Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 6th of Tenth Month, 2024
(World Quaker Day)
Speaker: Brian Young
Good Morning Friends!
13 Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? 14 But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, 15 but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; 16 yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. 17 For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil.
Today is World Quaker Day, when we reflect upon the global family of Friends: our Religious Society; the Friends Church; the people known as Quakers. West Richmond Friends has benefited from our longstanding connections to the wider body of Friends in many ways. For decades, we have welcomed students from elsewhere who have come to study at the Earlham School of Religion or at Earlham, and have enriched our fellowship for a season—for two or three years, or even a shorter time, we have profited from the presence of Friends from Kenya, Rwanda, Bolivia, Palestine, the UK... (and that is an incomplete list; I am sure some of you can fill in other places that I’ve left out). And because Richmond is a Quaker crossroads, with not just Earlham, but all our other Friends organizations, it attracts folks from all over the USA, with their families, and many of those people find a home with us. And just in the past year, we have worked with other Friends to welcome several families of Cuban Quakers who have come here due to the difficult conditions in their native land.
Just as our meeting has benefited from these connections, West Richmond has also
given back to the national and global community of Friends, sending representatives to and supporting workers with almost every Quaker organization that has a national or international mission. This includes mission staff with Friends United Meeting in Kenya and Belize, as well as FUM central office staff here; workers with Right Sharing of World Resources; representatives to the General Committee of Friends Committee on National Legislation; leadership for Quaker Hill Conference Center; and again, some other roles that I’ve left out that you can fill in (and forgive me if I’ve forgotten the one closest to your heart).
Of course, part of the reason that there is this marvelous diversity of Friends in the US and around the world is that we haven’t always agreed with one another. So we have to acknowledge that our connections to our wider Quaker family have sometimes been a source of stress, discord, and even division. The memory of being forced to sever some of those connections, when our meeting and some others were separated from Indiana Yearly Meeting and formed the New Association of Friends, is still fresh for some of us.
So while being connected to a larger group of Friends is at times difficult, I would say that much more often, those connections strengthen us, and also allow us to lend what strength we have to others. Those connections remind us that we are not alone; those connections enable us to work with and learn from others who are not like us; those connections inspire in us a vision of God’s larger purposes, and assure us that God is not done with the people called Quakers. In short, I would say that the connections that we have with our global family are a source of hope.
In preparation for World Quaker Day, last week a few of us recorded brief videos responding to the question, “What does it mean to you to be a Quaker?” (The invitation to make these videos came from Mark Winner, our Friend from Open Table Friends Church in Ohio. I would have loved to show you Mark’s finished product to you today, which was supposed to stitch our videos together with others he’s received, but I think Mark may have bit off more than he could chew. I haven’t gotten notice that it’s ready, but I will send out the link as soon as I get it.)
As I’ve been thinking more about it this week, I’ve reframed that question a bit in my mind—not just “what does it mean to be a Quaker,” but, “what hope is there in being a Quaker?” And it strikes me that I would have answered this question differently at different stages of my life. That’s not surprising; probably many of you would do so as well. When I was a child, in the unprogrammed meeting where I grew up, I hoped that being a Quaker would help me understand God. As a teenager, I hoped that my being a Quaker would help to bring world peace. As a young adult, after I had become part of an evangelically-oriented Friends Church and experienced a very different kind of Quakerism, I hoped for spiritual power and personal transformation through Christ, for me and those around me. As a pastor and an older adult, the hope that I find in being a Quaker comes from the inward encounter with Christ, and that my walk in the world may more and more be patterned by that encounter. To be clear, I haven’t forsaken any of the things I hoped for in an earlier stage of life; I still hope for all of it—understanding, peace, power, transformation. But I think I have become more and more convinced that none of these things will come to pass by my own efforts, and only through resignation to Christ within. It’s the hope within, rather than any without, that is most significant, most enduring.
“Hope within” is a prominent feature of the Scripture passage we heard read earlier, so here are a few thoughts about the passage. The first letter of Peter was written from the heart of the Roman empire, the belly of the beast, to folks in the hinterlands, those on the margins, probably in a number of different churches in northern Asia Minor. The letter was written to encourage its readers in a period of great difficulty: likely one of two periods in which Christians were officially targeted by the emperor for persecution. The author of the letter is by tradition Peter, one of the Twelve around Jesus, although many scholars date the writing after Peter’s lifetime; if not Peter himself, then, someone writing from Peter’s community in Rome, with the authority of the apostle (but not the authority of the emperor). Regardless, the author knew what he was writing about—he knew the suffering that his readers were experiencing firsthand; as it went in Rome, so it went in the provinces.
And so the letter counsels, “do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated” (v14). Peter doesn’t tell us who “they” are, but it seems that they would have been the ones who wielded the power of fear—officials of the empire and anyone under their power. Fear and intimidation are two of the most important tools that empires use to keep sway over their subjects. And part of how that works is that there needs to be fear at each level of the hierarchy—the common people fear the praetor (local official); the praetors fear their governor; the governors fear the emperor. And that’s not to forget the military: the soldiers fear their officers, the officers fear their generals, and so on. By contrast, the people of the church are to stand aside from fearing in this way: “do not fear what they fear”; do not fear as they fear; do not be afraid of the things or the events or the people that they are afraid of.
Just as Peter knew the suffering of the churches he wrote to, in the face of the world’s fear and intimidation, he also knows the hope that will sustain them through that suffering. So he writes, “always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you” (v15). Hope within.
Now, many things differ between our time and that of the churches to whom these words were sent. Christians in the United States do not live under anything like the persecution that the early church experienced—in fact, we are privileged like few other groups, living in a society that, while pluralistic, is still shaped by the Christian experience and Christian culture in very significant ways. Quakers in the US are in some ways even more privileged than some of our Christian brothers and sisters. And yet fear continues to shape our society—just think of how much of our current political discourse is designed to motivate people through fear. And in the face of fear, we are called to hope within. The “hope that is within you”—this is a universal hope, within you, within me, within all of humanity. Many Quakers would use the words of John 1:9 to express this hope: it is the true Light that enlightens every person—all humanity—coming into the world.
We are called to hope within, and then to express that hope to anyone who asks.
On this World Quaker Day, as we reflect on our situation in the global Quaker family, and our hopes for ourselves and that wider fellowship, I want to highlight one new hope that is just being born. Many of you know that at our last Meeting for Business, we approved having the new Latino Friends group that is forming in Richmond meet here for worship once a week. They have been getting organized, and just this past Friday evening, they had their first official worship meeting. Some of you were there, and I hope to hear more about it from you.
If you haven’t heard the details, here are a few: this group is a pan-Latino Quaker fellowship, with Friends from Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Bolivia participating. The worship meeting is already attracting other Latino folks from the Richmond community, such as those from the ESL classes we have been hosting. The leadership of the group
includes Odalys Hernandez from Cuba Yearly Meeting as their pastor, Dinora Uvalle from Richmond First Friends as their director of social services, and Myron Guachalla of Bolivia, who has been worshiping with us frequently since beginning at ESR, as their secretary. This feels to me like a tremendous new opportunity to express the hope within, the inward Christ emerging in faithful lives to witness in a fearful world. And so I look forward to how we may further support and become part of this work.
Just a few minutes ago I mentioned that our meeting, situated where we are in Richmond, is a place at the Quaker crossroads. Today we find ourselves at a crossroads of a different sort, with a significant work of discernment before us, as we seek to find ways to use large bequests that have been given to the meeting.
As we listen for God within, how will we choose? What will we choose? What options do we see God placing before us? Some choices may speak more of our fear, as the world has taught us to fear; some may speak more of hope. How can we best proceed in a way that expresses, not our fear, but the hope that is within us?
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