Peace 12.9.18

Peace

On Malachi 3:1-4 and Luke 1:68-79 and 3:1-6

By Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On The First Sunday of Advent

December 9, 2018

British philosopher Geoff Midgley would have been dear friends with John the Baptist. They were both certainly 4’s on the Enneagram and they tended to really love the dark side of life, having a bit of an Eyeorish approach to all things, gloom and doom was quite fine with them and they never saw a glass full, everything was either an overflowing mess or in need. 

Geoff Midgley was having afternoon tea with his landlady one day decades ago and they are talking about all the gloom and doom stories of the newspaper, stories of the cold war and the possibility of nuclear warfare that threatened the existence of life as they knew it, I know totally unrelateable. Suddenly Geoff in the most dramatic of fashions blurted out: “The world is just too horrible! If we had a button we could press that would finally blow the whole thing up, which of us would press it first?” She sat there a bit horrified by his suggestion, thinking it through and finally said, “Oh I would not press the button, you know I am terrified of electrical things.”

It sounds like a lot of the conversations that we are having these days…. Where fear just builds upon fear and anxiety upon anxiety upon anxiety. 

The brilliant biologist Dr. Murray Bowen, whose work is perhaps some of the most important understanding of human development in recent history, has provided context for understanding the world and I think helps us truly look back and understand how we have gotten to where we are today, already brilliant think tank pieces are being written about his work and our days. 

His work states that there are times when any society will have a peak moment of anxiety and that will be followed by three symptoms: terrorism, fundamentalism and toxicity. Sound familiar? Kind of like a typical Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday of late?  I think a case can be made that since 9/11 we have seen the rise of these symptoms and we live in an increasing age of anxiety. 

Dr. Bowen’s work suggest this pattern will continue until the anxiety subsides or when the complications of the regression are greater than the anxiety that feeds the regression. Now that is Bowen, not Gospel. Here I disagree with Bowen and his theory, here I think the Gospel provides a different answer. 

You see our days are not all that different, history does repeat itself. I think our days are a lot like the in between days of Old and New Testament. A period of waiting and wanting more. A period where it felt like all was lost. Israel, us, we had lost our land, we had lost our temple and we had lost our king. Trying to rebuild but not finding the passion that task required… it’s the days of Malachi and his text we read earlier. Those days were days full of anxiety and there is evidence for terrrorism, fundamentalism and toxicity. 

So what do we do? I think the church all too often misses her calling in these days because we are called to be a people of peace and we have a very poor understanding of peace. We think of peace as calm, we think of peace as trying to make everything better for everyone without stirring anything up, we think of peace as trying to avoid the hard stuff. Peace is a family dinner where you avoid all the topics that have potential to cause a situation. Peace is polite conversation instead of authentic conversation. Peace is surface level. Peace is polite. 

And that is as far removed from peace as it can be.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, instead peace is the presence of so much more, peace is wholeness. And you can’t get to wholeness without addressing that which is broken. Which is the Gospel way, the “Prepare Ye the Way” way, the way of John the Baptist. The one whom Malachi and the other prophets point to, the first voice of Advent. 

Our Gospel texts began with Zachari’s song about his son, the one whom will “guide our feet into peace” and then jumps straight to the 15th year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius and there we find listed the political powers of the day and the religious powers of the day and then the spotlight zooms in on this odd character, this John the Baptist fellow. 

We go from the most powerful to the least powerful, a man in the wilderness and that is just the beginning of the strangeness.

Let’s start with the physical description of John the Baptist: he is wearing clothing made of camel’s hair and a belt. And all the Gospel writers make note of his clothing… which should tell us something. When do you make note of someone’s clothing? You note it to say “did you see what so and so was wearing?” You do that either when something is really good looking or when it’s not. And I don’t think a dress made of camel’s hair is really high couture.  Instead it’s a little off, a little tacky…. It’s very Old Testament and we are in the New Testament now.  

And then the Gospels go on to tell us about his diet, his diet consists of locust and honey. The locusts are bugs, they are insects. And truth is they are really nutritious but they are not gourmet. And the honey is not bee’s honey, but a flavorless sticky substance that came from the tamarisk tree. Again nutritious but not gourmet. This is not the clothing and food of the average person back then. 

And if that’s not enough, well pay attention to the way he talks: John is a fire and brimstone preacher, it’s hell or high water every time, it’s always turn or burn. His favorite name for folks always compared them to vipers and serpents in a pit. He was sure that the Kingdom of God was coming but he warns you that is not going to be a cup of tea. He was quick to warn everyone that if they did not get in shape pretty fast that God was going to cut them down with an axe. And if that was not enough he told them not to think that being Jewish would save them, because in the end that was not enough. 

And his sermons always ended in the same place, in the river. You always knew his closing lines: “You need to repent, you need to clean yourself up and get right because the Kingdom of God is near. So come and be baptized.” 

And then let’s talk about his location, John is preaching out in the middle of nowhere, in the wilderness. Which for us might just appear as though it was inconvenient and out of the way, but that was not what it meant back then. The wilderness was something else entirely. The wilderness was a difficult place, a world outside the domesticated and predictable world of the city.  A place of unknown. A place where human rules and standards don’t apply. A place that is unspeakably beautiful but equally unspeakably violent. A place where they truly believed monsters lived, horrible creatures who could not be tamed. It’s a place of exile, heartbreak and fear. 

If the wilderness was in a children’s book, this would be the place where things go bump in the night. The word for wilderness is toou, which literally means “a place where the dessert and mountain meet, all terrain beyond the safety of the Nile, a place of brokenness where divine mercy must suffice.” Hear that again, the wilderness is a place where only God’s mercy will suffice.

And it’s here that he is preaching his message: prepare ye the way, get things ready because God is coming back and it might not be as nice and pleasant as you want it. Not quite the Advent message we wanted, but probably the one we need.

It’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose timely and incurable Christmas message never seems to make it on Christmas cards: “It is very remarkable that we face the thought that God is coming so calmly, whereas previously peoples trembled at the day of God…. We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.”

And First Austin that is peacemaking. The frightening news that God is coming and wants to judge how we are doing things. Speaking the truths that need to be spoken. Naming the brokenness which must be made whole. Doing the tough work of preparing a way. For those of you who have ever had the joy of clearing brush, this is the same work and it will leave you tired, and a little bit cut up and in deep need. 

Peacemaking names what must be named so that the broken can be made whole. Peacemaking is finding a way when there seems to be no way. 

Peacemaking is the work that happened this summer at Tham Luang, the cave that captivated our attention, the cave where a soccer team and a soccer coach were stuck for weeks. You know the story, the boys being boys explored a cave one afternoon after soccer practice, nothing wrong with this, they all knew the rains would start soon but it was not quite time yet until they were in the cave and suddenly the rains started early and they were suddenly hostages of the cave.

There were three options to save the boys: to wait it out (not truly an option because the waters could hold until November and getting food and oxygen and medical attention to the boys for that long seemed impossible), so next to try to drill to get them out and create a new way out (but this was dangerous for other reasons including timing and collapse of cave) and third, to swim each boy out. The third option was really the only option. 

There is so much about the rescue that is just now coming to light, all the fears of what could have happened to each boy. The doctor, the anthologist who had never before delivered drugs to malnurshed children who were stuck in a cave and were going to be put under so that they could be hooked up to oxygen tanks and swum out of caves that grown adult risk takers were scared to dive in and out of, caves that had already taken the life of one diver. The divers themselves who learned how to give a second dosage of sedation medication halfway through the journey so the boys would not awake and panic, the divers who had to strap these boys into these improvised harnesses and buoyancy jackets so that they were the perfect weight to avoid the rocks above and below them which could impail them, the divers who strapped these boys to their bodies and began journeys that could take as short as 5 hours or as long as 23 hours. 

And they got each boy and the coach out of the cave, alive, a feat all had hoped for but no one had expected.

That is peacemaking, facing all the obstacles ahead but knowing this is the way back to life. Those doctors and divers, the entire teams of folks who saved those boys, they are our calling. 

You see our version of peacemaking looks way too much like sitting around a campfire singing campfire songs than it does the hard work, the sweat, the blood, the tears that is actually peacemaking. Just pay attention to the greatest peacemaker Jesus and what his life looked like.

Or Ghandi. Or Martin Luther King. Or Desmund Tutu. Or Nelson Madella. Or Rosa Park. Or Jane Adams. Or Malala Yousafzai. Or Cindy Sheehan. Or Jennifer Long and the work of Casa Marianella.

And it should be you and me and our work. 

It’s the prophet who was with us a few years ago, Joan Chittister, who says: “God let me not die in nuclear war is not a prayer. We made the nuclear weapons, so it’s up to us to unmake them.” That is peace.  

Or just listen to the Scripture about peacemaking. It passes all understanding. It heals and makes whole. It’s the lion laying down with the lamb. It’s a child leading us. It’s the prophets screaming out. It’s Jesus cleaning the temple. It’s Paul calling out slave owners. 

It’s not absence of conflict and violence, it’s so much more than that.

It’s the work of John the Baptist who named what was broken and needed to be fixed, who was not scared to call out that which needed to be called out, who was willing to do dangerous things and say scary truths, who was not afraid to point fingers, who was willing to do the hard work that no one else wanted to do, the work that eventually got him killed.

That is the work of peacemaking. It’s scary and hard. It’s risky and it might just get you killed. But it might also prepare the way where there had been no way. 

And it’s what brings about Christmas, this is how we get Christ born. Because birth is messy and labor is hard. 

There is a lot that is broken in our world and church it’s our turn to do some peacemaking, to heal and to make whole. To team and support the work of those doing the work. To reconcile the brokenness in our own lives. And the old truth is still true: if we are not part of the answer, we are part of the problem. 

These are days of anxiety, days of terror, fundamentalism and toxicity. May we be peacemakers like John the Baptist and call forth a new way, a way of wholeness for all people. Because in doing so we prepare the way for Christ himself.

Amen and Amen. 

*artwork: Christmas Dove, Painting by Lynn Bywaters, lynnbywatersart.com