The Quaker cemetery is just on the other side of the hedge in our backyard.  Sometimes people ask about it and we say the residents have made quiet neighbors all these years.  But now some of our quiet neighbors are crying out.
 
A memorial service for interred slaves will be held tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 in the cemetery.  The story of Quaker slaves and their graves in the burying yard is worth hearing as much as it is hard to hear.  Now the cries of some of our quiet neighbors echo in our backyard and find their way inside our house whenever I look out the back window and see the silent stones of the cemetery. 
 
Early in its history the Friends Meeting in Middletown had allowed slaves to be buried alongside their masters in the cemetery, but minutes from a meeting in 1703 record a change in practice: “There having been formerly some Negros Buryed in friends Burying Yard which they are not well satisfied with therefore Robert Heaton & Thomas Stackhouse are ordered to fence off that corner with as much more as they may see convenient, that friends burying place may be of itself from all others.” 
 
Apparently the 1703 decision was not always honored, and in 1739 the fence around the burying yard became a wall with a locked gate and instructions for its keeping were noted in the minutes of the meeting: “this meeting having had the Matter under Consideration it is unanimously agreed that hereafter no Deceased Negros be Buried Within the walls of the graveyard Belonging to this meeting, & Adam Parker, Jonathan Woolston & Joseph Richardson are appointed to keep the keys of the Said Graveyard & take Care that none be Buried therein but such as they in the Meetings Behalf shall allow of.”
 
Quakers were leaders in the cause of abolition a hundred years after the wall with its gate to keep out those not allowed of was built around the burying yard. They deserve the honor they have been given for their work and witness. To be sure, the story of the Quakers and their attitudes and actions is complicated like all the stories of race in America. 
 
I’m not a Quaker and its been over 300 years since the cemetery just on the other side of the hedge in our backyard was shamefully segregated. And other forebears of those Quakers who still gather at the Meeting House were and are diligent in their work for freedom and justice.  
 
Must I let the call our quiet neighbors disrupt my life?
 
The line that connects the locked gate in Quaker burying yard and the experience of indignity and injustice told by every single black ever I have met is tangled and not always easy to follow, but it is unbroken.
 
I could turn up the volume on the music I am playing, a collection of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs new and old.  It doesn’t have to be very loud to block the cries of our quiet neighbors, but at risk to Christ’s claim on my life I grow deaf to those cries.  Workplace or school campus, neighborhood or church, the Apostle Paul reminds us that in Christ there is not Greek and Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11). 
 
The locked gates and the key keepers still experienced by the “not allowed of” is an affront to the Gospel and an offense to Christ.  I didn’t build the wall and I may not keep the keys to the locked gate, but I am called to serve the One who has and continues to break down all the dividing walls of hostility (Ephesians 2:14). 
 
It may be a little bit disruptive – it may have lowered our property value – but the cry of our quiet neighbors will not and should not be silenced.  
 
See you Sunday