So let’s see if we can think like Lucretia for a few minutes. I want to offer for your consideration three goals which could form the over-arching basis of the Hundred-Year Lamb’s War, a framework for a century of work:

First: To make the United States into a law-abiding member of the international community.

Second: To help the three great monotheistic religions learn to conduct their rivalry without violence or bloodshed. And

Third: To make the Religious Society of Friends a meaningful player in both arenas, and one that can go the distance.

That’s what The Hundred -Year Lamb’s War could be about – it could serve as a Quaker counterpart and rival to the plan for a century dominated by American military might and the rival drive for a fanatic theocracy. Even partial progress toward these ends would make the world a safer place and increase our chances of surviving the clash of crusaders and their bloody visions.

Let’s take a quick look at these three goals:

First, getting the US to be a law-abiding international citizen. What a concept. Was it only a few years ago that such an idea might have seemed mundane or even banal? Yes it was. But now it’s downright radical, and even under the best of circumstances, it will take decades to reconstruct the major elements of international law and order that have been undermined or demolished in the recent past.

Second, peaceful rivalry among the monotheisms, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. To me this is at least as important a goal as taming the American empire, and probably more difficult. And for this, a century is likely a very short time. After all, we don’t often recall that it took western Christianity about three hundred years and rivers of blood to reach a similar place internally.

Three hundred years of war to figure out that the differences between its various sects could be settled in some other way than by one group exterminating another. And even then, many of them still thought it was just fine to slaughter those other monotheists, Jews, right down to my own lifetime. This substantial truce among most European Christians is both one of our culture’s highest achievements, and yet one of its least known. Where are the peace museums celebrating the way most Western Catholics and Protestants finally learned to stop killing each other – and recalling the significant Quaker role in that process?

Is this only a matter of Dead White European Male history? I don’t think so. This saga – which we know so little of – could be an asset, a model, and warning as we set out to play a part in ending the current religious warfare. And make no mistake: many of the wars and rumors of war that threaten us today and tomorrow will be religious at bottom. Contrary to what we hear from the few surviving outposts of the "liberal" media, I don’t believe it’s all about oil, or Halliburton and other multinational corporations, though yes, these all play their part. It’s about God, and who gets to play God, and be the enforcer for the divine.

And then there’s the third goal of the Hundred-Year Lamb’s War– making the Religious Society of Friends a long-term player; which will get us to the practical part of this talk.

What would it mean to plan a Quaker peace witness on such a long-term basis?

Would deciding to be part of it make any difference when we got back home to our meetings?

Would it reorder any priorities, lead us to do something different next week, or next month?

Would it change the usual routine of following one media-hyped "crisis" or another, and fretting about the next political horserace poll, and then the one after that, and the one after that?

I believe it could make a difference. And the way to approach those differences is to learn from the other two lessons I’ve taken from the military, starting with doing what an army in action does first, which is to secure its base.

For an armed force heading for combat, securing the base means making sure they have the supplies, the transportation, the food and bullets to fight their battles, safe places to store them, and hospitals to take care of the wounded. More broadly, it means keeping Congress and the public hypnotized by militarist propaganda, that’s how they keep recruits signing up and megabillions in tax money flowing to the Pentagon.

Remember those 300-plus war museums? They are not just memorials; they are also strategic investments in shaping public awareness, and they pay handsome long-term dividends. They tell – and re-tell, and re-tell – a simple story: For America, war is necessary, war works, war is exciting, and war is almost painless.

What would "securing our base" mean for Friends? Let me suggest three things for starters:

First, it means build our meetings. Build them spiritually, first and foremost; and physically, and numerically. That’s our base; without them we’re nothing. There shouldn’t be a need to expand on that; those who don’t think spiritually-centered, vital Friends meetings are central to Friends’ life and witness, are probably headed toward finding a spiritual home somewhere else.

Second, to this growing base of strong meetings, let us add a national network of twenty or more replicas of Quaker House. Yes, if we’re going to be mounting a Hundred-Year Lamb’s War, we will need more projects like Quaker House, which have fulltime staff with some professional skills, regionally controlled, but able to see beyond their back yard, and with sufficient support to keep them going for at least the 35 years that we’ve managed to survive in Fayetteville.

These projects would not be intended to replace or duplicate any existing organization. Instead, they reflect the fact that there’s plenty of peace work to go around. Like the Good Book says, the fields are ripe for the harvest, so let’s pray that the lord of the harvest will send laborers – and then have someplace for them to work from when they do appear.

Another reason to build these new projects is that we need to support and develop our own expertise, without supplanting our decentralized, lay-led meeting structures, and this is a way to do that. In my time, too many of the best activist Friends have had to go elsewhere to exercise their gifts and follow their leadings, and not a few have thereby been lost to us. It’s been our own homegrown Quaker brain drain.