This morning, when a Friend expressed her wishes for the New Year, including that human beings live in peace, and that all be healthy and happy, I was reminded of what some postmodern philosophers have spoken of, approvingly, as a "commitment to the impossible." That commitment goes back, in our tradition, to the prophetic movement that began with Isaiah and reached an apex, for Christians, in the ministry of Jesus, who called his hearers to live the mercy, justice, healing, and peace of the Kingdom of God. I've found that same commitment in other faiths; for example, in the Buddhist bodhisattva who vows the impossible every day: "Sentient beings are numberless, yet I vow to rescue them all." (And that in the context of Buddhist "self-power," which holds that it is not possible for one person to save another.) We're not few, and we're not alone.

And we're not naive dreamers. At first look, a commitment to the impossible can be a discouraging thing to hold, and sometimes I do feel very discouraged. But when I look back over the history of that commitment's realization in the world, I see that many good things once thought to be impossible eventually came to pass because of it. Then I feel hope and courage return as I see the compass of "impossible" become increasingly thinner and smaller.

Lately, because I'm thinking of using ideas from it in an essay, I've been studying Love to the Lost, published in 1656 by my favorite early Quaker, James Nayler. A sentence that I read a couple of days ago struck me as capturing the essence of Quaker practice, and so it has stayed with me.

Nayler wrote that "...the way to be well-pleasing to the Father is to wait in the light till you see something of the Spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus moving in you, and then to that join...."

"The way to be well-pleasing to the Father..." puts us in mind of the story from the Bible: when Jesus was being baptized by John, a voice from heaven was heard, according to the story, which said, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." So Nayler is telling us that if we want to be the beloved son or daughter of God -- if we want to be the Christ, the human form of the God who is love -- this is what we should do: we should begin by waiting in the light. I think he assumes a prior commitment to love as our ultimate value, and he is telling us to find the light, even if it's only a faint glimmer, of that unselfish love in our hearts, to attend to that love until it shows us what it wants to do and who it wants us to be, and then, when we feel it moving us in that way, to join with it.

I think that remarkable little passage from Nayler encapsulates the Quaker experience: to become the human embodiment of love. It seems simple and yet immensely difficult, this beautiful process and goal of our spiritual lives.

I want to speak about the heart of Quakerism. In order to do that, I must speak about Jesus, Christ, God. I am not a theist. So when I speak in those terms, I'm not pushing a standard Christian, or even theistic, belief agenda; I'm using the religious metaphors of our tradition to point to the heart of our identity as Friends. That heart is an a very specific, ongoing experience that is, as Quakers have insisted from the very first, available to believers and nonbelievers alike, an experience that is, in fact, as our ancestors pointed out repeatedly, very often blocked by religious belief. So I’m not talking about belief at all, but about the experience of transformation, of having our fundamental ways of thinking and feeling be "turned around" -- converted -- from the normal, commonsense “wisdom of the world” to the foolish wisdom of the spirit of Christ.

If the question then is "how we know what we mean by the spirit of Christ?" then the otherwise meaningless slogan is correct: Jesus is the answer. The spirit of Christ is the spirit that animated Jesus, that is shown to us in his life and death and teachings.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus, "the visible form of the invisible God" who is love, announced the coming of the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of which is not of this world. What does that image, Kingdom of God, mean? The evangelist Luke has Jesus define the Kingdom clearly, at the very outset of his ministry, in words borrowed from Isaiah, a great prophet of social justice: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor...." He continues, but I think it’s highly significant that the very first phrase Jesus uses to describe the new order, the Kingdom of God, is “good news for the poor.” That’s the agenda of the spirit of Christ in nutshell: "good news for the poor."

And what would be good news for the poor, except that those of us who have more than enough would learn to share much more than we do now, so that justice would be realized? In another place, Jesus tells the story of two men. One, well off, relaxes comfortably in his spacious home every evening, enjoying his plentiful and delicious dinner, perhaps planning his postprandial pleasures while he eats; the other, the poor man Lazarus, lies just on the other side of the well-off man’s locked gate, bleeding and starving to death, hoping for crumbs from the other’s table -- as if human beings can survive on crumbs, as if we well-off should consider ourselves generous if we give our crumbs to the poor. If you don’t know the rest of the story, you can find it in the same Gospel of Luke: briefly, it graphically illustrates just what Jesus thought of that well-off man and those like him, who use the rationalizations of accepted worldly wisdom to justify their pleasures while the poor lie bleeding at their gates.

"[T]he Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor, healing for the broken-hearted, freedom for the imprisoned, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed: to preach the year of the Lord’s favor."

"The year of the Lord's favor" is the Jubilee year, the year in which the commonsense, private-property economic rules of society are laid down for the sake of justice, a year in which land is taken back from those who have hoarded it, slaves are freed, and debts are forgiven. In the Kingdom of God, the Jubilee year is now. Justice, healing, liberation, vision: the agenda of the spirit of Christ.

So we’re talking about a man who put the poor first, who fed the hungry when he could, healed the sick when he could, associated with sinners and outcasts, insisted that we care for the just and the unjust alike, openly challenged religious people whose religion is a mask for unacknowledged self-centeredness and aggression, turned on their heads the commonsense rules of conventional morality -- which always favor those who have and hoard wealth and power -- and was therefore tortured to death. But he passed on his vision of the Kingdom, and he passed on the Spirit of Christ, and he became the key to our realizing that Kingdom and Spirit in our lives.

Sixteen hundred years later, our ancestors, too, were tortured, sometimes to death, because they dared to assert their right and their obligation to be possessed of and by the Spirit that was in Jesus -- the spirit that gives and then gives more, that forgives and then forgives more; that willingly sacrifices for justice, for love of the other, and that calls on all of us to do the same, to open our hearts to the suffering of the world and to be moved to action.

They, in their turn, passed that Spirit on to us. They handed down to us this institution called Quakerism, all of the accomplishments of which come out of that transformation of individual hearts. They gave us our unique forms of meeting: for worship in silence, and for making decisions in the Spirit of Christ -- both part of the unique gift which Quakerism offers the world. And these forms of gathering together have deep and serious purpose and meaning: the crucifixion of the "natural" person, the raising of the spiritual Christ in our hearts, and the manifestation of that spirit in and among us and, through us, in the world.

I've been told that Quaker meeting is a place where all opinions are respected and can get a hearing, and that Quaker decision-making is a process of arriving at truth through attending to each person's expressed opinion. Our ancestors, however, tell us that the only place personal opinions have within the meetinghouse walls is on the cross, as we courageously crucify them so that the spirit of Christ, which they have been trampling and trying to destroy while telling us they're doing the opposite, can be raised in us. As the early Friends read Paul, "if Christ be not raised in us, then our faith is in vain." Our faith, our coming together, our going out into the world under the name of Quaker: all vanity unless we allow our worldly wisdom to die in silence so that the spirit of love can be raised in our hearts, can break open our hearts and make us new, -- unless we help each other set aside our cherished opinions and ways of seeing the world in order that we may, as Paul said, "have the mind of Christ," that we may be brought into one mind, one heart, one body.

That is not easy. The logic of the Kingdom of God is illogic to the natural mind; the agenda of God seems to be madness. But I ask myself which is more of madness: an open life of giving and forgiving, filled with the joy and pain of love, or a life centered on the smallness of self, a life that closes its heart to Lazarus at my gate. Certainly, the life of love is very difficult and costly. But I can only echo Paul, who said that “Our present sufferings I count as nothing compared to the glory that us now unfolding within us.” Our ancestors taught that each of us has a measure, more or less of the divine glory of love within us. May we be faithful to that measure, help it grow, and help each other in that process.

We recently received a mailing that pointed out, in very broad terms, the great disparity in resources between people like us, who live like royalty, and the hundreds of millions who suffer lack of resources such as food, water, shelter, fuel, safety and security, sanitation, health care, transportation -- not to mention comforts and pleasures. People dying of starvation and treatable diseases, people living in squalor and hopelessness. Doesn't it break your heart to think of that? Doesn't it lead you to ask, "What can we do?"

People asked John the Baptist the very same question: "What can we do?" He gave a brief answer that succinctly sums up what came to be the Christian ethic: "If you have two tunics, share with someone who has none. And if you have food, do likewise."

Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing if we actually did that? If we actually would "live simply so that others may simply live"? Wouldn't it be beautiful if, for example, instead of getting into a fuel-burning, pollution-creating conveyance and going off to buy myself more comforts and pleasures this summer, I took my delight in helping to rescue people from lives of deprivation and suffering? If that were how I re-created, if that were how I found joy? Wouldn't it be beautiful if we took Woolman's words to heart and put all that we possess into the service of universal love?

Every week, as I approach the driveway to the meetinghouse, I see our sign by the road: "Quakers Value Truth." Whenever I see it, I can't help but remember Pontius Pilate's quip: "What is truth?" He asked that after Jesus had said to him, "all who are of the truth hear my voice" [Jn 18:37-38].

Paul tells us that Jesus the Christ is the image of the invisible God [Col 1:15]. And John tells us that God is love [1Jn 4:8]. The voice of Jesus is, then, the "still, small voice" [1Kings 19:12] of God, the silent voice of love. But how do we hear a still, or silent, voice? Physical sound is movement of air, of matter; spiritual sound must be movement of Spirit. The first Friends taught that we must develop a "spiritual ear" if we are to hear the voice of the Spirit. We do that, they said, by becoming silent. In inner stillness, we feel the movement of the Spirit of love in our hearts. As we become increasingly better attuned, better able to discern that movement, we develop our "spiritual ear" and become increasingly open to being led by the "divine motions" [Wm. Penn, preface to Fox's Journal] of love in the heart.

As we drove in today, my friend commented on the sign out front, "Quakers Value Truth," and then of course at 11 I heard the church bells [from the Catholic church across the street], and so I continue my meditations on truth. I'm thinking of the countless preachers, people our ancestors would call "hireling ministers," who are doing today what they believe is the ministry of the New Testament: preaching from a book, and claiming that the book contains truth, that it is the "new testament" of God, and that it must be used as a rulebook for human life. And I recall a passage from one of the letters attributed to Paul, in which he says that we are insufficient as ministers, but God [who is love] is our sufficiency, making us "able ministers of the New Testament: not of the letter [that is, the written word] but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life" [2Cor 3:6].

The Greek phrase translated "new testament" -- and that's how it is translated in the King James Version in the passage I just quoted -- is also translated as "covenant," and in fact its primary meaning is "contract." The idea of the "new covenant" takes us back to one of the prophetic books, Jeremiah, in which Yahweh says something like this: "This is the covenant that I make ... after those days, ... I put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and I am their God, and they are my people. And no one need teach another about me anymore, saying, 'Know God,' for they all know me in their hearts."

So I'm struck by the irony, the absurdity even, of preachers claiming that a book -- a set of books, actually -- is the new testament of God, when that "book" itself pretty clearly says that the new testament is a covenant "written," not in spirit-killing words contained in books, but in the life-giving spirit of the God-who-is-love in the human heart.

I think it likely that Paul had that passage from Jeremiah in mind as he wrote about being ministers of the new testament. A few lines later in that section, Paul talks about Moses, who veiled his face when he delivered the written covenant. And he says that people continued to veil their hearts when they read the "old covenant," but that we, turning to the Lord who is spirit, find the veils [of words] removed. "But we, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory ...." In the new covenant, we not only gaze upon God; we are transformed and made one with God through openness to the living "law" of love in our hearts.

So this is our Quaker ministry of truth, the ministry of the new testament or covenant: to help each other unveil our hearts to the Spirit of love, and thereby unveil our true face, the human image of the God who is love.