Advent 1a.07                                                      December 2, 2007

Jesus’s favorite book in the Bible was Isaiah.
He quoted Isaiah far and away more than any other book
         because Isaiah is where Jesus got the raw material
                  for his vision of the Kingdom of God.
And the coming of the Kingdom is what we hope for
         especially in this Advent season.
We see part of Isaiah’s vision of the Kingdom in today’s lesson:

        “They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
        and their spears into pruning hooks;
        nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
        neither shall they learn war any more.”

There is more to the Kingdom of God than peace.
But it starts there.
The gateway into God’s Kingdom is peace.
God’s Kingdom resembles an Old West saloon
        where you have to check your guns at the door.

The Kingdom is not something
       we can create by our own efforts.
God does it.
But the Kingdom is something we can welcome.
        We can hasten it’s coming.
                We can ready ourselves for it.
We open the way to the Kingdom
        by practicing Kingdom Ways here and now,
        and that starts with the practice of peace.

Does this have implications for actual war and peace
        engaged in at the edict of our government?
Absolutely it does.
But it doesn’t start there.
The war in Iraq is just a bloody flower on a tree
       with deep, deep roots of violence.
Beneath the political violence lies spiritual violence.

Those of us who want to practice Kingdom Ways
       will not have much luck in persuading
       our government to practice Kingdom Ways
                unless we go much deeper.
We have to look at the underlying spirituality of our people.
And we have to start with getting the plank out of our own eye.

But first let me get a little more clear about the deep roots of violence.
In the Creed we say “We believe in God the Father, God the Son,
        and God the Holy Spirit.”
But out in the real world, we believe in war. We believe in violence.
        We believe in vengeance.

Before the War in Iraq, we had a War on Terrorism.
Before that, we declared war on drugs.
We have declared war on inflation, war on poverty,
         war on this, war on that.
If we don’t like something, we declare war on it.

That’s just a metaphor, we might say.
Well metaphors create reality. They shape action.
They cause us for example to spend fortunes
         on so called drug enforcement
         while cutting drug rehabilitation funding to pittance.

Is war ever the right response to a crisis?
Maybe, but it’s hard to know if war is such a controlling metaphor
         in our collective mind that it is our knee jerk response
                  to whatever makes us afraid.
Is it possible that the answer to fear is faith – not war?
Is it possible that the drug problem is an illness to be cured
         and not an enemy to be obliterated?
If terrorism is the response to war, can war really end terrorism?
Which of these wars has anyone ever won?

New Testament scholar Walter Wink says
         that the Gospels and even much of the Old Testament
         are written to repudiate a belief system he calls

         “the myth of redemptive violence”.
That’s the idea in the end violence is what sets things right
         and that vengeance is the sweetest repast.
All of Jesus’ teachings said just the opposite.
And the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
         all showed dramatically and powerfully that Jesus was right.

Violence begets violence.
There is no end to it until someone like Jesus
         or Antigone suffers but does not strike back.
Only then can it stop.

But all the television shows and movies keep preaching
         the myth of redemptive violence,
         and that myth keeps shaping our consciousness,
         and we keep spending far more money killing people
                  than we do on feeding, healing, and educating them.

So how do we change it?
How do we practice Kingdom Ways while living in the Empire
         of the Powers and Principalities as Paul said?
We start with ourselves.
We learn to practice peace.

This is a poem by a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
         the Buddhist monk, Tich Naht Hanh.
He was a peace activist in Viet Nam and a friend
         of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The poem goes:
         Peace is every step.
         The shining red sun is my heart.
         Each flower smiles with me.
         How green, how fresh all that grows.
         How cool the wind blows.
         Peace is every step.
         It turns the endless path to joy.

Tich Naht Hanh is describing inner peace.
That’s where it starts.
As a veteran of the 1960's peace movement,
         I can say from experience there is nothing less effective
                   than an angry peace activist.
There is nothing less likely to achieve peace than a violent protest.
Violence begets violence.
Only peace begets peace.
Jesus said you don’t get good fruit from a bad tree.
As usual, he was right.

So peace starts within.
We come to peace through prayer and a deepening faith.
When we learn to pray instead of lash out,
         then we may have a chance of doing some good.
So prayer: centering prayer; loving kindness meditation, taize,
         the kinds of prayer that bring us to the Serene Center of Reality
                  we call the Father – that’s the beginning of peace.

It doesn’t mean we always feel calm.
It means when we feel sad, we are brave enough to just be sad
         and not panic – terrified we will always be sad.
And if we are afraid, we are brave enough to just feel afraid.

The usual pattern is hurt morphs into fear that we will
         get even worse or never get better
         so hurt turns to fear and fear turns to anger.
Anger lashes out in violence.
Someone retaliates.
The we get hurt worse for sure –and it all snowballs.

Prayer – deep prayer – lets us just feel what we feel when we feel it,
          then let it go.
We let the hurt, the fear, the anger sweep across the surface

          – but not capture us and carry us along.
Byron wrote a poem using the ocean as symbol of our soul
          and ships as those destructive passions.
It went,

          “Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.
          A thousand ships sweep over thee in vain.”
Can you hear the peace in that.

          “Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.
          A thousand ships sweep over thee in vain.”

Prayer is like that.
It rolls on. It entrusts our hurts and our fears to God.
So the passions sweep over us in vain.
They don’t carry us into aggression.

Then when we have done enough of that to find our serene center,
         which is to say, when we have made contact with God the Father,
         we are ready for the next step.
We make friends with people we don’t agree with.

Anyone can make a shallow easy friendship with like minded people.
That’s just a way of loving our own reflection.
Frankly it makes us even more dangerous.
I don’t have time to explain that.
But it’s all in Reinhold Niebuhr’s book, Moral Man, Immoral Society.
The bond of people who agree with each other is by and large a bad thing.
That’s why we don’t base the church on agreeing with each other,
          but on caring for each other.

Spiritual practice lies in befriending those who disagree.
Some of the old guard at St. Francis have done that beautifully
          over the years.

Old timers, the best thing you can do for the future of this church
          is to teach that discipline to the new folks.
New folks, the best thing you can do is to learn it.

We do not become friends by debating the issues
         we disagree about.
We become friends in two ways – and it takes both.
First, we treat each other with gentle kindness.
Second, we find things in each other to appreciate.
That’s the one we tend to leave out.
It isn’t enough just to treat someone well.
We have to discover the good in the person and admire it.

This congregation isn’t the only place to practice
          these Kingdom Ways.
But we need to start here,
          because if we can make peace in the Church,
                   we can make it anywhere.

So I invite you, sisters and brothers,
          to the practice of peace.
I invite you to start beating a sword into a ploughshare,
          this Advent.
Do it prayerfully.
Do it here.
Do it now.

                                        

                                         Amen.