It doesn’t really matter if Quakerism disappears tomorrow. If Christianity vanishes from the face of the Earth, it’s no great loss. And we are abandoning institutional religion in great numbers. According to a 2020 Gallup Poll, only 47% of Americans are members of a church or synagogue. Among unprogrammed Quakers, the inevitable passing of the “baby boomer” generation means that many meetings will go extinct. And yet, this is no great tragedy.
         
Why? Well, religion and spirituality are not the same. In fact, an unhealthy focus on religious rites and dogmas leads to spiritual atrophy. Take the Catholic requirement that the faithful attend Sunday Mass. If someone drags themselves out of bed in order to listlessly and perfunctorily go through the motions of worship, a religious obligation has been satisfied, but nothing spiritual has been gained.
         
Or suppose our Catholic friend is a police officer who has spent Saturday night and early Sunday morning patrolling the city. He or she is just too tired to go to Mass. According to Church law, missing Mass is a mortal sin. If the officer happens to die before confessing that sin, they’ll go to Hell for all eternity (according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church). This mistaken idea is religious, but it has nothing to do with love or spirituality. As Jesus remarked, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” And there is also Jesus’ phrase in which he describes the Scribes and Pharisees—the religious authorities of their day—as “straining out gnats while swallowing camels.”
         
A deadening religious legalism also happens among unprogrammed Friends. Traditional silent worship is pointless if it’s nothing more than silence. If God’s Presence is not sought or felt during silent worship, the silence is an outward religious observance with no interior spirituality. And the opposite travesty occurs in so-called “popcorn meetings,” where several people offer superficial vocal ministry that is not guided by Spirit.   
         
Curiously, the most spiritual people are often the most religious. Yes, religion may be an empty form, but spirituality seems to need religious rites and traditions in order to express itself. It’s just that religion, in and of itself, has no ultimate value. Rather, religion is a vehicle for a spirituality that has ultimate value. We may be very attached to our Quakerism, but we must always remember that God is not Quaker, Catholic, or a member of any other religious group. God stands above religion and frequently—like Jesus versus the Scribes and Pharisees—judges particular religious manifestations.
         
Perhaps it’s not inappropriate to finish this essay with the words put in God’s mouth by the prophet Amos (5:21-24):

           I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a
          stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain
          offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellow-
          ship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise
          of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let
          justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.
 
~ Richard Russell

It seems that I’ve got a very un-Quakerly dark side as many of my favorite films contain significant sex and/or violence. The 2008 Austrian film Revanche is a good example, and Revanche is the number one film on my list of favorites in spite of a lot of nudity, sex, and some rough language.  So, what’s the plot of Revanche?
         
Well, it’s a tragic love story between Alex, a former convict who works as a bouncer in a brothel, and Tamara, a Ukrainian prostitute. They plan to escape their joyless existence by robbing a bank and starting a new life, but policeman Robert stumbles upon them during the robbery and accidentally kills Tamara. Grief-stricken, Alex hides out at his grandfather’s farm, where he coincidentally meets Robert’s wife Susanne. Susanne, unaware of her connection to Alex and unhappy in her marriage, propositions him. And Alex methodically plots his revenge against Robert.   
         
Suspense is one reason this film’s so good. Another is the symbolic use of nature: a forest full of bird song and a pond, rippling when something’s thrown into it, ripples erased when the wind blows. And there are the winter apples, opposite in symbolic effect to Garden of Eden apples. But above all, there is a deep exploration of character in the film. As Roger Ebert notes, “How often, after seeing a thriller, do you continue to think about the lives of its characters? If you open up most of them, it’s like looking inside a wristwatch. Opening this one is like heart surgery.”
         
At its heart, Revanche is about forgiveness and redemption. It is an extraordinary movie. If you don’t see it, you’ll have missed a profound experience of cinematic art.
 
~ Richard Russell

When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.  He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that,

    “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,
     and ever hearing but never understanding…” (Mark 4, NIV)
   
Jesus has just told the Parable of the Sower. He explains to his disciples that the farmer in the story is sowing the word of God. At this point in the Gospel of Mark, he doesn’t explain to the crowds following him that he, Jesus, is the sower spreading the seed. Jesus, however, does begin to let the disciples in on “the secret of the kingdom.”

When he casts out demons, Jesus forbids the demons from revealing his messianic identity. When he cures a man with leprosy, Jesus commands him, “See that you don’t tell this to anyone.” After he restores a blind man’s sight, Jesus tells the man, “Don’t even go into the village.”
         
Later, on the road to Caesarea Philippi, he asks the disciples, “Who do you say I am?” Peter, in a flash of insight, answers, “You are the Messiah.” And Jesus immediately warns Peter not to tell anyone. In fact, all through the Gospel of Mark, Jesus keeps his messiahship a secret.
         
Why? According to William Wrede, who published The Messianic Secret in 1901, Jesus did not teach that he was the messiah. Later Christians, who did come to believe in Jesus’ messiahship, were confronted with the problem of why Jesus never proclaimed himself as such. To solve that problem, Wrede argues, Mark re-writes history so that—yes—Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah but kept it a secret from everyone except the disciples, who nevertheless had a hard time accepting Jesus’ teaching.   
         
However, there are problems for Wrede’s theory of the messianic secret. For example, parables are not meant to hide meanings. Parables are meant to be understood by everyone. Wrede misses this point. Moreover, it’s a contradiction for Jesus to want his public acts to be kept secret when those same acts—many miraculous—were bound to be talked about and publicized.
         
However, the contradiction is understandable. Jesus had good reason to keep his messianic mission a secret. Messiahs cropped up in Judaea rather frequently, and the Romans—just as frequently—killed them. King Herod executed John the Baptist, ostensibly at his step-daughter’s request, actually because he challenged the authority and power of King Herod. Jesus knew that proclaiming the Kingdom of God could get him in trouble with both Jewish and Roman authorities. Even though his ministry brought him fame, most scholars argue that Jesus tried to keep its implications a secret or at least ambiguous.
         
Not until his arrival in Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, greeted by the Hosannas and palm leaves of his followers, did Jesus—by this act—proclaim himself to be the successor of King David, the Messiah and the leader of a revolution against Rome, albeit a non-violent revolution. The Romans got the message. When they crucified Jesus, they posted a titulus on his cross, Rex Iudaeorum, King of the Jews.  
         
All this is relevant to modern day Christians, among whom I number myself. We are asked to decide who this Jesus was. Was he a charlatan, a prophet, or God’s Messiah? In his Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer ends the book by asking the same question:

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.
 
~ Richard Russell            

This film is based on real events. In 1968, Chuck Smith, a Southern California pastor, finds that his Calvary Chapel church is slowly dying and that he is unable to connect with a younger generation. Then, his daughter, Janelle, gives a colorful hippie hitchhiker named Lonnie Frisbee a ride. Frisbee is travelling the country, telling people about Jesus; and Janelle offers Frisbee a place to stay temporarily.  
         
Chuck Smith, at first suspicious of Frisbee, eventually warms up to him. Soon Smith is welcoming bona fide hippies both to his house and church. Frisbee even takes on the majority of the preaching duties in Smith’s church, and his charismatic preaching style attracts crowds of disaffected, hippie youth.   
         
Meanwhile, high-school student Greg Laurie runs away from his Junior ROTC class and joins a girl named Cathe, who “turns him on” to a Janis Joplin concert. However, Cathe is not exactly a hippie true believer. After her sister almost dies from a drug overdose, Cathe begins attending Calvary Chapel. Greg, however, is ambivalent about drugs, the Chapel, and even Cathe. Nevertheless, with time, Greg’s doubts are resolved. He accepts Jesus as his personal savior, and he and Cathe begin their own ministry in an abandoned church near Calvary Chapel. That ministry explodes in popularity, sparking a “Jesus Revolution” that becomes a Time cover story in 1971.
         
So, what did I think about Jesus Revolution? Well, the film certainly isn’t as relentless as most Christian faith films. Nevertheless, I cringed when Lonnie Frisbee was baptizing people in the Pacific Ocean and asked them beforehand things like, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins on the cross and rose again from the dead?” If I were to watch Jesus Revolution again and take notes, I could come up with most of the Fundamentalist Christian tropes that I suffered through in the Baptist Church of my youth. Words like “sin,” “Devil,” “Hell,” and phrases like “born again” fall heavily on my ears.
         
Moreover, Jesus Revolution is saccharine sweet and mostly predictable. There’s a conflict between Greg and Cathe, but we know that they will reconcile and that true love will win out. Nor are we surprised when Chuck and Lonnie have a falling out over Lonnie’s Pentecostal ministry of healing. And we suspect that Greg, in spite of his faith struggles, will launch a movement—a movement which morphs into a “Jesus Revolution.”  
         
Do I recommend Jesus Revolution to Old Chatham Friends? Well, it depends. If you’re curious about the Jesus Freaks of the 60’s and 70’s, the film might well serve as an interesting introduction to the phenomenon. However, those who are not so curious could well pass on this film, so alien to the spirit of unprogrammed Quakerism. As for myself, I’m still entranced by some scenes in Jesus Revolution.
         
For example, after one of Chuck Smith’s older parishioners complains about the hippies’ bare feet soiling the church carpet, Chuck washes their feet, re-enacting Jesus’ similar service. And although the hippies being baptized in the ocean react with cloying enthusiasm, I still remember the ecstasy and joy I felt when Father Joe baptized me with a gallon of water. Perhaps my own Christocentric Quakerism is not so different from evangelical Christianity—at least in some respects.  

~ Richard Russell