First Friends Meeting
Joel 2:28-29
‘Dreams and Visions’
Doug Gwyn

The prophecy of Joel that Nancy has just read for us is a great one. God promises to pour out the Spirit on all flesh – not just the occasional prophet. The Spirit will inspire all people, men and women, the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the outcast. Everyone will receive dreams and visions from the Lord. To Joel, that meant that not only would everyone have God’s guidance in their personal life. It also meant that God would lead Israel, not by means of a king, a few priests and the occasional prophet. The word of the Lord might come through anyone, with important guidance for the whole nation.

The democratic implications of Joel’s vision are huge. It suggests that everyone needs to have a voice. No one should be excluded from participating in decision-making, from the local congregation and community to the entire nation. To silence or exclude anyone is not just to repress that person, that class, race, or sex – it is to limit the Lord’s movement, to stifle the Lord’s voice, to thwart God’s will among us.

In the Book of Acts, we see that Spirit fell upon a motley crew of disciples in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death. Simon Peter immediately recognized what was going on. He told the crowd that Joel’s great vision had become reality. The Spirit is now poured out on all flesh. The knowledge of God no longer has to pass through temple rituals or be dispensed by experts. It moves at large in the world. And very quickly after that great breakthrough moment, an international, cross-cultural network of house-churches sprang up. It brought all kinds of people together, from many classes, races, and cultures, into a movement even mighty Rome could not suppress.

Well, at least for a while. Sometimes the Church itself seems to be very good at suppressing God’s Spirit. Even as we try to perfect ways of channeling and optimizing the flow of the Spirit, we can end up putting it back in the bottle again. Church history is one long drama of God’s Spirit rebottled and limited, then breaking loose again in some new quarter. Quakers are part of that history. Early Friends reclaimed the prophecy of Joel when they proclaimed that “Christ is come to teach his people himself,” that the light of Christ is available in each person’s conscience. They denounced the establish Church for silencing women’s voices. They worked for a more open society, a more participatory democracy. George Fox came to America and had conversations with Native Americans that convinced him that they knew this same light. William Penn made and kept treaties with local tribes. He was confident that they would respond to his good faith, because he knew they had the same Spirit that guided him. If only more colonists in America and around the world had had that same faith, that same confidence in God’s Spirit.

In both England and America, despite persecution and marginalization, Friends have been key contributors to the shape of modern democracy. In 17^th-century England, because of their Christian commitment to nonviolence, Friends helped create the concept of a loyal opposition. That is, you can have serious disagreements with the government (and early Friends certainly did), but you can voice your viewpoint peacefully and not try to overthrow the government. That’s a key foundation-stone to a democratic society. The willingness of early Friends to suffer for their faith was also a major contribution to religious freedom. And that religious freedom was the starting point for all civil rights of free speech, free assembly, and a free press. It’s really important to understand that these and other Quaker contributions to modern democracy were all based originally in our conviction – indeed, our experience – of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. To limit the freedom of any class or category of people is to limit God’s freedom.

Those formative days of modern western society are now long past. Once they were encoded in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and elsewhere, it was easy to forget that these civil and constitutional basics were originally radical, scandalous religious ideas and practices. The separation of Church an state in this country is an important provision of our Constitution, and again, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists and others struggled and suffered greatly for that provision. But we must never forget that our religious freedom is an engine of growth for the freedoms and civil rights of all. Wherever God’s Spirit moves freely in churches, synagogues, mosques, and anywhere else, it should serve the general good. So when we try to discern whether we are being led by the Spirit, one criterion for discernment is whether our actions are in tune with the freedom and welfare of all people.

I believe Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the great prophets of American history, probably the greatest of our time. He was probably the most eloquent American since Abraham Lincoln, a full century before, in weaving together the great themes of the Bible and the Constitution. We must never forget that his powerful vision for civil rights was energized most fundamentally by his Christian faith and his calling as a Baptist minister. King was part of that long line of prophets who rediscover the prophecy of Joel for new times. He was one who not only dreamed the dream of a free America for all people, he lived the dream. Back in the mid-1950s, as the Montgomery bus boycott dragged on, more and more people criticized and questioned the movement. King answered the critics, saying, if we are wrong, the Bible is wrong, the Constitution of the United States of America is wrong. He challenged all of us, as Christians and as American citizens, to take seriously the prophecies of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, to enact the universal freedoms the Constitution clearly enunciates but has still not fully delivered.

In many different speeches and sermons, we hear this spelled out. When he said “I have a dream,” he envisioned a better, freer, more equal America of the future. And since then, we have realized some of that dream. But most importantly, he was living that future dream as a present reality. His commitment to nonviolent direct action was one key to living the dream as a present reality. The civil rights movement gained the moral high ground in the eyes of the nation by speaking truth to power, refusing the violent option, being willing to suffer the threat of violence and actual violence without reprisal. To live the reality of human dignity and mutual respect, even when those around you hate you – that’s living the dream here and now – that’s what the Letter to the Hebrews calls “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (11:1).

In quiet and mostly forgotten ways, Friends allied themselves with MLK’s work. In the late 1950s, the American Friends Service Committee helped finance his trip to India, so he could study Gandhi’s principles and strategies of nonviolent direction action. Nonviolence is really a part of Joel’s vision – to kill is to pre-empt what God might still accomplish in someone’s life – and through that person for others. In Joel’s vision, the life of the most vicious offender remains holy, if only for the sake of God’s freedom.

I shall always remember the great speech King gave in Memphis, the night before he was assassinated. You remember. He seemed to know he would not live much longer. He said that long life is a wonderful blessing, but he’s not concerned about that. Because, he said, “I’ve been to the mountain-top. I’ve seen the Promised Land.” Of course, he is hearkening to the story of Moses. After leading his people out of bondage in Egypt and through 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, Moses didn’t get to the Promised Land. But God led him up to a mountain-top and gave him a view of it just before he died. MLK was not only a prophet but a Moses figure. MLK, the vision was the reality. He was already there. Not simply by an act of imagination, but the way he had lived his life.

Of course, after his death in April 1968, it became a lot safer for America to accept and praise its prophet. MLK day tomorrow is a modern, civil version of the traditional saint’s day. And rightly so. But it was not always so. The civil rights movement at the time was both inspiring and frightening. Last fall, I caught some of the rebroadcast of ‘Eyes on the Prize’, the PBS documentary on the civil rights movement. I had forgotten just how tense the confrontations had been in Little Rock, Birmingham, Selma and elsewhere. It was difficult for Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson to know whether and how much to intervene. Bringing federal force to bear on local and state matters was a delicate matter, with implications ranging beyond the civil rights issues themselves. And would King and the other leaders of the civil right movement be able to keep it nonviolent? Or would it boil over into a race war, a battle the black community would surely lose?

King, Gandhi, George Fox, Dorothy Day and other prophets – while they are alive, they stay at the cutting edge. They keep generating controversy. Because the Spirit of the Lord is moving in them. The Spirit of the Lord is a Spirit of peace – but in an unjust and violent world, it continually creates turbulence. It requires vision to see the larger picture. For example, in his Journal, George Fox describes an occasion where he made a crowd of Church-goers so angry they attacked him and beat him to the ground. He writes that he looked up at them and “I saw the power of the Lord was over all.” And they weren’t through with him yet! That’s living the dream, enacting the vision.

What dream that creates its own reality in your life? What vision of hope makes the present different for you? What is your hope for the world. How might you live that hope in 2007?