t help thinking about the seriousness of his charge and its possible consequences. But I realized that my only choice was to trust that it was all in God’s hands.
Our assistant clerk, Misha Roshchin, stood up and led our unexpected visitor out to the kitchen for a conversation about his concerns, while the rest of us tried to settle back into worship. We could hear their animated conversation going on for quite a while. As we found out later, our visitor’s worries began when he made a summertime visit to the community center we were using, in his role as one of the managers of the center. In those years, we didn’t meet during the summer, but he saw some of our booklets and leaflets on a bookshelf and decided he needed to check on us.
This is our kitchen and the man in the middle is Misha.
While Misha and the visitor talked, our worship time came to an end and we had a chance to meet our guest in a calmer setting. After that conversation and some tea, we were able to do what we’d planned to do for our education hour: we watched a beautiful documentary film about the great Russian Orthodox priest and bishop Anthony Bloom, and our visitor actually stayed to watch it with us.
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh was a prominent writer and broadcaster on prayer and the Christian life, as well as the founder and leader of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh.
Judy and I were the only foreigners there, and for whatever reasons, he was especially eager to get to know us. We certainly had not planned in advance to show a film about a famous Orthodox priest in order to disarm a suspicious visitor. Nor did we, looking back on it, try to impress him with how wonderful we were as Quakers. We were just being who we were.
We came out of that incident apparently unscathed, but it wasn’t the end of our story with that community center. Our arrangement for the meeting room came to an end when the owners of the building decided to rent the space out, for far more money than we could have afforded, to a pet food store. We were promised another meeting place in the same complex, but it never came about. But we soon found another place to meet, and this too is a remarkable story. The room was in the offices of a nonprofit organization—but here’s the interesting twist. This nonprofit was far larger than we were, and it was getting its funding from a variety of official and non-official sources, local and international, but its seed money, years earlier, had come from Friends, through Friends House Moscow. We had helped them begin, and now they were the ones giving us shelter.
Last month, I began speaking about the qualities of our lives as people of faith, and how those qualities communicate our faith. I mentioned the apostle Paul in Athens, and then went on to generalize about how the Christian faith spread in the Roman world.
I said, “comparing today’s USA with the Roman empire of Paul’s day, we have a similar mix of anger and polarization on the one hand, the kind that drove Paul and his friends from more than one Mediterranean town, and, on the other hand, an overall tolerance that welcomes all sorts of faiths and, at the same time, trivializes them. Nowadays there’s some evidence that the more militant versions of Christianity have driven young people into the ranks of the ‘nones,’ … but what we share with most of the Roman empire in its first two centuries is that there is no one religion that demands total loyalty. The tacit American assumption that being Christian meant being part of the establishment has weakened almost to the vanishing point. If being publicly identified as church people once carried a social advantage, apparently it doesn’t do so any longer.”
I went on to ask, “What openings does this provide us Friends? We have very little investment in promoting ourselves as defenders of Christian respectability, or promoters of the religion industry in general. Our whole approach to evangelism is similar to what Paul said to the Athenians, ‘… God is not far from any one of us. For in God we live and move and have our being.’ And our invitation is to look inward and see that witness that God has put into each of God’s beloved, and to join us in learning how to live by that witness and its ethical consequences. This invitation can be as fresh for someone who’s spent a lifetime in the church, as it might be for someone who has never had any church experience at all.”
I referred to the Mennonite historian Alan Kreider, and his book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. His two central words, “patient,” and “ferment,” are very fertile ideas for thinking about how our life as followers of Jesus can express hope and freedom to those around us who need precisely those things.
Kreider says that the patience of early Christians meant that they did not seek to control outcomes or people. This quality shaped an approach to life that, without those motives of control, had a power of its own. In Kreider’s words, “The sources rarely indicate that the early Christians grew in number because they won arguments; instead they grew because their habitual behavior (rooted in patience) was distinctive and intriguing. … When challenged about their ideas, Christians pointed to their actions.”
Kreider went on to describe how the educational and mentoring patterns of the early church helped people form and maintain these habits. The cumulative effect was that ferment that led the Christian movement to grow rapidly, without hype, theatrics, or pressure. They didn’t seem to be telling the world, “Look how wonderful we are—especially compared to those fill-in-the-blanks who are corrupting our nation.” (In today’s times, you can fill in the blank with your favorite left-wing or right-wing villains.) If the engine that powered their communication wasn’t their own specialness or their own irresistible arguments, what was it? And is it still available to us today?
Kreider’s description of the virtue of patience in the ferment of the early church is that it entirely rested on trust. As the hymn says, “The Lord hath promised good to me, His word my hope secures.” The more I thought about it, the more I saw that one way to look at this motivating core of our faith, that communicates to others through our habits and practices is to see it as faith in the promises of God.
There’s nothing particularly abstract or pious about the promises of God. The Scripture that I proposed for today comes out of a messy case study of the church, a case study we know as First and Second Corinthians. And those two books are composed of letters from Paul to the Christians in the city of Corinth, in the same Greek province as Athens. These letters are just two of several that went back and forth in both directions, and some scholars say Second Corinthians actually draws from several different letters. And in those six or so years between Paul’s first visit to Corinth and the last letter, he may have made several visits, and we know that at least some of them were confrontational. The church was dealing with internal controversies and disciplinary cases, and they also had awkward questions for Paul himself. His leadership wasn’t taken for granted. So: the church at Corinth may have been part of Alan Kreider’s “patient ferment,” but it certainly wasn’t all peace and calm.
Let me read just a sample of Paul’s mentoring of a church in conflict. For context, Paul is trying to explain why he changed his travel plans, and if we read between the lines, we can detect some other controversies in the background. In the beginning of this letter, Paul also refers to the persecutions that Paul AND the Corinthians had to endure as a consequence of their faith, and as a setting for their exercises in trust.
2 Corinthians 1:12 Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God’s grace. 13 For we do not write you anything you cannot read or understand. And I hope that, 14 as you have understood us in part, you will come to understand fully that you can boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of the Lord Jesus.
15 Because I was confident of this, I wanted to visit you first so that you might benefit twice. 16 I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia and to come back to you from Macedonia, and then to have you send me on my way to Judea. 17 Was I fickle when I intended to do this? Or do I make my plans in a worldly manner so that in the same breath I say both “Yes, yes” and “No, no”?
18 But as surely as God is faithful, our message to you is not “Yes” and “No.” 19 For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us—by me and Silas and Timothy—was not “Yes” and “No,” but in him it has always been “Yes.” 20 For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.”
By the way, I like the interpretation of the word “amen” that has the sense of “this is reliable, worthy of commitment.” It has a hint of “promise” about it.
This morning, I’m suggesting that it’s trust in the promises of God that shapes and empowers our faith, and the community that we visibly form in the larger world.
I admit that I’m talking aspirationally here. I don’t think that we actually always live in that trust. I make this confession on two levels.
First, on an individual level, we are not always in a place where trust comes easily. In the first moments of that confrontation with the angry visitor to Moscow Meeting, I wasn’t thinking about the Lamb upon his throne; I was thinking about what might happen if this guy began spreading the word about a cult operating in their community center. What if next time we were surrounded by a mob of angry anti-sectarian campaigners? It’s happened many times in Russia.
The peace came later, as together we pooled our anxieties and our prayers, and settled back into worship. One of the best things about a beloved community like this one I’m speaking to, is that we don’t all have to be at the same level of trust at the same time; we support each other as Paul and the Corinthians supported each other, even boasted of each other, in their ups and downs.
Secondly, let’s be realistic about the cultural context we’re in. The world’s messages that surround us, and inevitably influence us, are not messages of trust and promises. I’m reminded of something that the philosopher Os Guinness said a few years ago in an interview.
I remember when I was in Australia, speaking on modernity, a visiting Japanese CEO came up to me and said, “When I meet a Buddhist monk, I meet a holy man in touch with another world. When I meet a Western missionary, I meet a manager who is only in touch with the world I know.” You could say today that many, many Christians are atheists unawares; they are implicit, practicing atheists because they are so secular in their consciousness. So we have words like prayer, supernatural, revival, but we don’t actually operate in the world named by those words. To live with the spiritual disciplines opening us up to another reality, to other powers and other dimensions, cracks secularization very powerfully.
We should not be surprised that trusting and living in God’s promises doesn’t come automatically. It’s like Kreider says: it’s a matter of formation, mentorship, discipline, and practice, but not only that—we begin to experience God’s promises for ourselves.
What are God’s promises? God makes promises to us, and through us. Throughout the various biblical covenants—to Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the promises recorded in Jeremiah (“I will write my law on their hearts”) and in Second Chronicles chapter 7 verse 14 (“…If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land”) … in all these and many other places, a picture forms of a people formed by God’s promises: a people reconciled with God, living in anticipation of peace and hope, and a people formed to bless others. You and your descendants will be a blessing to the whole world, God promises Abraham. “I will heal their land,” God promises Solomon. And in times of trouble, Jesus promises in Luke chapter 12, “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.”
Speaking of the Holy Spirit teaching us what to say, there’s a PS to the story of our angry guest in Moscow. One of our elderly members responded to his opening outburst by saying, with her face shining with kindness, “What’s wrong? We’re just studying English.” I do not claim that she was acting under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, but we all realized that she had spent most of her many decades learning how to cope with life in the anti-religious Soviet Union.
What does it mean for us as a community to see ourselves as people receiving God’s promises, trusting in them, and living them out? Here are some suggestions. Maybe more suggestions, or better ways to express these, will come to you in the open worship.
First of all, I have a new appreciation for that ancient virtue of patience. I don’t ever mean to shame natural responses of fear or anger or pain. I just mean that we don’t stop there, and beyond that, we don’t simply react. We do what we can to move, maybe even to stumble and blunder, toward that space where we can turn our situation over to God, and we ask our community to walk with us.
Secondly, we ourselves become agents of God’s promises. I think this comes naturally to Spokane Friends. Some of us may be especially gifted in direct help to others, to meeting the needs of people who are suffering, or in prison, or targets of discrimination, or in some kind of bondage. Others are gifted to ask the prophet’s question, “Why is this happening?” and propose systemic solutions. Still others pray for the community within which these gifts emerge, and educate its newcomers and children. Nobody wastes time fighting over which approach is more righteous.
Finally, we are a learning community. We’re bound to blunder. Sometimes we do end up wasting time in conflicts. Maybe we overlook opportunities for service. We rightly cherish our three and a half centuries of experience in discipleship, but sometimes there’s too much Quaker and not enough God. And sometimes we gloriously get it right, and our unforced, patient kindness to each other and our neighbors adds to the sum total of joy in the universe. In any case, we watch and learn. After all, what is a church if it’s not people who are gathered around the Living God, learning what it means to live that way, including its ethical consequences, and helping each other in that lifelong process, through all the ups and downs?
What does it mean to you to be people formed and empowered by the promises of God … promises made to you, and promises made through you to the world?
This message was given to Spokane Friends by Johan Maurer during Sunday worship service on September 24, 2023.
Spokane Friends Meeting 
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