December 7, 2008 Second Sunday after Advent (Peace)
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8
The hymn we will sing in a few minutes begins with this verse:
Comfort, comfort ye my people,
Speak ye peace, thus saith our God;
Comfort those who sit in darkness
Mourning ’neath their sorrows’ load.
Speak ye to Jerusalem
Of the peace that waits for them;
Tell her that her sins I cover;
And her warfare now is over.
That hymn is based on the passage from the prophet Isaiah we just heard.
When we think of what it means to speak prophetically, we tend to think of fiery
diatribes meant to afflict the comfortable. But just as often the role of the prophet
is to comfort the afflicted, to comfort “those who sit in darkness mourning ’neath
their sorrows’ load.” Just as often as “Speak ye warning,” God says, “Speak ye
peace.”
As Christmas approaches, the darkness and the weight of sorrows can grow
hard to bear. Many of us struggle with depression or grief this time of year; in
addition, as we focus on Advent hope, we can feel more deeply pained by poverty
and war and all the forms of violence we do to one another and to the earth itself.
Many of us need comfort during Advent. We need to hear the prophet
speak peace. As someone once said, “It is no manner of good preaching peace
unless we preach the things that make for peace.” Sometimes even a prophet’s
comfort is uncomforting because it points out that we are looking for peace in the
wrong places. If it were soldiers and bombs and enormous military budgets that
made for world peace, we would have it now. And if it were laws, jails and police
forces that made for peace, we would have it now. And if entertainment or drugs,
or wealth or power, or popularity or fame that made for peace, then People
Magazine and the National Enquirer and all the rags and TV shows that document
the heartaches of the rich and famous would be out of business because the rich
and famous would have peace. We are surrounded by overwhelming evidence that
force does not make for peace, and that material things beyond sufficient
necessities do not make for peace.
Whether it is peace in the world or nation or town or home or heart, it all
needs to build up from within, rather than be enforced or bestowed from outside.
The things that make for peace are themselves made out of building blocks of
peace, not building blocks of violence or agitation. The greatest leaders of the
20th Century knew this. President Roosevelt and President Eisenhower both had
learned it by their final speeches. President Kennedy knew it well. The Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. practiced it. And in all history no one revealed
more powerfully than Jesus that the end of peace must come by means of peace
and outer peace must begin with inner peace.
Much of what Jesus said and did was original, but he also drew from his
Jewish heritage. He found plenty in the Hebrew Scriptures that makes for peace,
starting with the two great commandments that he lifted up out of the law of
Moses: to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; and to love our
neighbor as our self. That love, truly practiced, would be all we would need to
make peace on every level from heart to home to world.
Christ’s nonviolent, love-based way of peace is constantly compromised by
Christians who call it impractical. It is hard to argue against that. It certainly
appeared to be impractical for Jesus, who died on a cross because of it. But if the
cross were the end of the story, there would be no comfort in Advent, there would
be no light that shines in the darkness. Christ’s way of peace requires us to trust
that within and beyond the darkness, there is light, and within and beyond the
cross there is life, and within and beyond our confrontations with a violent and
unjust world there is always love. Christ’s way asks us to trust that the light and
life and love of God make up the most powerful force in the universe, and are at
the core of all that makes for peace.
Trust in God’s highest power is one of the cornerstones of peace; courage is
another and perhaps that first, as William Sloane Coffin said, because it takes
courage to do something as seemingly irrational as trusting in God. But how often
have we felt our hearts torn by fear or doubt or by wounded love and found peace
only when we let go and handed the situation over entirely to God? “I’ve got the
peace that passeth understanding down in my heart,” is a song some of us grew up
singing, and that means the irrational peace that comes through trusting in the
irrational act of surrendering our control to God.
This is the comfort John the Baptist promises in today’s reading from the
beginning of Mark. He said, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after
me…I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
The Holy Spirit is the higher or deeper power that rises from within us when
we hand over our life and our will to God’s care. The Holy Spirit has a few
different gifts in the scriptures. One is to inspire and guide. Another is to
strengthen and empower. But another is to comfort. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the
Comforter in the King James translation. The Spirit may guide and empower us
into confrontations with forces that will crucify us, but within and beyond all our
trials and sorrows will always be comfort and what makes for peace in the heart.
No one escapes trials and sorrows, but those who open to the Spirit may find peace
within them.
Today’s Isaiah passage has one of those uncomfortable comforts in it that
prophets tend to give. The passage begins, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says
your God.” Then a little later, “A voice says, ‘Cry out!’” And Isaiah asks, “What
shall I cry?” And the voice tells him to cry out, “All people are grass, their
constancy is like the flower of the field….The grass withers, the flower fades; but
the word of God will stand forever.”
With good news like that, who needs bad news? It seems like strange
comfort to hear that our life will be short. But truth is one of the things that makes
for peace. And the truth is that life is short, that people are like grass or the flower
of the field. But within and beyond that truth is a greater truth, which is that “the
word of God will stand forever.” We find in God a life that is eternal, and a love
that feeds us like a flock of sheep and gathers us like lambs in its arms and gently
leads us through life and death alike. Within and beyond the truth of the suffering,
loss and deaths that are so poignant during Advent is the greater truth of light and
life and love that are always present and always still to come. The heart that looks
at the first truth of our limited life and keeps looking through it to the greater truth
of limitless life in God is a heart that has a peace that nothing on earth can shake
for long.
Our Advent and Christmas Eve services are full of words and music and
rituals that we return to every year. We can find great comfort in them in part
because they connect us to people and places and times that we have loved. But
another part of their comfort is that their return every year reminds us of a higher,
deeper, greater source of comfort we can count on and turn to throughout our
lives.
The more we practice turning to the Spirit’s source of light and life and
love, the more peace we will have in our heart, and the more resilient our heart will
be in regaining peace when it has been disturbed. Turning again and again to the
Spirit moment by moment is the greatest thing that makes for peace in the heart,
and it leads us to the kindness and compassion, the justice and mercy, the wisdom
and courage that make for peace in the home and in the town and in the nation and
in the world.
So let us look now to that limitless source that we can find in the silence of
our limited hearts. Let us have the courage to trust that if we let go of our thoughts
and surrender our will to God’s care, peace and all the things that make for peace
will flow out of that choice. Let us pray in silence, opening to God’s presence
within us here and now…
Sermon 12/07/2008