Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
Matthew 3:1-12
Isaiah 11:1-10
Cultural divides are not exactly new, no matter what we might think. The nation was torn apart during the Vietnam War, just one example, people not speaking to one another, fights at the holiday dinner table, and worse. It is easy to romanticize the past, but we do well to remember the shootings at Kent State University, the innocent victims, how everything was us vs. them in those days. We’ve been here before, and for many of us, in our own lifetimes. The man in the White House at that time was engaged in an ongoing series of criminal activities, targeting and smearing his perceived enemies, including one lad from Liverpool who had held protests against the war the year before, along with his partner, bed-ins for peace in Montreal and Amsterdam. Nixon wanted John Lennon deported in the worst possible way, any way it could be made to happen. And all Lennon was saying, as the song reminds us this season, is give peace a chance.
Another big but slightly less important cultural divide for that generation existed between the pro-Yoko and anti-Yoko folks, and I am definitely in the latter group. I tend to see post-Beatles Lennon as an emotional and psychological hostage, Stockholm Syndrome if you will, yet we cannot disentangle the bearded Lennon laying in the bed next to Yoko from his powerful voice against the war, and against the institutions that supported it. I totally get the impulse behind his “Imagine,” as anti-religious as it is, for religion has often been an agent of warfare and destruction rather than a force for peace, co-opted by political and nationalist agendas. But there have been Christian voices for peace as well, not only the pacifist branches of Protestant and Anabaptist Christianity, but also notable individuals, Father Daniel Berrigan, the Rev. Dr. King…
And here we sit, on this Second Sunday in Advent, speaking of peace. But what does peace mean? What does it mean in scripture? What does it mean for the progressive Christian, and particularly in our own theological trajectory?
We are quick to pull out lines like Isaiah and Micah’s commands to beat swords into plowshares, conveniently ignoring the prophet Joel, who instructs the people of God to beat their plowshares into swords. We take the command to turn the other cheek, possibly misinterpreting it, for the interpretation is rightly contested, and turn Jesus into a pacifist and more than a little wimpy, selectively ignoring his whipping of the merchants on the Temple, his declaration that his teaching would divide people, would be a sword, all that Day of the Lord imagery that did indeed promise peace, but only after a dramatic re-ordering of the world, a re-ordering that would see the people finally faithful to Yahweh and living by God’s command to righteousness, to justice, to radical welcome and hospitality.
Peace in scripture is always the after, not the now, for now, the kingdom is not yet fulfilled. We still chase after false gods, we still live out of our fear.
Early Christians adopted a notion of Pax Christi, the Peace of Christ, after the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome, forgetting that the Peace of Rome was peace precisely because there were dead bodies left rotting on crosses outside of every Roman-occupied town, a constant reminder of Roman brutality, of what would happen if anyone dared to step out of line.
That Roman peace is one form of peace, negative peace, the peace that comes not from mutuality and human thriving, but from brutality and oppression. There is another negative peace, the peace of those who don’t want to look, don’t want to hear, don’t want to be confronted with a player taking a knee, because they personally don’t have to tremble every time their teenage son runs to the store, drives home from soccer practice, for their son will not die for the crime of breathing while black.
The Rev. King, preaching in Montgomery in 1956, spoke of this sort of peace when he said:
Yes things were quiet in Tuscaloosa. Yes there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price. It was peace that had been purchased at the exorbitant price of an inept trustee board succumbing to the whims and caprices of a vicious mob. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of capitulating to the forces of darkness. This is the type of peace that all men of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the almighty God.
There are these forms of peace that are not at all peaceful for everyone, that do not allow for human thriving. Is this the sort of peace we want to preach, peace for us because we do not want to be disturbed by the constant churn and chaos that is creation? By the messiness that is human? Is our peace to be a “shut up and sit down” peace?
That has never been our way. Not as Congregationalists. Not as the United Church of Christ. We have always understood that peace would be the result when each and every human was granted dignity, was understood as a reflection of the Living God, when the door to thriving was not just opened, but blown off the hinges, for there should be no door, no barrier.
It is why we were the first to ordain a woman since the apostolic age, why we fought for the abolition of slavery, why we participated in the Civil Rights movement, why we were the first to ordain an openly LGBTQ person. It is why we do more than just give handouts to the poor, but also ask why they are poor, wrestle with injustice and oppression, for we take seriously the parable that says “what you have done to the least of these, you did to me.” It is why local churches, conferences, and our General Synod prayerfully wrestle with difficult issues, from fossil fuels and human-caused climate chaos to the slow-moving ethnic cleansing and genocide on the West Bank. The West Bank is a long way away, but we understand peace as justice, understand that we must not look away, that the least of these in Palestine are Christ, are an experience of God.
But there have also always been congregations that preferred a negative peace, a “shut up and sit down” peace, that did not want Jesus mean and wild in the Temple, Jesus proclaiming that the gospel was hard stuff. They like wimpy Jesus, comfortable Jesus. They were okay with the fact that their peace came at the expense of others. They just wouldn’t look and see the others. That way, they didn’t have to feel guilty. They put off hard conversations because their internal peace was more important that the peace of others, the thriving of others. Let’s not discuss it. Somebody might get upset.
Peace is not stasis, for stasis is impossible for this moderately advanced still evolving social primate on a planet that shakes and spins and gets hit by asteroids, so don’t get too comfortable.
Creation abhors stasis.
Like a flower or lightening storm in time-lapse, we grow and blossom and explode in brilliance and color and are gone, and that is the order of things, no matter the mind games we play with ourselves to pretend that isn’t true.
Any external peace we might find will be based in mutuality, accountability, and thriving, more broadly, in justice not escapism. As Dr. King preached, “Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force—war, tensions, confusion but it is the presence of some positive force—justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God.”
I believe in peace, though I am skeptical about the ability of millions of scared and barely enlightened creatures to achieve it through the use of reason, for we have worshipped at the altar of reason for several centuries, and are as anxious and destructive as ever. If we could think our way out of trouble, we’d be in paradise.
No, for me, peace begins with a simple premise, with heart not head: for God so loved the world. Not a God who so loved the world that God was willing to demand a blood sacrifice, but God, mysterious divine and serendipitous creativity, God who broke into the world in an unexpected way, in a child conceived out of wedlock, born in Bethlehem. I don’t need every detail to be literally true, these two contradictory and equally improbable tales of nativity. I don’t need my head to fit that experience into some neat category, theological and historical boxes.
I just need to believe that the X in our every equation, the tug in our hearts and the beautiful self-ordering that happens at the intersection of creation and chaos, is good. That on balance, as a whole, creation is good, and it is suffused with the holy, in a child in a manger and in a crashing wave, in an anthill and in a concert hall, in me and in you, in Bethlehem under Roman occupation and in Bethlehem under Israeli occupation.
My peace comes from knowing that I am part of something, and while my existential terror at non-being may be real, never quite smothered by the snake-oil of eternity, there is purpose and meaning in agape and selflessness, in the hard and messy work of trying to make the world a better place for human thriving and coral reef thriving, in dancing and singing, in the Christmas Truce and in the bizarre way that the season sometimes breaks down the artificial barriers we create to try to protect ourselves, how the season reminds us that God is in all things, all things charged with the glory of God. The stars cry out and our hearts soar.
Peace has to start with peace within ourselves, our ability to just be, to love this moment, this creation. We can all thrive, the planet can thrive, a peace of Christ of sorts can be made real, if we can quell the anxiety, the fear, for fear is our original sin.
Peace starts within, with a simple decision to believe. Not in some creed or formula, but in the goodness of that mystery we name as God, of this tilt-a-whirl universe in which we find ourselves, of the experience of the holy in a child who would become a troublesome rabbi, executed and alive again, in a story that empire and death could not end. Belief in the goodness and holiness that is already in you and already in me and already in every single person we meet.
We are in the business of changing hearts, lives, the world. Imagine. Believe. It may seem crazy, but crazy can become real if you believe. Remember, someone once said, “hey, let’s make a movie with tornados, but with sharks in them”…
And the rest is cinematic history.
Amen.