The Power of Compassion — Shelly Pruitt Johnson
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
November 24, 2024
Good morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. The scripture I have chosen to support my message today is from Colossians 3:12-17 from The Message version.
So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.
Today, we come to the end of this series, “Speak Truth to Power: The Legacy of the Quakers.” I want to express that I have thoroughly enjoyed taking this great adventure since Kick-Off Sunday back on September 8th. Since then, we have looked at a variety of Quakers: Lucretia Mott, Paul Cuffe, Rachel Robinson Elmer, George Fox, The Grimke Sisters, Cyrus Bustill, Alice Paul, Benjamin Lay, Bayard Rustin, and last week, Jim Corbett. As well, we have highlighted some of you – but the reality is that each Friend in this room brings something very special to the table and is crucial for this community to thrive. I am inspired by you and realize each day the gifts you each bring, especially in these challenging times.
This week, after being asked to Speak Truth To Power against the death penalty in Indiana on our Capital steps, I was thinking I would end with Elizabeth Fry and her great work on prison reform, yet the Spirit nudged me in a differ direction.
Over the last several months, I have had numerous people ask me, “What is the Quaker’s response to Christian Nationalism?” People from outside of Indiana (Quakers and others), and several of you, have been contacting me and referencing that I and our meeting are on the front lines, so what am I saying to our Meeting? How am I addressing this growing concern in our state and country?
Now, I am going to be honest; I have often kept the conversation behind closed doors and in one-on-one conversations. Anything that is said could have people offended, people angry, people asking for my job. Yet, in the tradition of that great list of Quakers we have already heard from, this is a subject that needs our attention, some education, and ultimately a lot of open dialogue together. As I said a couple weeks ago, First Friends needs to be a safe place for everyone and a place for us to have these important conversations.
I sensed this final message should address this subject, as we soon will turn our attention to the coming hope, peace, love, and joy of Christmas, which may afford us an opportunity during this season to ask ourselves some difficult queries, do some soul searching, come together, and open our ears to listen to what the Divine may be saying to us – as Friends and citizens of this country.
As I heard the Spirit’s nudging, I was led to the writing of Shelly Pruitt Johnson. Shelly has a beautiful website called, “Love is Stronger” with a subtitle that reads, “Understanding we are Worthy, Capable, Connected, and Called to Adventure for a more Joyful and Resilient Life.” Sounds pretty inviting, doesn’t it? Well, it has been just what I needed in the last couple of weeks.
As she describes on her site, Shelly is a philosopher, an educator, an author, an artist – and as you will soon hear, she is also a Quaker.
What I found surprising when returning to her site while researching this message was an article she wrote titled, “Why I am a Christian but Not A Christian Nationalist.” I was a bit surprised that she was addressing this subject and read it through several times. Her words were not what I expected to read, rather it was very personal and relatable. I realized rather quickly it was how I wanted to broach this difficult subject with you, my Friends. I know some of you are probably already concerned and maybe wanting to walk out – but I encourage you to stay and listen.
Early in the week I reached out to Shelly on a whim that she might give me permission to read her story, and graciously she responded and granted me permission. In our correspondence, Shelly said, “I really did try to express the personal side of it (the struggle with Christian Nationalism that is) with my own story, so I am glad that came out.”
Now, just as I have done throughout this series, I want to share with you, Friend Shelley Pruitt Johnson’s story. Please remember these are her words:
So, let me tell you first why I am a Christian.
I am a Christian because when I was about eight, I realized that I was fighting with my brother all the time. Weirdly enough, I didn’t want to fight with him anymore. But I felt like I couldn’t stop.
In fact, I felt full of anger at my brother for the silliest of reasons. Namely, I was older than him. And I thought I knew a lot more. But he wouldn’t admit I was right most of the time. And that made me mad. So, I was mean to him. A lot.
This was typical sibling rivalry. But I didn’t like my anger. I wanted to be a kinder, more loving person. My family attended church regularly, and my Grandpa Clark was a pastor. Both my church teachers and Grandpa said that if you gave your life to Jesus, He would change your heart.
So, I dedicated my life to Jesus. And I can’t say the change was immediate, but I did change. I started praying a lot and asking God for help. And slowly but surely over the years, I became a kinder, more loving person.
(Update: By the way, my brother and I get along great and have for decades.)
My faith in God became a steady anchor for me. It still is. I am a person who regularly has what some folks call peak religious experiences. By this, I mean that I regularly have vivid encounters with God’s love.
I don’t ever hear voices or see visions in these experiences. Rather, I feel a strong sense of goodness, peace, and love that feels as deep and wide as the Universe. And it always helps me be kinder, compassionate, and more respectful of myself and others. It helps me live a good and joyful life.
So, if I had to say in a nutshell why I am a Christian, it is because becoming a Christian helped me connect to the love in the Universe. This love is the light of God.
And that light is also inside of me and you, which I will explain shortly.
Now, you might think that because I am a Christian that I support Christian nationalism. That is, you might think that I believe we should try to rule the United States (where I live) according to Christian laws or rules.
But that is not the case.
So, now let me tell you why I am NOT a Christian nationalist, even though I am a Christian. I first remember learning about ideas associated with Christian nationalism when I was a teenager in the 80s.
My history teacher at the Christian school I attended assigned us to read a book called The Light and the Glory: Did God have a plan for America? (by Peter Marshall and David Manuel)
The basic gist of this book is that God led Columbus, as well as the early Puritans and pilgrims, to sail to North America and create a city on a hill. It would, in essence, be a Christian nation.
I vividly remember reading this book and thinking that the stories in it were interesting. But I also remember feeling concerned about some of its content. My concerns might make more sense if I tell you a little bit about my family heritage.
I was raised in the Quaker Christian tradition. And I learned when I was little that both sides of my family are Quaker going back many generations. In fact, my great grandmas were recorded Quaker pastors.
If you know me personally, you probably already know I am Quaker because I TELL EVERYONE I AM QUAKER, usually within the first couple of months I know someone.
Let me tell you a brief Quaker history that is important for this post. [Please note this may be review for some of us, but I want to leave it in here to help shape her story.]
The Quaker faith developed in England in the 1500s and 1600s. At this time, the Anglican Church taught that only priests and clerics had direct contact with God. And only men could be priests and clerics. Everyone else had to go through them to gain God’s forgiveness and blessings.
England at this time was also hierarchical, and the aristocracy did all they could to maintain their power and status. For instance, the aristocracy expected that people from lower classes would bow to their betters in the streets.
However, Quakers rebelled against all this. For example, Quakers insisted that every human being equally shared the light of God—they called it the inner light.
And they also believed that everyone could communicate with God directly. As such, Quakers promoted equality between sexes, races, and people of every class. This is why they recorded female Quaker ministers and protected freedom of speech and religion.
And it is also why they became some of the biggest champions of what some folks today might call social justice initiatives. For example, one famous Quaker in England, William Penn, was a friend of the king of England.
Being Quaker, he refused to bow to the king, a rebellious act which could have spelled his doom. Luckily for Penn, the king found Penn charming. And, recognizing that Penn would not last long in the England of his day, the king granted him a tract of land in North America.
Penn gladly traveled to the New World and established Pennsylvania. It became a haven for people persecuted for their religious and political beliefs. Penn was also well-known for establishing peaceful relationships with the native-American tribes around him. He did this while many of his other fellow colonists considered indigenous natives their enemies and routinely battled with them.
Quakers in both the United States and England took this notion of the light of God in everyone seriously. Therefore, they were some of the strongest advocates for Native-American rights, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, prison reform, and the Civil Rights movement.
Hannah Whithall Smith was a Quaker speaker and writer in the 1800s. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement and wrote a book called The Christian’s Secret to a Good and Happy Life. I read it in high school around the same time I read The Light and the Glory.
I tell you all this because it is my Quaker heritage that made me concerned about what I read in the Light and the Glory.
For instance, the book portrayed Columbus as coming to the Americas to spread God’s word especially to native-Americans. And I am sure Columbus did have these intentions, at least sometimes. But growing up, I also knew that Columbus and his men enslaved many indigenous Americans and treated them cruelly.
So, as I read the book, I thought, “Why didn’t Columbus treat native-Americans respectfully like Penn and protect their rights?”
The book also had a lurid chapter on Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson was a Puritan woman who held somewhat unorthodox views according to the Puritan leaders of her day.
Her beliefs sounded awfully Quaker to me. For instance, she believed that anyone could connect with God through personal experience. She offended many Puritan leaders of her day for preaching and teaching her theology in her community.
That also sounded very Quaker to me.
But the authors of the Light and the Glory portrayed Anne Hutchinson as an evil and rebellious woman. In some passages, that I remember sounding a lot like something out of Rosemary’s Baby, they suggested (and I am not making this up) that Anne Hutchinson eventually gave birth to demon spawn.
(You can read this account in the chapter titled “The Pruning of the Lord’s Vineyard.” I double checked to make sure I was remembering this correctly.)
To be fair, the demon-spawn rumor was going around a lot in Anne Hutchinson’s day. But as I read the Light and the Glory, the authors reported these rumors as though they were probably true. And further (as I read it) the authors suggested that such demonic goings-on were likely the natural consequence of this terrible woman disagreeing with the God-ordained leaders of the day.
And this is when I first realized vividly that there were Christians in the world who interpreted Christianity very differently from me.
I also realized that they had a very different view of what creating a Christian nation meant. For me, creating a Christian nation meant that we love people, respect their conscience, treat them equally, and help folks in need.
For instance, this was in the 80s, and the AIDS crisis was a major cultural concern. I remember wanting to go and visit AIDS patients at the hospital. That felt to me like the very thing a Christian, especially a Quaker Christian, would and should do.
At this time, I was also especially concerned about poverty and homelessness. I thought, “Okay, look. Solving this problem is easy. There is a lot of food and money around. You just make sure everyone has enough food and a home to live in.”
There were also a lot of Mexican immigrants living in a nearby city. And I often heard people speak derogatorily of them.
This greatly troubled me because growing up, one of my neighbors and my best friends was a boy from Mexico. My friendship with him made me especially concerned about these prejudiced remarks. Such experiences made me feel like white Christians had to learn to reach out to the Mexican community and work to decrease their own prejudice.
All these concerns seemed, in my thinking, to flow logically from what it meant to be a Christian. But these weren’t the ideas I read in books like The Light and the Glory. And as I got older and read more about Christian nationalism, I was often perplexed.
It seemed to me that folks in the Christian Nationalist movement promoted beliefs and practices that were the opposite of those Christ exemplified.
For instance, people in the Christian nationalist movement tend to focus on things like forcing people to pray in public schools and putting up Christian monuments in public spaces. In addition, they advocate laws that punish people for violating certain scriptural commands the way they interpret these commands.
Such goals struck me as odd because they seem to focus on forcing people to do or say things, rather than loving them. But it always seemed to me that the heart of Christianity is love, not force.
There is another history lesson from my teens that helps to explain this discrepancy between different Christian religious beliefs. I loved studying history in high school.
One of the most interesting periods of history we studied was the Protestant Reformation. I loved learning about how Martin Luther got fed up with the abuses and greed of the Catholic Church of his day (like selling indulgences).
So, he decided to call them on it. As a result, he wrote 95 points of disagreement with the church (The 95 Theses), and he nailed the theses to the cathedral door of his hometown. And this sparked a massive reformation in which people argued that everyone had direct access to God.
As such, reformers argued that people didn’t need priests to talk to God for them. Furthermore, reformers believed that everyone could read the Bible and interpret it for themselves.
The Quaker in me loved this story.
But sadly, I also learned that the Protestant Reformation descended into years of religious wars. During these wars, people fought bloody battles over doctrine and theology. Ironically, many champions of the Protestant Reformation often became intolerant of religious dissent themselves.
For example, many Christians including Puritans in the early American colonies labeled Quakers religious heretics. Some Quaker women were even accused of being witches and were executed. And this illustrates one of the primary reasons I am concerned about Christian nationalism.
If we were to make the United States a Christian nation, what kind of Christian beliefs would we try to establish?
After all, Christian nationalists don’t appear to promote historical Quaker Christian beliefs. Nor do they promote the beliefs of the Quaker churches and colleges of my youth. In addition, they don’t appear to promote the beliefs of the Baptist church I attend on Sunday. Nor do they reflect the beliefs of the Baptist college at which I teach.
And they don’t reflect the spiritual community I attend during the week, among whose members are Catholics and Christians from several other denominations. And Christian nationalists don’t reflect the beliefs of the Methodist churches or the New Monastic community I have attended in the past. Nor do they reflect the Presbyterian graduate education program I attended.
This list represents a wide variety of Christian people that Christian nationalists do not represent. As best as I understand it, Christian nationalists are a small group of Christians in the U.S. And they want to shape the country according to a narrow theology that a small group of Christians hold.
As such, it seems like they want to set up a kind of priesthood of Christian leaders. And they want these leaders to interpret the Bible the way they see fit. Then they want to force other people to follow such interpretations and judge them accordingly.
That doesn’t sound very Christian to me. It sounds much more like the pharisees that Jesus often criticized in the Bible. Or it sounds like the way Jesus’ disciples sometimes behaved when they got too big for their britches. That was just before Jesus rebuked them.
I understand why Christians would want the United States to be a Christian nation.
However, the power of Christianity lies not in forcing people to behave or believe a certain way. It lies in the compassion of Christ who fed the poor and healed the sick. And it lies in the radical creativity of Christ who loved the world so much that He laid down his life that the world might be saved.
When I think of First Friends, I think of the power of compassion in this room. The poor and sick are both outside our walls, and sitting right next to us. We are first feeding one another and healing each other in this place, so that the message we share with the world can both be heard and felt.
I probably don’t say it enough, but each week I see us calling one another to not only Speak Truth to Power but to also reach out with a hand, a hug, or even our entire selves – whatever we can muster in this moment.
Together, we ARE the radical creativity of Christ with flesh on to our world.
Let me repeat that: First Friends is the radical creativity of Christ with flesh on to our world. Just let that sink into your hearts.
I know many of you in this room are ready to love the world, some may be ready to lay down your lives for this world, and even in the most profound way some of you are already being called to step up and “save” those around you. And I know you will answer that call – because you are good people.
And I am thankful that I am surrounded by each of you in this moment in history, and that you are in this world, right now. Because we need people like you around when things get difficult. We need people like you who will reach out, check in, and really care when life hits hard. The world needs you and me ready, willing, and able to truly love a world who may not remember how. That may be the most important way we can Speak Truth to Power – to simply love one another.
And whether salvation comes in a simple cup of water for a thirsty friend, financial help for someone struggling, or literally picking someone up from the bottom of the pit and walking with them into safety, that is who we are called to be – and I believe many of us are ready for that.
I know this was a lot to process this morning, but I believe in you. I believe you can make a difference. That awareness, dialogue, listening, and action, but most of all compassion and love will win the day.
Since we all have a lot running through our minds right now, I want to simply offer us a time to enter waiting worship and give ourselves some space for the Spirit to speak to us and maybe more importantly comfort us. I ask that in the silence of waiting worship you consider Shelly’s words deeply. If you need some queries to help you process, consider these:
1. Where am I sharing the compassion of Christ with my world this week?
2. How am I connecting to the Love in the Universe – the Light of Christ?
3. Is my embracing the Quaker Way helping me to positively change my world? How about for us at First Friends?
