Learning from our past, looking to our future

'Learning from our past, looking to our future' by Roy Stephenson

For many years there has been a Meeting for Worship on Firbank Fell to commemorate the great occasion in 1652 when George Fox spoke with hundreds of Seekers and convinced their leaders that their message and his had a fundamental unity and relevance to the world.  This Meeting is always introduced by a few words from a Friend.  This year the invited speaker was Roy Stephenson, of Lancaster Meeting, who talked about Quakers and the Bible.

I wanted to say something that arose from the same sources from which early Friends spoke; in other words, out of personal experience, informed by the ideas of the Bible. I also wanted to show that in times that are much less centred on biblical language, some biblical ideas might still have much to say to us. And lastly, I wanted to give an example of how we might listen to one another in our differences, if we listen below the spoken word for its meaning and message. This is the ministry I prepared:

Friends,

Meeting on Firbank Fell is an opportunity to consider the roots of Quakerism and what they have to offer to the world we live in. Today, I’d like to look at some of the roots of Friends in the Christian faith they rediscovered, and indicate how that might continue to challenge and inspire us.

One of the key gospel sayings for the development of the Protestant form of the Christian faith comes from John’s gospel. It is:

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
John 14:6

Today, this is more often a barrier to faith than a way to express it, unless one belongs to the evangelical tradition. However, it would be wrong to base a way of faith on the exigencies of translation; the form of this translation, by William Tyndale, was specifically designed to attack the church-oriented theology of fourteenth and fifteenth century western European worship and to redirect it back to the source from which that church arose.

Friends know that, for a living basis, faith always has to arise from personal experience and humble toleration of the experience of others.

I am what I am

Let’s go back to our quotation. I’m no expert, but people who know these things tell me that the language in which the gospels were written, new testament Greek, contains neither the definite not the indefinite article. And I remember being taught that the Hebrew form of the name of God, Yahweh, means something like ‘I am what I am’, suggesting that in God we find the possibility of change, of self-re-creation. The fact that John credits Jesus with beginning this quotation with the words ‘I am’ for me implies that he was linking Jesus to the Divine, but not in the sense of identification.

A different way of envisioning what was in John’s mind when he wrote these words might be that Jesus said:

God is Way, Truth and Life, and if you live as I live, you will find God living in you.

I’ll say that again, because I think it’s important and might be helpful:

God is Way, Truth and Life, and if you live as I live, you will find God living in you.

What strikes me forcibly about this is how like the approach of early Friends it sounds. They, too, realised that God was not to be contained by a static noun, but was a force that could refashion our lives; that the attempt to live according to this force for dynamic, often uncomfortable, change gives our lives an authenticity that otherwise they lack; and that being in connection with this force makes our experience of life so much more vivid that it feels as if our prior experience was merely marking time. In other words, Way, Truth and Life.

Message of faith

The first Friends were enabled to find their way to a truer, deeper sense of personal value and worth, to a freedom they had not previously experienced, and to a courage in life they had not known was in their grasp. And it was these qualities that enabled them to take their message of faith out from this hillside and immediate area to the towns and cities of this country, to other countries, other continents and to other faiths.

Why, Friends, are we today not listened to when we attempt to share with the world the truths we find? Why do we not continue to grow and show the world how much joy there is in living in the Quaker way? Are we so much smaller people today? Do we have less to share? Do we believe that the ideals of early Friends have all been achieved in this country? Are we, perhaps, afraid to find a Divine Way, an authentic Truth to live by, a Life that is full?

We are not first called to become evangelists, or to speak Truth to power, but to have changed lives, lives that infuse our Quaker community with the power of our love for one another and the certainty that in the Divine scheme of things, we are worth loving.

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Comments

Just on a point of information, New Testament Greek does have a definite article, and it is used in John 14.6 with the implication of exclusivity that John does seem to be trying to convey. It also has an indefinite article tis”, though this tended to be used less freely than the equivalent “a” or “an” in modern English. Ian Waller St Albans LM”

By Ian Waller on 23rd August 2013 - 17:11

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