Love Thy Neighbor

by Ann Kjellberg
15th Street Meeting

It has long puzzled me that Jesus was very direct with us about his priorities. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he said. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He underlined an important aspect of this teaching — that it extends even, indeed especially, to people who are outcast or oppressed or suffering — by coming to us in the form of an outcast, oppressed, suffering person. “What you do for the least of these, my brothers and sisters,” he said, “you do for me.” 

Friends took from this teaching that there is that of God in every person, that this consciousness is at the heart of moral action. This is the fundament of most of our testimonies: of equality, of peace; I would say also of simplicity, because what you consume is drawn from the resources available to others and distracts from your attention to the exercise of love — as Jesus, and our Friend John Woolman, demonstrated with their own simplicity. To live simply is to liberate oneself from structures that harm others, the structures that arise from greed.

Jesus was also clear that living by this obligation is strenuous, and requires unwavering moral attention. So I’ve always found it puzzling and revealing that so much of the energy of Christian doctrine became distracted from this call to love by a punitive preoccupation with sins of the senses, sins of temptation. Of the “seven deadly” ones, first enumerated as far back as the third century, nearly half — lust, gluttony, and sloth — are sins of the flesh. Sex has always risen up as the most powerful and potentially dangerous of these, felling otherwise virtuous Christian heroes throughout literature. Of course there’s plenty of study of this impulse, tracing it to Paul and early church fathers and other things, some having to do with patriarchy and who controlled religious institutions. I’ll leave that for another day, except to note that, unlike the Hebrew Scriptures, where, as in much of life, connubial love and longing and jealousy play a large role, Jesus did not take much apparent interest in sex, except in one instance — in order to accept and embrace a person who lived outside sexual norms. How did Christianity become so preoccupied with sex, down to, for centuries, threatening eternal damnation for even thinking about it? How did so much Christian doctrine fold into this sexual taboo so many proscriptions against people simply living honestly and humanly as themselves, or making responsible life decisions? How did so many people become convinced that all these proscriptions were matters of importance for Jesus, when he was so explicit about other big priorities, pretty demanding ones, to which many followers of Christianity have seemed to devote not-that-much attention?

Friends have been blessed that the clarity of our recognition of that of God in every person, born of Jesus’s injunction that we love one another, has helped to lead us out of many historic wrongs, or at least guided us toward beginning to escape them, and prompted us lovingly to help others to liberate themselves too. It is time for us to extend this legacy to challenging Christians’ historic subjections on the basis of sexual expression. Like slavery, the oppression of women, and the conquest of native peoples, the oppression of those with non-normative sexual expression has long grounded itself in bogus appeals to Biblical authority. Friends know, from the voice that speaks within us, to see past such misappropriations of Jesus’s message. We are called by the Light within to stand with those who are persecuted and to renounce, in the name of another of our testimonies, integrity, the arrogation of Christ’s teachings to serve oppression and persecution.

Friends of the New York Quarter have been blessed to have among us trans and non-binary fellow seekers who, by the courage of their living in integrity as their full selves, have witnessed to the gathered body the justice and urgency of their cause. We celebrate their bravery and the revealed Truth of their godliness. It is by dwelling with open hearts in inclusive community that our Society has been opened, again and again, to the divine in all, been continually renewed and reawakened, and prompted, again and again, to cast off oppressive dogma. The wider we are, the more various we are, the deeper — and more transformative — is our listening. It was with solidarity and gratitude for this opening that we adopted our minute “Love Thy Neighbor,” embraced our trans and non-binary Friends’ cause, and brought it to our yearly meeting, which joined us in the Spirit. We call on all Friends to extend the sacred principle of love of neighbor toward people of all gender expression, and take as a mission of our body the effort to secure for them full human rights and civil protections. The Light has led us through the centuries to stand as one with the oppressed and build the beloved community that Jesus enjoined us to commit ourselves to with full hearts.