[A version of this was delivered as part of Barclay College's "Spiritual Emphasis Week"]
In the last post I discussed one way that time and eternity function in theology and in lives of faith in a direct experience of the indwelling Christ. These two posts address how a realizing eschatology changes the possibilities for spiritual transformation in the present, how God’s eternal promises are invading our lives at every moment, an apocalypse of the heart. Christ lives in us in His fullness. He dwells in our hearts in his completion, not as parceled out and obscured but as God’s revelation to the world. Christ resides in us as the crucified one, the resurrected one, and the glorified one. Christ is not only crucified, Christ is not only resurrected, Christ is not only glorified by the Father. The salvific and eschatological promises of the past and the future are directed incarnationally into every time and every moment.
Crucified, resurrected and glorified.
And the paradox of paradoxes is that Christ is all three eternally and dwells in us as this eternal presence. And according to Second Peter, we are “partakers” of this nature made incarnate in us (2 Peter 1:4).
What I want to say in this post is that the saints, the ministers, the faithful prophets of God, are those who see time for what it is. They are those who see the reality of time and are commissioned by God to proclaim the meaning of time and to embody the fullness of time. These are prophets. Prophets are those who can see God’s will and can call our brothers and sisters to a more living understanding of our place in God’s world, of our relationship to the fulfillment of God’s presence.
Throughout history God has anointed men and women as prophets and ministers to witness to God’s unrelenting commitment to the world. Faithful ministers like Elijah, who in his dark moment of despair and desperation fled to a cave so he could die in peace and be done with the whole messy business. God would not let him go. “What are you doing here, Elijah. Go back the way you came, there is work to do. Do not be afraid and do not despair, for I will never be left without a witness."And people like Jeremiah who knew they are unsuited for the task and unqualified for the job (Jeremiah 1). “I am too young God, I don’t sound very good when I speak.” And God says, “Don’t say I am too young, and don’t say I can’t speak. You must go wherever I tell you and I will be with you to rescue you.”
Or people like Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation. Luther was dragged in front of a court and accused of heresy for daring to say that salvation is by grace alone and with the threat of prison in front of him he refused to recant and declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
If you think that God’s prophets are limited to bygone days and ages and have no relevance to the world today I want to remind you that God will never be left without a witness. That God will always reserve for himself men and women whose actions testify to God’s absolute commitment to love the whole world, every nook and cranny. A world that as often as not turns its back on that love, but that nonetheless hungers for it and groans to be reconciled with Christ as the first-fruits of a new creation realizing on earth.
It is no easy thing to categorize someone as a prophet. But I know it when I see it. When we talk about prophets and the prophetic we are pointing to the biblical tradition in which God works through human beings to point others to the activity of the Spirit, to abandon human strivings and to turn to God. A prophet is a truth teller more than a fore-teller. A prophet is someone who gives voice to their experience of God as it addresses the social and political status quo with the counter-cultural values of God’s Kingdom. A prophet keeps God’s time in a world distracted by meaningless time.
John Woolman’s spiritual awakening in his early 20s coincided with his experience of being called to ministry. He wrote in his Journal,
“From one month to another [I felt] love and tenderness [increase], and my mind was more strongly engaged for the good of my fellow creatures, [and I found it too strong… to be much longer confined to my own breast].”
Woolman felt God’s prophetic commissioning, a calling that God had appointed him to bear a message, to testify to the ways of God in the world. Woolman wrote, “I felt that rise which prepares the creature to stand like a trumpet through which the Lord speaks to his flock.”
Perhaps Woolman’s experience of being commissioned by God to ministry was in the spirit of Isaiah, who heard the word of the Lord say: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins” (Is. 58:1).
A trumpet is an instrument that channels wind and breath. By itself, a trumpet is only a piece of metal. But when it is held and air is blown into it, the trumpet translates that breath into notes and sounds according to the will of the one who holds it. Throughout history, a trumpet is the instrument of harkening, of announcing, and of declaring. A trumpet announces a royal visitation, and important news. Woolman viewed his ministry as that of the trumpet because, like the Hebrew prophets before him, he wanted to hearken people to the revelation of God’s presence. Christ is come and coming!
Just as in the popular mindset the word “apocalypse” most often has negative connotations of devastation, catastrophic destruction, and zombies. So too, the popular image of the Prophet is of the self-righteous, angry zealot who shakes his or her fists at the world and cares very little about the actual fate of actual people in the messiness of their actual lives. However, neither a message of destruction nor a message of self-righteous condemnation resonates with a gospel that features a God who went into covenant with humanity and took on flesh as a statement of absolute solidarity with real people in all of their foibles and failures.
When Woolman felt commissioned to be God’s “trumpet” he was stepping into the role of Isaiah and Jeremiah. He was not primarily acting as an accuser, but as the harbinger of a restored creation. He was describing a new world in which humanity was no longer condemned, but opened up to intimacy with God.
Woolman quoted from the Hebrew prophets a lot. Woolman’s writings contain over 700 biblical quotations, and many of these are from the books of the Hebrew Prophets.
“A Time, I believe, is coming,” he said, “[when God’s will shall] so spread and prevail, that "Nation shall not lift up Sword against Nation, nor learn War any more." Isaiah ii. 4. And [I know] that this precious Work is begun.”
Woolman reminded his peers that the fulfillment of God’s promises has already “begun”, that the peaceable kingdom where lion and lamb coexist peacefully, and where nations learn war no more, was not merely wishful thinking.
Woolman was obsessed with time because every time was God’s time and time was pregnant with the eschatological reconciliation God willed to bring forward and to spend your time outside of a state of consistency within God’s will rejected the true meaning of time. Wasting time was not a trivial thing.
Woolman took time seriously. He saw that the unnecessary use of time could damage the community and wasted what belonged to God. This is a hard line to hold.
But underneath this intensity and obsession, was a belief that every minute of every day was a scene in salvation history and was a moment for Christ to reign triumphant in the midst of world events. And he challenged his fellow Quakers to see the urgency of every moment and the eternal glory God would interject into our lives when we surrender to Him.
Woolman held out to his peers, his fellow Quakers, and all who would seek God, the prospect that the direct hear and obey relationship God established in Eden could be restored. The harmony of creation could be revived. Woolman challenged and he grieved and he called his fellow Quakers to live up to the gospel they said they believed. He challenged them to enter into a life that “is hid with Christ in God” so they would “behold the peaceable government of Christ” and become partakers of the spirit of Chirst.
Woolman embodied the ministry of Isaiah and Jeremiah. He called his fellow Quakers to stop the navel-gazing, the self-obsession and the pride, and step into the Government of Christ, where the faithful are partakers of Christ’s life and where the peaceable kingdom comes to typify the socio-political aspirations of those who surrender their allegiances to God alone.
But Woolman did not snap his fingers and see the changes he wanted. Woolman was ostracized and criticized for his ministry, and his neighbors remained stubbornly entrenched in their apathy and oppression. There was never a point at which Woolman felt his own powers of persuasion would be enough to convince people to change their ways. He knew all too well his own frailty and his own inadequacy to such a task, but it was a matter of faithfulness and witness to call his fellow Christians to be their best selves, the selves God wanted them to be, and to see the full integration of their spiritual and social lives.
Woolman lamented and mourned the distance between the world he knew God offered and the world he saw around him. He grieved the eternal danger he saw in the lives of the most stalwart citizens of his day. And he was led to tears over the distance his message put between himself and his neighbors. His message was not always welcome. In pointing to the emergence of the peaceable kingdom on earth he was sometimes made to feel like a man rejected by his community, when his community wanted to theorize and fantasize about the kingdom of God, but not actually enact it.
Woolman was deeply concerned with the issues of his day: lotteries, high rents and interest rates, poverty, egregious wealth, alcoholism, the injustices of the colonial economy. But he did not merely have a list of issues on which he took public stands, as if they could all be isolated, fragmented, and compartmentalized. Woolman’s prophetic voice was a comprehensive and unified whole: “let the Government of Christ spread and prevail!” By pointing, again and again, to the spiritual, eschatological and theological root and cause that taught him what a world remade would look like, Woolman directed his peers to the establishment of God’s will on earth as it is in Heaven. Like the Hebrew prophets, Woolman saw that the social degeneracies of his day were symptoms of spiritual alienation and rebellion. Woolman’s challenge to his fellow colonists was to hearken back to the spreading of God’s will.
Even in all the anguish Woolman felt when he witnessed materialism, greed, and the self-pride that results in oppression all around him and in his own church, he remained committed to his community. He stood with them and loved them, even as he reminded them that God had much better things in store for them. Woolman believed God could lead these fallen and lost people to overcome the dualisms of heaven and earth, the future fulfillment of all things and the present reality. He did not condemn his peers, he grieved for them. He grieved that they could not see the spiritual danger they were in. He grieved that they could not see the mercy God was offering to them. He grieved that they could not see these things, but he could. He could see it, and they wouldn’t listen.
To be an agent of God’s time, is to be under a heavy burden. It is also to be in good stead. The Hebrew Prophets, Jesus at Gethsemane, the Apostles; church reformers like John Wicklyffe, John Huss, Martin Luther, John Wesley; and Quaker ministers and martyrs, like George Fox, Margaret Fell, John Woolman, James Nayler, and Thomas Kelly: People who held out the Light of Christ’s immediate presence reconciling all things together in a world easily distracted by the flashy and cheap imitations.
We must grieve because the world as it is, is not the world as God wants it. And we must grieve again because God freely offers the reconciliation that can finally set things right, but we have rejected it. But grieving is an act of resistance to the status quo. Grieving is a statement that what is, is not what might be. To grieve in Spirit is to point to a Divine Reality that supersedes whatever the present reality appears to be.
Grief and mourning are the ultimate forms of criticism.
We grieve for the distance between the world as it is and the world as God wills it to be, but in our grief we declare that the way things appear to be is only an illusion of the new reality established by God in Christ.
Woolman’s grief grounded the social manifestations of his prophetic commission in love for his people, his friends and neighbors. Like Jesus’ tears shed over Jerusalem, like an estranged parent’s tears for a child, Woolman’s grief for his neighbors was a sign that he was absolutely committed to their well-being no matter what and that he knew God had better things in store for them than what they ever knew possible.
Woolman’s own experience of the “apocalypse of the heart” opened to him the transformation God held out to all people. A transformation that entailed the unveiling of a new world, a revelation of ultimate human fulfillment, of eternity weaving itself into temporality and birthing an alternative socio-spiritual consciousness. Woolman believed that the world of the spirit and the physical world were intertwined and that God was bringing about a new world that repudiated the values, politics, economics and structures of a world alienated from God and God’s purposes.
In my estimation, Woolman understood himself to be within the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Prophets, Protestant martyrs, and other reformers who were willing to die and endure persecution in obedience to the voice of God they discerned.
It is said that confession is good for the soul. And now, after all of your patient listening, after all of what I have said, I must confess to you that though I have studied John Woolman’s life and teachings for years upon years, I am not very good at following his wisdom. Though I know in my head that Christ has come to teach His people himself and that I, too, may be a partaker of his nature, I hold God at arms length. I am tempted to have that petty and shallow faith that says believing is enough, without ever letting believing become transforming.
It is possible to know in my head that Christ dwells in my life fully, without reservation or deficiency, and still not surrender every corner of my heart to the reign of Christ. I have studied enough theology and philosophy to tell me that the genius of Woolman, and the early Quakers before him, was that their transforming experience of Christ in His fullness overcame the dualisms that lead to fragmented allegiances and cultural accommodation.
For Woolman and the early Quakers, transforming faith was not a spectator sport and it was not like rooting for a football team and it was not like adding one more bullet point to your resume. It was an experience of God acting with such authority that it overthrew all barriers to a new, resurrected life.
And even as I acknowledge my own inability to effect the faith I want to have I dare to hope that, even now, God is working in me in all of the fullness and power of eternity. I don’t know how long my mortal flesh can hold out against a God who is in the business of reconciliation and redemption, but, in the end, I am going to be putting my bets on God. In Christ, the dualisms of Spirit and flesh, present and future, heaven and earth, our social lives and our spiritual lives are overcome because they are all subsumed in the present Christ who reconciles them in Himself and brings that reconciliation into your life to reveal God’s will, day by day, if we let go of agendas and selfish aspirations.
It is possible to know all this, and yet to still live as if I were on my own, as if I were alienated from the True Voice that calls out to me, as if I could segment my religious life away from my whole life. It is possible to waste my time living as if eternity can wait.
And I grieve my own complacency. I grieve my own apathy. I grieve the limitations I place on God.
But maybe, my grief over my own shortcomings is a sign of hope. I grieve for the world around me and the souls trapped in bondage to addiction, oppression, and narrow self-pride. I stand shoulder-to-
And when I reflect on the power of Christ, incarnating in the world as the crucified, resurrected and glorified One, I am filled with wonder and awe and I begin to open myself up to a grace that is more than the forgiveness of sins, but is nothing short of a full integration into the life of God, beyond words, beyond time, beyond status and pride. A life that is a sign post on which God makes known to our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and our communities, that now is the Day of the Lord, that the promises of old have already begun to be completed, that the Kingdom is realizing on earth, that time is too short to sit by and bide our time because all time is God’s time and every time is pregnant with God’s eternal time.
And so I confess that the power of this testimony we bear, the power of the Kingdom of God realizing in our midst, is not something I feel I have gained any mastery over. But Lord willing, I hope it will master me. I hope I can be listed among those who truly surrendered to God. And if I can do that, I think I will finally be able to keep time accurately.
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