Speak Truth to Power – The Legacy of Quakers
\Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
September 8, 2024
Good morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. At the meetinghouse today we are celebrating Kick-Off Sunday. The scripture I chose for this morning is from John 17:13-19 from the Voice version.
Now I am returning to You. I am speaking this prayer here in the created cosmos alongside friends and foes so that in hearing it they might be consumed with joy. I have given them Your word; and the world has despised them because they are not products of the world, in the same way that I am not a product of the corrupt world order. Do not take them out of this world; protect them from the evil one. Like Me, they are not products of the corrupt world order. Immerse them in the truth, the truth Your voice speaks. In the same way You sent Me into this world, I am sending them. It is entirely for their benefit that I have set Myself apart so that they may be set apart by truth.
Since it is Kick-Off Sunday, as usual, I am kicking off a new sermon series that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. I do hope the previous weeks since I returned from my Sabbatical, where we focused on joy, were beneficial and spoke to your condition.
For the next couple of months, we will be looking at some famous Quakers and some you may have never heard of. Each sermon will begin with me telling a bit of their story and then spending the rest of the time talking about how their story is still applicable today or how we may be called to continue their legacy.
Often, I hear Friends talk about how earlier Quakers laid a foundation of activism, social justice, and seeking Truth. Yet, many outside Quakerism then ask, “What happened? Where is that action today? Have Quakers simply become complacent, comfortable, even lazy? Or are Quakers still relevant and empowered today to Speak Truth to Power?
As I hope to show you over the next couple of months, Friends are still being called to Speak Truth to Power. This may come in the ordinary aspects of our daily lives, or it may be much bolder and lived out in a much more public manner. I hope in this series, you will see yourselves in these ordinary people who aren’t that much different than you and me. They heard the call, spoke up for truth, and changed the world! And you and I have this potential as well.
To begin this morning, I want to talk about that phrase I have used a couple of times already – Speak Truth to Power – actually, the title of this sermon series.
I first came across it when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation. At the conclusion of my first class, I had been encouraged by my professor to study how one prepares for conflict in their life, a subject that I sensed the church universal, and ordinary Christians struggled with on a regular basis. What I had observed is that most of the time, instead of preparing for conflict that may arise or how to transform it into positive experiences, most of us are simply reactive or get consumed by the conflict and then (after the fact) look for ways to relieve the tensions.
I had written an extensive paper on Gandhi’s influence on Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, which was the impetus for this study on preparing for conflict since Gandhi posed a plan that King had begun to utilize. Unbeknownst to me, I discovered in my study that it was a Quaker who introduced King to Gandhi’s work. Since my dissertation supervisor was a Quaker and I was personally beginning to find my home among Friends, I decided to ask him what he knew of this connection. Instead of just giving me the answer, he encouraged me to read further and make some more associations.
The most important reading he suggested was one titled, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, which did not have a single author, but rather was published by the American Friends Service Committee in 1955.
I quickly immersed myself in this document. What I found was what is considered the most lucid pacifist tract ever penned in the United States (even still today). It raised the basic questions about what people should be, and do, to end war and establish peace – whose principles I quickly realized could be adapted down to our daily conflicts in ordinary life.
H. Larry Engle gives a historical context in his retrospective on the “Speak Truth to Power” pamphlet saying,
Unfortunately for the pamphlet’s immediacy, the Montgomery bus boycott, which gave Martin Luther King. Jr., an opportunity to charge words like love and truth with a new and electric political meaning, was still more than six months in the future. To demonstrate the practicality of nonviolence, “Speak Truth to Power” drew instead on the example of Gandhi’s Indian independence campaign. Emphasizing that each individual had to renounce violence (“for war grows directly from the accumulated prejudices. selfishness, greed and arrogance of individual men”), the authors called on each person to take a committed stand so that “the impossible moves nearer to the possible.”
Not only was this document pivotal for my dissertation it was stirring in me a desire to know who was really behind this work. I had started to put some pieces together, because I had been introduced to a Quaker who was teaching the principles of Gandhi, and he was alive and at his peak of influence when this document was drafted. But strangely his name was nowhere to be found on the document.
If one simply did a search on the phrase and title, Speak Truth to Power, one would quickly find out that something was up. I assumed as many have in history that I would find this going back to early Quakerism or even earlier, but the phrase, Speak Truth to Power has been attributed to Quaker civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (the Quaker who influenced Dr. King), who wrote in 1942 that the role of a religious group was to “speak truth to power.” Rustin himself attributed the phrase to a speech he had hear by Patrick Malin, a professor of economics at the Quaker Swarthmore College and head of the ACLU from 1950-1962. But in that talk, he never used that phrase.
Several decades after the Speak Truth to Power document was written, it was made known that Bayard Rustin was one of the authors, if not the principle author of the document. Rustin and his co-authors had agreed to expunge Rustin’s name from the document because of his arrest on charges of committing a homosexual act in 1953 (because back then homosexuality was literally a crime). He served 50 days in jail and was registered as a sex offender. (and sadly, this is what some people in our country want us to go back to.) While his sexual orientation resulted in him taking a less public role, it did not stop his groundbreaking work of organizing the March on Washington where Dr. King shared his dream. (If you have not seen the movie Rustin, which we watched at our first Film Night here at First Friends several months ago, go watch it on Netflix).
Finally in September of 2010, a historical note was added by American Friends Service Committee to the Speak Truth to Power document that restored Rustin’s name as the primary author. It took 55 years for this to fully be recognized and made know.
It seems almost ironic, that a black, gay man during some of the most difficult times in our country for all that he was, not only coined the phrase but also lived the idea of Speaking Truth to Power daily from the shadows, and all amid his life being threatened, constantly.
Yet for Rustin speaking his truth to power was, as he said on numerous occasions, because he was a Quaker. Rustin had been taught to respond in this Quaker manner by his dear Quaker grandmother, Julia David Rustin who raised him.
Julia would have taught Bayard that Quakers have always known that the quest for truth has an important role to play in wider society and political life. When a Quaker speaks truth to power, it means we feel that something important needs to be said, and we must make the effort to say it to the people who need to hear it and have the power to effect change. That is exactly what Rustin did (and you will find this common among ever Quaker we talk about in this series).
I love the way Quakers in Britian describe this,
“Speaking truth” suggests an external expression of an internally received insight, an outward faithfulness to a spiritually experienced truth. It comes from the heart, from a place of love. Saying it “to power” implies courage to speak that truth to those who may not want to hear it and are in a position to punish you. Faithfulness and courage: speaking truth to power describes an intention of moving the world towards the Realm of God.
That is what Bayard Rustin lived, shared with Dr. King to shape his dream, inspired generations to speak, and calls us as Quakers to recognize as foundational to our faith.
And as always, I find it essential that we do not miss that Jesus in his prayer for each of us (which you heard as part of our scripture for today) said, “Immerse them in the truth, the truth Your voice speaks.”
Folks, when we speak truth to power both individually or as a Meeting – we are tapping into the voice of the Divine within us and making it known where otherwise it may not be heard. I wonder what Truth the Spirit is nudging us to immerse ourselves in and make our voices heard?
As you begin to reflect on that, let me leave you with some inspiring words of Bayard Rustin from the conclusion of the “Speak Truth to Power” pamphlet (you can read the entire document on the American Friends Service Committee website (sadly, you may find much of it as relevant today as it was in 1955) – I will post the link on Facebook later today). Listen to what Rustin says for us, this morning (please note, I have changed the word men/man to people to include all),
The politics of eternity works not by might but by spirit; a Spirit whose redemptive power is released among [people] through suffering endured on behalf of the evildoer, and in obedience to the divine command to love all [people]. Such love is worlds apart from the expedient of loving those who love us, of doing good to those who
have done good to us. It is the essence of such love that it does not require an advance guarantee that it will succeed, will prove easy or cheap, or that it will be met with swift answering love. Whether practiced by [people] or nations, it well may encounter opposition, hate, humiliation, utter defeat. In the familiar words of the epistle, such love suffers long, is always kind, never fails. It is a principle deeply grounded in the years of Quaker sufferings, imprisonments and death. From the dungeons of Lancaster Castle Friends spoke this Truth to Power: "But if ... not ... then shall wee lye downe in the peace of our God and patiently Suffer under you." that overcomes the world.
To act on such a faith, the politics of eternity demand of us, first, repentance. As individuals and as a nation we must literally turn about. We must turn from our self-righteousness and arrogance and confess that we do that which is evil in the sight of the Lord. We must turn from the substitution of material for spiritual values; we must turn not only from our use of mass violence but from what is worse, our readiness to use this violence whenever it suits our purpose, regardless of the pain it inflicts on others. We must turn about.
That does not only speak to our condition still today, it is the call to raise our voices and lives and join Rustin in the legacy of Speaking Truth to Power for the betterment of all.
Later in this series, we will return to Bayard Rustin again and look at what he meant for us to be Angelic Troublemakers. Until then, I hope you will take a moment to center down and consider how you Speak Truth to Power. To help you with considering this, here are some queries to ponder.
1. What can I do this week to “immerse myself in Truth”?
2. What Truth am I neglecting to speak to power because of fear of push-back or punishment?
3. Who am I being called to speak up for, today?