Lester Start’s Works

1JESUS IN THE WILDERNESS

02/24/80

L. J. Start

First Baptist Kalamazoo

February 20, 1955

First Baptist, Herkimer, NY

This is the first Sunday in Lent. It is fitting that we turn our thoughts to the occasion which our Lenten season commemorates, to the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness, to the temptations He struggled with and conquered there, to His inner preparations for the external ministry He was about to begin.

Jesus had just been baptized by John the Baptist when the spirit of God descended upon Him as a dove. This symbolizes the fact that the power of God was in Him to begin His great life task, but He had still to determine the means and methods He would adopt to realize His mission. And so He went into the wilderness led by the Spirit to be alone with God and to learn through prayer what God required of Him. Like Abraham of old, the father of the faith, who wandered in the wilderness not knowing whither he was going, but led by God, so Jesus prepared for the new covenant by going alone into the wilderness to be led by God.

But along with the spirit which led him, Jesus is confronted, we read, with the tempter, the devil, Satan, and we are given an account of his temptations. Now how are we to understand these?

First of all, the word translated “to be tempted” might better be translated “to be tested”. Jesus’ experience here might be compared with the experience Abraham had when his faith was proved or tested by God. God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham prepared to obey, but God stayed his hand at the last minute and offered a ram as a substitute for his first born. The King James translation reads, “And it came to pass that God did tempt Abraham.” The New English Bible reads that the time came when God put Abraham to the test. This is what Jesus’ wilderness experience is — a testing, not a temptation in the usual sense.

This is an important distinction. God does not tempt us to evil — He does test our spirits. And as steel is strengthened by the refiner’s fire, so are our spirits tested by God. The testing, the temptation so-called, we find in life is aimed not at suggesting we sin, but rather at showing our ability to conquer sin. It tries not to make us bad, but rather good. It functions not to weaken our resolve, but to strengthen it. And it points not to a penalty for being tempted, tested, but rather to the glory of the spirit of man triumphant over evil. If we are freely to follow the spirit of God, if we are to travel like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, then we must come to forks in the road, testing times for our resolve, temptations for solutions less than the highest. And so it was with Jesus.

What road, what method, what values should He follow in obedience to the call of God?

Then, too, we must understand the figure of the devil as a symbol of the inner struggles Jesus experienced. The outward symbol represents the profound inner struggle of Jesus. Incitement to evil may come from without but the real struggle takes place within. It is said that on the wall of Luther’s room in the Wartburg Castle, there is still a black stain, caused by the ink pot that Luther is said to have hurled at the devil. However this may be, we know Luther’s real struggle was an inner one in coming to terms with his new interpretation of faith. And we, I think, need not fear encounters with Satan in spite of the popularity of witchcraft talk and movies like The Exorcist. The real struggle is within. (Besides, the devils we do meet in the world are usually pretty attractive fellows; wickedness first appears in a pleasant guise.)

But what of the tests, the temptations themselves? The first one comes when the tempter says, “If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The first thing to note is the temptation to self-doubt. If you are the Son of God, says Satan. If you have this special calling, then certain marvelous things should result. Make these stones bread! Perhaps Jesus was only mistaken when He thought He heard the voice of God proclaiming Him His Son after the baptism! Perhaps this was part of the struggle those forty days and nights. And the temptation for us all is self-doubt, self despair when the going gets tough. “What made me think I could help matters?” we may ask ourselves. But the impulse to do something originally was a response to an invitation to serve the good; it requires resolve to remain committed to it and confident in furthering it. There seems no slackening in Jesus’ commitment.

But how to express it? Turn these wilderness stones, round like loaves, into bread? Jesus was hungry after so long a fast. God provided His children in the wilderness long ago with manna from heaven. And besides, extending the sense of need, Jesus knew well the poverty, hunger, and misery with which His people struggled. Why not use the power of the spirit to gain material benefits? There is a crying need for a new order in which man’s material needs are satisfied. The prophet Isaiah had said, after all, that in the day of salvation, they shall not hunger nor thirst. Besides, it is an old pattern to expect benefits as a result of one’s devotion to God. Some Orientals have been known to beat the images of their gods when they are disappointed in results. And there is that very human vow of Jacob, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, then shall the Lord be my God.”

Let us admit this temptation, today. The real function of religion, we might say, is to make us more effective as people –it helps us to put positive thinking to work in our lives so that we prosper - and lack no good thing. Prosperity is a sign of God’s favor. And religion shows us how to put God’s power to work in our lives for our own benefit. The electronic church of TV today prospers in peddling this appeal.

But Jesus said, quoting Deuteronomy, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” He does not mean by this that He is unconcerned with the material needs of His fellows; He tells His followers to feed the hungry, give the thirsty drink, clothe the naked. His feeding of the multitudes with the loaves and fishes shows this. But He is saying this is not the chief purpose; we must not look to God simply for material benefits. He tells us “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”

This, I think, is the Christian answer to all the schemes for human salvation based on material considerations alone, whether it be the Marxian millennial myth of a classless society or our earnest hope that funding material programs will in itself solve our social problems. Jesus knew that human salvation requires more than a material remedy. He knew that bread alone will not satisfy the inner pangs of the soul; that the spirit of God is required for the transforming saving experience of life. We cannot live by bread alone. We need the water of the spirit. We need the vision of a higher kingdom to unite us, the kingdom of God and its spirit of righteousness and ethical purpose and the common feeling of being one body in Christ under God.

Let us go back in our thoughts to the dramatic scene of Jesus’ next temptation. The scene is the temple on the heights of Jerusalem and the devil puts Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple and says again, “If Thou be the Son of God, then cast Thyself down, for it is written He shall give His angels charge over Thee and in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.”

There are different ways of treating this temptation or testing. Other claimants to the title of Messiah had claimed miraculous powers. One is said to have been able to fly, but then he was killed in a test trial. If Jesus really had, as the Son of God, the power of God, then clearly He should show His authority as a wonder-worker. And indeed this is a real test for Jesus. As His later ministry indicated, He was a wonder-worker. He healed the sick again and again, multiplied the loaves and fishes, stilled the tempest, walked on water, even raised the dead. Yet again and again we find Him going off by Himself in prayer, disturbed that followers seek Him only because of the signs and wonders, or perhaps only to be fed. And so He responds to the tempter — Scripture says, too — you shall not tempt, test, the Lord thy God.

What do we make of this? It seems to be a variant of the first temptation. But instead of being concerned with material values alone, one is now concerned to find some special sign of the power of God. The problem, as Jesus was to discover later, is people were interested only in the signs and not the source of the power in the spirit of God. They were eager to benefit from His power, but not eager to serve Him or follow His command of love and righteousness. Jesus knew He could be a popular wonder-worker. But this would be to appear as a great magician — not the example of quiet and humble service in obedience to the spirit of the love of God. Instead of wielding a magic wand, He showed His relation to God by examples of love and service.

And surely the temptation is still with us. It is a tendency to confuse magic with religion. Religion is the earnest wish to be used by God, to commit oneself to His will. Magic is the wish to use the power of God, to wield it for our own purposes. It is not surprising that in the history of religions, the magician and the priest are in opposition, and that the sorcerer is associated with the devil, not God. This is because their motives are opposed. The magician wishes to use the power of God, to usurp it; the religious leader wishes to be used by God and so commits himself to God’s purposes. And if a final confrontation comes between what he wishes and what God seems to demand, he says, “Thy will be done.”

I submit that popular religion misunderstands this. And certain leaders in the electronic church of TV land prosper with their claims to be vehicles of the healing power of God. And it is pathetic to see the gullible and credulous respond as they are expected to for the TV cameras. Now I don’t wish to be misunderstood on this. There is a healing power from God — I believe in this — some of you have heard me refer to it in hospital visitation — but it is presumptuous to claim to be an instrument of that power. It is the act of an imposter, a charlatan — and inevitably attention is drawn to the wonder-worker and not God — in spite of the pat formulas in praise of God. And there are times we know, and Jesus’ own life shows us this, when God says “no” to our earnest plea. It is the greatest heresy to think one has power with God, that one can wield His power. It is to appear as a magician and not as a religious person committed to the will of God.

There is only once, so far as I can see, when Jesus became really angry. That is when He drove the money-changers and all those who bought and sold out of the temple, saying, “It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer — but ye have made it a den of thieves.” I think His judgment is still pertinent. Religion is the earnest prayer to be used by God, not the interest in using Him, or profiting by the practice.

The last temptation of Jesus occurs when the devil takes Him up a high mountain, shows Him all the kingdoms of the world, and promises Him them all if He but bow down and worship him. This is the one that might have been the hardest to resist. It relates to the Jewish expectation of a Messiah who would save the people from the tyranny of Rome and restore the power enjoyed in the successful Maccabean revolt. But a much wider kingdom was promised in the Messianic vision of a new order, a new heaven and a new earth under God. Now the kind of Messiah who proclaimed a new political order was the kind the Romans hanged as revolutionaries. But Jesus was not this kind of Messiah, as we know. The devil had stated and Jesus saw the price that this kingdom required — service to Satan. And He said, “It is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And the new heaven and new earth of the Messianic hope He interprets as the spiritual unity of the children of God united in service to the law of love.

Somehow I think we need not worry too much about this temptation. Two world wars have disenchanted us about the possibility of a military, political solution to the troubles of the world, and yet nations keep trying in places like Vietnam or Afghanistan. What we need is encouragement in the possibility of building on a concern for universal rights, a global vision for mutual human understanding and service. The temptation always is to withdraw from this vision and to be concerned with economic and military might alone, to trust in chariots and horses instead of the word of God. Yet I am convinced that moral leadership and the kind of kingdom Jesus teaches is the pattern for ultimate human brotherhood.

In this Lenten season, as we seek to renew our faith in the Easter message of the triumph of God’s love, let us not ourselves fail the tests symbolized by the temptations of Jesus. And remember, as we practice symbolic acts of sacrifice, that man does not live by bread alone, that we should not tempt the Lord our God, that we should worship the Lord our God, and Him only should we serve.

1FORGIVENESS

02/10/80

L. J. Start

First Baptist Kalamazoo

January 23, 1955

First Baptist Herkimer, NY

How casually we pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And yet immediately after this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, in the sixth chapter of Matthew, we read Jesus’ clear teaching: “If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

The story in today’s New Testament lesson is spoken by Jesus to illumine this teaching. Forgiveness on our part is required if we are to receive the forgiving love of God. Consider the man in the story. He is an important official who has been serving a king. But, in doing so he has been so unfaithful to the trust put in him that when the king decides on an accounting or a reckoning, it is found that he has a debt of 10,000 talents. Now this is an enormous sum - l0 million dollars. And when he could not pay, the king ordered that he and all his family be sold into slavery and whatever he had, confiscated. There was no way the servant could pay the debt and so he fell on his knees and pleaded for mercy and time. And the miracle happened. Not only was he spared the cruel fate of slavery, the lot of insolvent debtors according to law, but also inexplicably the king cancelled the debt and he went out a free man.

And just as he leaves, he happens upon a man who owes him l00 dinari - a measly 20 dollars! And he takes this poor debtor by the throat, demanding payment. He who has just been absolved of a debt of millions insisting on his 20 bucks, and refusing to grant this poor wretch time to repay.

The mean official gets his reward, though. The king hears about his action and the unmerciful one winds up in bondage, with the original obligation facing him. For once the bad guy gets what he deserves. Justice is served.

But this story is not about justice. It is about love and forgiveness. Jesus tells it in response to Peter’s question, “How often should I forgive someone who sins against me?” The old Jewish rule seems to have said three times. Peter asks up to seven times? -probably thinking to appear generous. But Jesus says, “Not seven times, but until seventy times seven”. Forgiveness is not a matter of calculating spirit, but overflowing love. This is the spirit of Christ’s promise of God’s love. It is anticipated in the Old Testament. In Jeremiah, for example, the scripture lesson, we heard the promise of a new covenant where men will be freed from the burden of inherited sin, and a new law of love will be written in their hearts. And the law of love and forgiveness is pointed up in the story of the merciful king and the unmerciful servant.

If the king has forgiven so huge a debt for us, surely we can be forgiving with the minor debts owed us and trespasses against us. And if one does not forgive another, then the king, God, will not forgive him. This is the clear teaching. Let us look at it and see what it means for our lives.

Surely, on a simple level, forgiving and forgiveness make human relationships possible. Imagine what it would be like if we could not say, “Excuse me”, or, “I’m sorry” and be reasonably confident to hear, “That’s OK”, or “No problem” as a response. Simple politeness expresses the respect and concern for another that reflects this rule of forgiveness on a basic level. If you accidentally bump someone, you apologize and expect a polite response - not a shove in retaliation. And we get along as well as we do driving in traffic because off mutual respect for one another’s safety. Traffic safety engineers say simple politeness is the key to safe driving. If somebody cuts in on you or fails to yield, it does not help matters to try to cut in on him or to insist on your right of way. Forgiving the infraction will make for fewer fender benders. It might even save your life.

But, of course, there are deeper and more personal examples of hurt, pain, injury at the hands of another. And these are not wiped out by simple polite responses. What do we do when we are really hurt, betrayed, let down or abused? How can we glibly say “forgive” when the cost is so great?

Let us consider what happens when we cannot forgive or when we say, “I can try to forgive, but I can never forget what you have done.” Consider first what happens to the situation. It is frozen in its irremediable state of injury. It remains as a permanent alienation. Its effect may remain when the actual occasion of the injury has been long forgotten - as when family feuds continue long after everyone has forgotten who started it, or whose cow got into whose cornfield. Sense of injury turns to resentment, to hate - and hate engenders more hate. It is not by hate that hate is overcome; hate is overcome only by love. This is an old law; so taught the Buddha and so lived Christ.

If we are honest with ourselves, so often we say we cannot forgive because we want to nurse the injury, perpetuate the offense, cultivate our wounded pride. So often it is the case that we have not tried the law of love and found it wanting, but that we have not wanted it and have not tried it. We wanted to nurse the grievance, perpetuate it, not heal it. And so it remains - a permanent cause and source of alienation: the situation cannot improve, but tends to worsen as it invites the spirit of revenge, retribution, and a general exacerbation of the rift, the injury, the alienation.

And consider what this does to you who cannot forgive. The injury is held closer and closer; your negative and hostile attitudes grow stronger; your health can become affected - a sour disposition leads to a sour stomach and all your other relations can become affected as your friends wonder what has come over you, to make you so bitter. We say revenge is sweet, but it is short-lived and turns sour. Revenge turns to bitterness and gall and leaves its mark on you. Revenge might well have the been the spirit of the North after the Civil War, but Abraham Lincoln spoke of the task of healing, forgiveness and the binding up of the nation’s wounds. The last words of his second inaugural address are famous:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Finally, consider what this unforgiving spirit does to the one who has betrayed you, or injured you, or offended you. No matter how he might feel about the act now, your implacable, unforgiving spirit fixes him with a perennial guilt and affords him no opportunity to make amends even if he wishes. How often we have regretted an unthinking, unkind remark! How terrible it is then if the other is so hurt he will not even hear our apology, our plea to be forgiven. How easy it is for misunderstandings to arise in even the most intimate of family relationships. How terrible it is then for one who feels aggrieved, misunderstood not even to hear the “I’m sorry - forgive me” of the other! How terrible to cut off irrevocably the spouse who is heartily ashamed of his fling, the child who deeply regrets his mistake! The unforgiving spirit is in some sense more guilty than the spirit of malicious injury that evoked it, because it fixes the other with a guilt he cannot remove, writes his sin in permanent ink that cannot be erased, condemns him to a perpetual memory of the offense.

This is what happens if we cannot forgive. But the story reminds us, if we cannot forgive, like that official who could not forgive the $20 debt, then we cannot be forgiven either - and so the king countermands his forgiveness of the enormous debt owed him. General Ogelthorpe once said to John Wesley, “I can never forgive.” And Wesley replied, “Then I hope, sir, that you may never sin.” The unforgiving spirit hardens the heart and we bar ourselves from God. The thrust of the story, of course, is that the servant’s mean, unforgining spirit is the cause of his ultimate misery. And we who nurse our grievances, preserve the injury, embitter ourselves, condemn the other in permanent guilt, efffectively close ourselves off from the redemptive love of God in ourselves, in the other, and in the situation.

But consider what happens when the path of forgiveness is taken. A creative act is set forth which bridges the gap between the injured and injurer, which heals the rift and overcomes the alienation. It requires going the second mile, meeting the other more than half-way and taking on oneself, absorbing, the pain of the offense.

First of all, the focus is now upon overcoming the rift, not preserving it; healing the injury, not nursing the grievance. A possibility of creative change now appears. Forgiveness is a giving back, a restoring of the situation, a giving back to what it was before. When you forgive the thoughtless remark, the mean attempt to damage you, you have in a sense erased it from time, wiped out the sin, restored the situation to what it was before. When you forgive and refuse to nourish your hurt, you are creatively redeeming the time. The grievance forgiven and forgotten wipes out the cause of the rift and not only restores the situation, but infuses it with a new spirit of love and understanding.

And consider what your creative act of forgiveness has done for the other. You have freed him from his sense of guilt - you have given back what only you can give: an assurance that the injury is forgotten, an erasure is made in the record of your lives, a black episode wiped out, and the old relationship restored. You have restored a relationship that only you could restore.

How can one really forget a deep injury through forgiveness? Perhaps in a sense one cannot; the sears of memory may remain. But the act of creative redemptive love in forgiveness does not allow this to affect the new relationship. Hosea, the prophet, used the example of his wife’s infidelity to serve as a symbol of Israel’s faithlessness to God. The memory must have been agonizing. And yet, speaking in the name of God, he cries, “How can I give thee up? How shall I deliver thee, O Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger.”

The ancient code of Hammurabi, 1750 BC, has an arresting provision giving legal status to forgiveness. If a woman is found guilty of infidelity, she and the guilty involved male are separately tied up and thrown into a river. The code provides that the husband has the option to save his wife before she drowns. If he does so, the other is also retrieved and both will go free, no longer be guilty.

One can imagine such a drama - a struggle like Hosea’s. To forgive like this is to reach way beyond injury and hurt and to share in the redemptive love of God that restores, and heals, and saves.

And this suggests what forgiveness does for the one forgiving. A hurt is overcome, a burden of pain is faced and borne, a painful separation is bridged, and a restored relationship made possible. There is pain, there is hurt: but out of it comes something creative. And somehow one senses God’s redemptive power at work in oneself.

Is it not wrong to step out of the court of the king having been forgiven millions and not forgive a debt of $20? Is it not wrong to have received so much from God and his sacrificial love through Christ, and not give - and yes, sacrifice - in turn? But we have been deeply hurt, we say; the pain is great! And the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, was mortally wounded by the sins of man. The world He loved betrayed Him, drove great spikes into His hands and feet and sides. And yet He said, “Father, forgive.” Can we, His servants, do less?

O God, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

1QUIETUDE

02/03/80

L. J. Start

First Baptist Kalamazoo

The sermon subject is quietude — and it means not silence or stillness so much as an inner spiritual quality of serenity and tranquility. It is the spirit evoked by the Psalmist when he says, “Be still and know that I am God.” It refers to an inner communion with the spirit of God, an appropriate theme as we prepare to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. It is the spirit cultivated by Quakers; it is the mood found by mystics of all ages and all cultures. It is, I think, a more positive term for such experience that the term quietism which has been associated with mysticism. This term may suggest a negative inaction; quietude suggests the serenity of the creative spirit that finds its source in the inner sanctuary of the soul but flows outwardly in positive acts of love and concern. It is the spirit of Walter Rauschenbusch who led Baptists in the Social Gospel movement at the beginning of the century, a movement dedicated to building the kingdom of God on earth, a movement which was blunted by the disillusionment of two world wars, and gave way to Neo-orthodoxy and now the contemporary interest in personal salvation peddled so successfully by the the electronic church of television evangelists. In Walter Rauschenbusch and in the Quaker testimony the inner quietude discovered in the depths of the spirit is the inspiration for the committed social concerns they felt so keenly, and which seem to be so lacking in the electronic church of today. Rauschenbusch was giving testimony to his own personal religious inspiration when he wrote:

In the castle of my soul

Is a little postern gate

Whereat, when I enter,

I am in the presence of God.

In a moment, in the turning of a thought,

I am where God is. This is a fact.

This inner spirit is what I call quietude and I think it is a fact experiences by all those who listen to the voice of the eternal — to those who are still and know that this is the experience of God.

Quietude implies a kind of solitude. It is evoked in the quest of the self for its deepest dimensions, in the flight of the alone to the alone, as one mystic has put it.

But it is important to know that this sense of solitude, of being alone, is not to be confused with loneliness. There is nothing good to say about loneliness unless it inspires us to seek another. We can sympathize with the Psalmist when he cries, “Turn thou to me and be gracious, for I am lonely and afflicted.” And Ecclesiastes gives a poignant picture of the person all alone in loneliness, warning “Woe to him who is alone when he falls, and has not another to lift him up.” And even Jesus seemed to have his moments of loneliness, especially in the Garden of Gethsemane when He prayed in agony alone, and His disciples whom He had asked to watch and pray fell asleep. After the feeding of the 5,000 Jesus sent the multitudes away and went up into a mountain away from everyone to pray, and as Matthew reports, “when evening came he was there alone”.

And yet with Jesus we have a sense that He was alone in the sense of solitude, not loneliness, for in His life of prayer He was in the Presence of God, the Father. And this is the answer to the curse of loneliness: spiritual solitude brings us to a Presence. Quietude is this inner communion.

There is a basic sense in which all people are faced with an inevitable loneliness. This is the fact of physical separation which is consequent to existing as a body. For bodies are distinct and separate. God said, we know, “It is not good that the man should be alone, and He made woman out of Adam’s rib.” But the creation still implies another, a separation, even though it be as Adam said, “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” And in the most intimate relationships there remains a separation. It is this separation that is the symbol of and reason for our loneliness. We try to overcome it by being with others, by an eagerness for togetherness, group associations; but the basic loneliness of our beings cannot be overcome this way. There always remains the experience of the loneliness of our responsibility, our guilt, in being what we are. And there is the knowledge of the individualizing and isolating prospect of dying our death, which haunts our being.

Quietude suggests another way to heal the curse of loneliness.

It suggests that the self is not limited to or by the body. It suggests that the self is no thing, no mere object — that it is a consciousness of unlimited dimensions. As Aristotle said, the mind which he identified with the soul is nothing before it thinks, and it is potentially everything it thinks. The soul, or self, then has dimensions that far transcend the limits of the body. It has depths that reach into the ultimate source of our being. This is the reason for the strange paradox that every religious person knows; it is in denying the personal self that one finds a larger self in which the personal concerns and loneliness are lost. In denying the self and following Jesus — His example, His spirit — we come to a new self in God. And in this larger self we find a new relationship with our fellows. We are not shut up in loneliness or private fears; we want to reach out and touch others, to give expression to the creative love we found in the experience of the inner presence of God in the spiritual solitude of prayer and meditation.

There are various explanations of this experience. For the religious, it is a fact that needs no explanation. For the theologian, it is evidence of the community of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God in the life of the believer, and this presence extended in many is the life of the church. The psychologist Jung calls this experience an awareness of a collective unconscious, a recollection of a common spiritual origin and destiny, that all people sense in some way. It points to larger unity of our selves in one cosmic spirit.

There are less arcane and more aesthetic ways of expressing the same experience. There is, for example, Thoreau at Walden Pond, exulting in the beauty of nature, finding each new day a dawn in his own spirit, and reality a fabulous experience. But he finds this in the depths — not on the surface — of experience. “When we are unhurried and wise,” he writes, “we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.” And whether it be in the beauty of nature, the imagery of great poetry, the sound of great music, most of us can catch a sense of a sublime reality to which we relate that far transcends our petty selves, that refreshes us, restores us.

Or, we can simply call attention to the remarkable depths of the human spirit — its resourcefulness, capacity for creative effort. This is how the humanist would explain the experience. We have these spiritual potentials within us at all times. But this does not account for the fact that what is experienced is larger than the self, a deeper self, a higher Being, what Emerson called the Over-Soul.

Perhaps it is best explained by Quaker theory and practice — probably because the theory is simple and it is put into practice. There is an inner light, a divine seed. This is the light that lighteth every man that comes into the world. This is the divine reason — the logos of Greek thought, The Word which John said was in the beginning and which was made flesh as the Light of men. Jesus is the Light — Jesus shows the Way through the darkness. And the darkness cannot destroy the light. And how is He the Way? For the Quaker — by showing us His own relationship to God by seeking the Father within in the spirit of meditation, by teaching that the kingdom of God is within, in the midst of us, by extending to us His own spirit of trust, serenity, joy in the beauties of creation, and sharing the wonder of God’s creative love. All of this comes with the quiet authority of one who was one with God.

This means we seek God as an intimate presence within — not as some great cosmic force in the external world. When ye pray, say our Father — not O great cosmic force. There is an inner experience — most all of us have had some sense of the guidance of the Spirit at some time — some ineffable sense of the beauty that surrounds us, some gratitude toward goodness we have experienced, some sense of what we ought to do because it feels right. The religious life is a cultivation of, a listening to, the creative spirit of God within.

“Be still, listen, look within — and know that I am God.” Then one will find a presence in this meditative solitude, and will never walk alone in loneliness of spirit. This is the spirit of quietude.

This does not mean that we flee the world of time and sense to live a life of cloistered meditation, or cultivate an inner emotional sense of being saved. The medieval world counseled this and neglected the concerns of the here and now to prepare for one’s eternal salvation in the life to come. Nor does it mean on the other hand that we direct our concerns to specific problems and measure the value of religion in terms of its usefulness in solving our personal problems, in making us feel better, or in relating to political or economic issues. There is a one-sidedness in the Here and Now and a one-sidedness of the World of the Eternal — neither of which is alone the true life of the religious spirit. We cannot ignore a maimed and bleeding world while we bask on the sunny shores of the Eternal found within. In the experience of the Divine Presence, there is a retention of both time and the timeless. In the experience of the Eternal Now of the Divine Presence, we no longer live merely in time. A deeper reality quickens, stirs, energizes, breaks in upon us and embraces us in Himself. We live our daily lives, then, just as busy as before — but with a new sense of serenity, joy, peace, and love. This is the spirit of quietude — fruit of the cultivation of the spirit.

It is this practice of religion that lightens burdens, eases pain, comforts sorrow, because it reveals a presence, a Comforter, a spirit within — even the spirit of Christ. And we have this promise: “Lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world.”

In this service of communion let us remember Jesus, truly seek His presence, and pray that we may go forth renewed in the inner depths of our being with His spirit in us to guide our lives.