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Good
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 Sermon
05/09/10
Spiritual Disarmament ~ by Reverend
Thomas Cary Kinder
May 9, 2010
Sixth Sunday after Easter, Blanket Sunday, Mother’s Day,
Festival of the Christian Home
First Congregational Church in Thetford,
Vermont, UCC
Philippians 2:1-11; John 14:23-29
Earlier
we sang a verse that went like this:
Hearts besieged by craving greed
and pride, and souls that reek of fear,
Minds that march and drive
compulsive lives, too frantic now to hear
Pain that God and earth and love
are feeling, pain whose cry is clear,
“Be peace! Live peace! Disarm!”
This
sermon is about that form of disarmament, disarming our heart, mind,
spirit and body so that we can each be peace and live peace. It is based on the Taoist formula,
No peace in the world without peace
in the nation,
No peace in the nation without
peace in the town,
No peace in the town without peace
in the home,
No peace in the home without peace
in the heart.
Without
spiritual disarmament we will never be able to fulfill President
Obama’s dream of nuclear disarmament, let alone Julia Ward
Howe’s dream of complete disarmament and the end of all war
that she shared in her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870.
The American Catholic monk, Thomas
Merton, was one of the great spiritual teachers and advocates of
nonviolence of the mid-20th Century. He wrote,
There is a
pervasive form of contemporary violence…: activism and
overwork. The rush and
pressure of modern life are a form…of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away
by the multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many
demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help
everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the
fruitfulness of one’s own work, because it kills the root of
inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. (from My Argument with the Gestapo)
Spiritual
damage may be the worst of what the rush and pressure of our lives do
to us, but of course that form of violence does other harm, too. The lack of peace in our heart
spreads violence to our home as those closest to us experience us at
our worst, and from there it spreads out to our town and nation and
world. The violence inherent
in our way of living makes us sick, physically, mentally and
spiritually. It can make us
addicted or fearful or angry unhappy people. It can make us feel hopeless or
exhausted. It blocks
compassion, kindness and love.
Thomas
Merton says that we inflict this violence of modern life on ourselves
by the choices we make. We can
choose between violence and nonviolence, we can choose between war
and peace at least within us, if not around us. What it comes down to is, how badly
do we want peace? Have we
reached the point that Julia Ward Howe reached where the good she saw
war accomplishing was far outweighed by the evil of the devastation
and death it caused? Are we
sick enough of the violence of our modern life to choose the path to
health and peace?
If
so, we need spiritual disarmament.
But true and lasting peace requires more than disarming,
because arms can always be built back up again. We need to find the eternal source
of peace that we can tap into and keep flowing within us whatever may
come.
The
scripture passages we heard today are almost two thousand years old,
but they talk of the same spiritual disarmament and source of peace
that we long for in our time.
Jesus
says in the Gospel of John, “Do not let your hearts be
troubled, neither let them be afraid.” He says, “Peace I leave with
you; my peace I give to you. I
do not give to you as the world gives.” The way of Christ is a way designed
to lead to peace. It intends
to help us live without troubled hearts and without fear. Christ gives us peace—but not
as the world gives. If we are
looking to the world to give us peace, we are looking in the wrong
place.
Jesus
says, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will
love them, and we will come to them and make our home with
them.” He says that the
Holy Spirit will come to us and teach us everything we need to know
to have peace. In the Gospel
of Luke Jesus says, “The realm of God is within you.” (17:21) In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says,
“Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will
find me there.” (Logia
77)
The
source of peace is not in outer things, but in inner things. We find it not in possessions or
power, technology or entertainment, but in love and in the wisdom of
God’s word. We find the
realm of peace within our hearts and as the inner essence of all
creation.
Some
people want us to believe that violence and war are inevitable, that
human nature is aggressive and naturally leads to conflict. Jesus says this is not so, that God
creates the world with the realm of peace built into the heart of
things. Mystics of all faiths
have confirmed that this is indeed true. One of those mystics, the Sufi poet
Jalaluddin Rumi, put it this way in a poem translated by Jonathan
Starr:
Everything you see has its roots
in
the Unseen World.
The forms may change,
yet
the essence remains the same.
Every wondrous sight will vanish
Every sweet word will fade.
But
do not be disheartened,
The Source they come from
is
eternal,
Growing, branching out,
giving
new life and new joy.
Why do you weep?
That source is within you,
And this whole world
is
springing up from it.
The Source is full,
Its waters are ever-flowing;
Do
not grieve,
drink
your fill!
Don’t think it will ever run
dry.
This is the endless Ocean!
The
question is, how can we tap into that source of peace when the
violence of modern life keeps driving us away from it? Jesus says in John that he told us
about the Holy Spirit and the peace it gives so that when it comes to
us we will believe it. The sad
fact is that when peace comes knocking on our door, asking us to let
it into our heart, showing us its path, we so often turn our back on
it. We do not believe and
trust the Spirit. We believe
the world instead. The world
says we have to drive ourselves ever harder, we have to conform our
life to the standards of our society, we have to meet all its demands
and deadlines, we have to give our children and ourselves all the
advantages and pleasures that we can get, in order to have
peace. That is what the world
says, but the world is not telling the truth. The world’s kind of peace
cannot last because it depends on many kinds of violence to exist.
Looking
for peace to come through a path of perpetual violence is irrational,
and yet this is what the world teaches us to do. Looking for peace to come through
disarmament is rational, and yet the world tells us not to believe in
it or trust it.
This
is why Jesus said he does not give peace the way the world does, and
why he tried to prepare us to believe and follow the Spirit’s
lead. It takes faith to choose
the way of spiritual disarmament, because it goes against what our culture
has taught us to admire and desire.
Think of that as you listen again to how Paul describes the
path to peace and joy.
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in
humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your
own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that
was in Christ Jesus, who…emptied himself, taking the form of a
slave…and…humbled himself and became obedient to the
point of death—even death on a cross.”
You
can see why this disarming path to peace takes faith. It goes against
the culture of ambitious competition and self-aggrandizement that our
society promotes. In contrast
to the culture of self-serving, spiritual disarmament looks
foolish. It looks self-defeating. It looks weak. And yet, as Gandhi said,
“There comes a time when an individual becomes irresistible and
his action becomes all-pervasive in its effect. This comes when he reduces himself
to zero.”
This
is what Paul saw in Christ. It
was Christ’s reducing himself to zero that released the power
that is still flowing two thousand years later through billions of
human lives and through this small church.
A
few days after my mother died my father suggested that I look at her
spiritual journal. She had
filled dozens of notebooks with her daily prayers and reflections on
scripture and on her life. I
pulled one out of the middle of the stack and opened it to a random
page and started reading, hoping to get her back and hear her wise,
loving voice again. The page
was from ten years before her death.
I
was surprised to see my own name on the page I opened. I was coming home for a visit, and
I was bringing my dog. My
mother was a cat person more than a dog person, but my father was a
dog person and was allergic to cats, so they compromised with about
as close as you can come to a cat in a dog. We had dachshunds, which she grew
fond of, but I learned from her journal that she never did like big,
long-haired dogs. In fact, she
was repulsed by them. And that
was what my dog was, a golden retriever.
In
her journal she was asking for God’s help to hide from me any
sign of her unhappiness and repulsion. She wanted me to feel nothing but
complete welcome and love and joy at my being home. I was heartsick as I read. It was excruciatingly painful to
think that I had caused her pain, and all the more so because I never
knew it. If I had, I would
gladly have left my dog with friends, rather than hurt my beloved
mother. I closed the notebook,
and her journals sit unopened to this day in a box in my house.
This
is a grief I have been carrying with me for twenty-two years. But this Mother’s Day, in
light of Paul’s words, I am thinking of it differently. Yes, I would never have wanted to
cause her unhappiness, but I realize now that her choice to empty
herself, to place my interests above her own, to humble herself and
be obedient to the law of love—that choice was the source of
her spiritual power. It was
what made her a great mother and a great spiritual teacher and a
great person. It was what made
my home what the Jewish tradition calls “a small holy
place.”
Gandhi
used to look for opportunities to put down his self-will, to deny
himself and place others’ interests above his own, because he
knew that each time he did he reduced himself a little closer to
zero, and the power of his love increased.
Spiritual
disarmament works like worldly armament. The more we do, the more powerful
we become. This is because
when we strip away our aggressiveness and our ambition and our
self-interest, we find below it the presence of God and Christ and
the Holy Spirit within us that Jesus promised we would find if we
loved and followed his way. As
Julia Ward Howe said, we each bear “the sacred impress not of
Caesar, but of God.”
That is what spiritual disarmament reveals. When our vision becomes all God
within us and within all things, the violence of modern life no
longer can seduce us, and we make the choices peace requires.
Gandhi
said, “My greatest weapon is mute prayer.” By mute prayer Gandhi meant
contemplative prayer, repeating a name of God over and over and
falling into inner stillness.
This was my mother’s greatest weapon, as well. She practiced the same Centering
Prayer as our Prayer of the Heart on Thursday afternoons. This is the great weapon of
spiritual disarmament, because it practices disarming ourselves of
the very things Paul lists. We
try to silence the part of our mind that is driven by selfish
ambition and conceit and self-interest. We try to empty ourselves of all
but the loving presence and transforming action of God. We try to humble our self will and
become obedient to God’s will, even to the point of death, even
to the point of being reduced to zero. The more we disarm, the more
powerful we become, because the Holy Spirit rises to fill our
emptiness and flow through us and make us instruments of God’s
peace.
Let
us practice mute prayer now, following our breath or repeating a name
of God in order to silence all our busy, ambitious, compulsive
thinking. Let us turn our life
and will over to God in trust.
Let us pray in silence…
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