"Peace That Isn't"
December 10, 2006: 2nd Sunday of Advent, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Isaiah 32:9-18
(Introduction:) "Our first reading this morning comes from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 32, verses 9 through 18. The 8th Century BCE was a time of great political anxiety in the kingdom of Judah where the prophet was writing. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had fallen recently to the Assyrians, and tensions are running high among the great empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt as each threatened to overwhelm tiny southern Judah. Various voices within Judah are counseling military alliance with one against the others in order to preserve the peace and their comfortable standard of living. The prophet reminds them that true peace—the peace that the sword cannot win and even exile cannot destroy—comes from God alone."

Rise up, you women who are at ease, hear my voice; you complacent daughters, listen to my speech. In little more than a year you will shudder, you complacent ones; for the vintage will fail, the fruit harvest will not come. Tremble, you women who are at ease, shudder, you complacent ones; strip, and make yourselves bare, and put sackcloth on your loins. Beat your breasts for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine, for the soil of my people growing up in thorns and briers; yes, for all the joyous houses in the jubilant city. For the palace will be forsaken, the populous city deserted; the hill and the watchtower will become dens forever, the joy of wild asses, a pasture for flocks; until a spirit from on high is poured out on us, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.

John 20:19-22
(Introduction:) "Our second reading comes from the Gospel According to John, chapter 20, verses 19 through 22. At this point in the gospel narrative, the sun has set on the first Easter morning, and the disciples are very much still in shock following the arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion of Jesus. Mary Magdalene claims to have seen the risen Christ, but no one else has. Terror lingers in the stifling air of the room where they meet."

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jewish authorities, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
(singing)
   Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright
     'round yon virgin mother and child! Holy infant, so tender and mild,
     sleep in heavenly peace! Sleep in heavenly peace...

Silent night? What a crock! Or sure, maybe after. After nine months of discomfort growing daily; after the morning sickness; after the finger-pointing, the carefully audible whispers; after the nearly unbearable donkey ride up hill and down; after the miasma of animal breath and damp straw and dung; after the sweating and groaning of labor pains and the last gasp and the final desperate straining push—sure, maybe then there was some sleep and some heavenly peace for the round young virgin mother and child, and maybe even for poor, wide-eyed Joseph, maybe afterwards they had a silent night, but before...? Not so much.

Contrary to the idyllic image presented in so many Christmas carols, birth in the real world is a noisy, bloody business—as any birth mother can tell you, there's a reason they call it labor—and dangerous, too, especially back in the third-world of the First Century, but even today in the first-world of the Twenty-First... Despite all our many advances, childbirth remains risky. And messy, physically and emotionally and spiritually. Birth mucks everything up. It changes everything and everyone involved, bending, stretching, relentlessly changing bodies and relationships as it struggles to bring something, someone completely new into the world. But few who have gone through this life-changing event in their own lives would deny that, in the end, it was worth it. Some brave souls even choose to do it more than once.

The same goes for peace. In the popular imagination, peace is merely the absence of all conflict, and it's supposed to be sweet and gentle and easy. What's more, this peaceful peace is supposed to just... happen, as though, at some unspoken signal, a hush will fall over the world and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. It's the peace of green fields and daisies and cooing doves, of sweet children and gentle old people, and puppies. It's that blissed-out state of being when all people, everywhere, join hands around the world and just, you know, sing together in harmony, man, like in those old Coca-Cola ads.

Such a bunch of hooey. Not only does that pipedream grossly misrepresent the lives of children and old people and puppies, but it bears no relation whatsoever to the Biblical vision of peace. God's true peace, God's shalom, is not just the absence of open conflict. It's not just a holy time-out before we get right back to abusing one another. It's an entirely different way of relating—of relating to God, to one another, and even to our very selves—a way based on mutuality, justice, and compassion. In other words, this kind of peace, God's peace, is completely unnatural. Don't think so? Listen again to the famous description of God's shalom from Isaiah, chapter 11.

(In that day, says the Lord,) the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain... (Isaiah 11:6-9a)

Sound like any Discover Channel nature special you've ever seen? Of course not. This is not the way the world works. In our world, in the real world, the bear eats the cow, the lion devours the ox, and when the little baby puts her hand in the viper's den, she gets bit and bit bad. In our world, the strong prey upon the weak, the rich exploit the poor, the privileged take advantage of the powerless... and if they're not, just at the moment, you can bet it's only because they're working a longer grift.

So, all this Christmas-time talk of "peace on earth" while we know perfectly well there is no peace in Afghanistan or Iraq or Lebanon or among Israelis and Palestinians, or in Darfur or Colombia or Kashmir or Burma or even in many of our very own families, our homes or hearts—well, it can sound a bit utopian, at best, and, at worst, disingenuous, or even dangerously deluded. In this context, all those quiet, hopeful carols coming across the Muzak may really hit a raw nerve. That's what happened to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow one Christmas morning in 1864. It was the depths of the American Civil War, and Longfellow was still mourning his wife's tragic accidental death when he learned of his son's grave injury in battle. Listening to the church bells ringing out the happy season, with those distressing personal and private sentiments lying heavy on his heart, Longfellow was moved to pen these words:

And even this verse, commonly removed from the carol's lyrics in hymnals today:
   Then from each black, accursed mouth
     the cannon thundered in the South,
   and with the sound the carols drowned
     of peace on earth, good will to men.

No, no one with eyes and ears can deny that peace is not native to our souls. It's just not our natural way of relating. It's not a case of a few bad apples ruining the whole barrel. Rather, in this world of habitual terror and terrorizing, of almost constant war and preparation for war, it wouldn't be overly pessimistic to say, as 17th Century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes did, that the natural state our lives seems to be "nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, chap. XIII).

So, given all that, if it's true peace we're aiming at, it's a very good thing we believe in a super-natural "higher Power." For we believe in a God who makes a way where there is no way, who splits the sea in two that we might walk dry-shod, who gives us water out of the rock in the wilderness, who repeated takes what was not enough and makes it more than enough. We do not have to be stuck in rut, "just as we are without one plea" for all eternity. Choice is possible. Change is possible. Friends, you don't have to believe these things literally, but believe them deeply. Peace is possible, because this God shows us the way to peace and empowers us to break our age-old addiction to violence and fear in order to get there. That is what redemption means—redemption, salvation, liberation, they're all just different ways of saying that what we receive from God is not merely a word of welcome, the desire to embrace the world as it is now, but a will and a way to transform the world into what it, what we may yet be with love... and with a whole lot of work.

Because, let's face it: Peace, like birth, is messy, hard work. Peace, like birth, or like the practice of sobriety, or any other process of transformation, does not come easy. God's not going to wave some magic wand and simply make it all better, all at once, short-circuiting our freewill in the process. No, we must make a choice to seek peace. First, we must be willing first to face the hard truth of who we are now, all the ways we are in bondage to sin and death, fear and force. We must be willing to see ourselves as God sees us, not only like a proud parent, smiling on all our rosy potential, but also with dismay and even anger as God observes us in this decidedly gray and grim present moment.

At the same time, if we wish to seek peace we also must be willing to accept great risk. For, just like birth, peace changes everything and everyone involved, bending, stretching, relentlessly changing our communities and our relationships as we struggle to bring something completely new into the world. We have to be willing to let it all go, all the comfortable consistency of the status quo, even the dependable discomfort, if we are to make room for the new thing God is doing among us. Committing ourselves to the way and the goal of God's shalom, God's whole peace, means making the choice every day to change our ways, to reject violence and domination, to lower our weapons, even—and this is what makes peace so hard—even if the other guy doesn't.

You see, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot go on crying "Peace, peace" while pursuing war and planning for more. We're going to have to step out in peace if we want to build peace. Listen to these words from The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a Christmas sermon he delivered back in 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War and only months before his assassination:

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends ("A Christmas Sermon," December 24, 1967)

Thus the rather odd reading from the prophet Isaiah this morning. At first glance, this passage doesn't seem to have much to do with peace, much less Christmas; in fact, it starts off with a rather stark and startling message:

Rise up, you women who are at ease, hear my voice; you complacent daughters, listen to my speech. In little more than a year you will shudder, you complacent ones; for the vintage will fail, the fruit harvest will not come. Tremble, you women who are at ease, shudder, you complacent ones... For the palace will be forsaken, the populous city deserted; the hill and the watchtower will become dens forever, the joy of wild asses, a pasture for flocks...

What's up with that? What sort of word of peace is that, that the comfortable world these urbane women inhabit will be torn down and turned upside-down and trampled over by wild animals? Well, Merry Christmas to you, too!

But the prophet knows that we cannot say we want peace while continuing to feather our nests with the fruit of domination. True peace, God's peace, comes at a cost, not in compromise, but in transformation. All is not lost, Isaiah, reassures his terrified audience, but all will be changed as God's peace comes to full flower among us. We who are comfortable are going to have to endure a little affliction if we are going to comfort the afflicted. As the prophet goes on to say, the institutions of violence and fear must be abandoned completely, for swords are rendered useless for violence when they are beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (2:4). The systems of oppression—the yoke of burden, the bar across the shoulders of the poor, the rod of their oppressor—all this must be dismantled. And all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood must be thrown into the fire (9:4-5). Even in our own families, where all too often true peace is just as elusive as it is between nations, things must change, and old habits must die hard. Only in that day and in that way, will

a spirit from on high [be] poured out on us, and the wilderness [become] a fruitful field, and the fruitful field [be] deemed a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.

Just what is the guarantee that God will indeed accomplish all this, that peace, true peace, really is possible? Well, it's that "a child has been born for us, a son given to us; and authority rests upon his shoulders; one who is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6). For us as Christians, the guarantee of the peace God intends for the world is Jesus himself, the little baby born away in the manger, the same Jesus who will become the prophet of God's shalom, strong in word and deed. In his ministry, Jesus throws himself like a wrench into the machine of war and empire in order to shock us from our complacency. He is the innocent victim, who refuses even to spit in the face of his oppressors from the cross but even then reaches out to forgive them in order to show us, all of us, that another world is possible, a better world, a world of peace.

Afterward, it is the resurrected Christ who comes in power to begin the dismantling of the world that is and the fashioning of the world that will be by breaking out of the stone cold tomb and breaking into the locked room where the disciples cower still under threat of violence. Christ breathes on them there, literally inspiring them with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so commissions them to become apostles of peace.

So think of that this coming Christmas Eve as we gather here in our own upper room, as we lift our candles high in the dark and sing "Silent night, holy night." Remember that, in Jesus, God has shown us just how far God is willing to go to open the door to the possibility of peace, and consider just how far you are willing to go to grow into that peace.

Then, the next morning, in the light of Christmas, listen again to those familiar carols. I know by that point you'll have heard them so many times, it'll be hard, but try. Listen again to those Christmas bells and see if they don't ring truer for you. See if they don't ring more loud and deep, as eventually they did for Longfellow, reminding him and us that despite the best efforts of a world drunk on violence and fear, "God is not dead, nor doth God sleep." It may be a long road that brings us there, but each foot we put in front of the other in peace brings us that much closer to the day when "the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to all."

Friends, life is a gift, and so is the possibility for peace. But peace itself, real peace, peace on the ground—that we have to work for. As a community of faith grounded in truth and grace and shaped by the call of Christ, let us commit ourselves again today to bringing God's peace, God's shalom to birth through our labor here and now, so the whole world, round or thin, young or old, virgin or non, mother and child and father, too, may sleep in heavenly peace at last.