December 10, 2006, Second Sunday after Advent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Luke 1:68-79, 3:1-6
Every year much of our society begins celebrating Christmas the day
after Thanksgiving, or even earlier. Every year this trend seems to be more
widespread, materialistic and gaudy. Every year I stand up here and urge you
to resist the temptation to rush into a Christmas mode. I urge you to spend
time in Advent first.
To be in Advent means to heed “the voice of one crying out in the
wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’” To be in Advent means to await
the coming of the light, to spend time in the tension of expectation and longing,
and to feel the subtle movements of hope, peace, love and joy that we can
perceive only in darkness and stillness. To prepare the way of the Lord means
to open our hearts to all that and wait.
It is important at least to try to slow down and to try to take Advent
spiritually and to try to experience its hope and peace if for no other reason,
because if we do not try, we will not feel how far our life has strayed from the
ideal.
This past week I was trying to practice what I preach, and thank God,
because otherwise I might not have noticed one morning how, before I was
even fully awake, I was thinking about all I had to get done. I already was
tense and compulsively making lists in my head before my feet touched the
floor.
Compulsivity is the opposite of Advent. Compulsion and obsession and
addiction are the opposite of the life Jesus taught us to live. They are warning
signs that some part of our life is out of balance and not in the sacred way that
leads to peace. They are exactly the kinds of conditions that Jesus came not to
judge but to forgive and heal and restore to God. All he asks of us is that we
repent—that we be willing to change our heart and mind. But first we have to
recognize that we have some things to repent. Trying to be at peace during
Advent in our violent, manic society shows us exactly what we need to repent,
both individually and collectively.
Today we cannot say the word peace without soon thinking about the
Middle East, and we need to think about it more and in new ways. Last week I
urged you to allow your hopes to be more extreme—hoping not merely for an
end to war in Iraq or in Israel, but hoping for abolition of all war. If we try to
take seriously the complete, pure vision of Jesus Christ, if we try to live up to
the absolute nonviolence of his ideals, then we feel how unacceptable any war
is, and we see perfectly clearly that war and militarism and violence on any
level can never, ever accomplish the ideal peace of Christ.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, and we need to repeat again and again,
“Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to
a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light
can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
King’s words are true both on a personal and on a global scale.
Violence cannot drive out violence. Only nonviolence can do that. We will
not have peace in the world until Christians repent the disastrous path of
compromise we have been on for the past fifteen hundred years and return to
the original vision of the first several hundred years of Christianity, refusing to
participate in any way in violence and refusing to cooperate with or accept the
benefits of a society that depends on it.
This is the extreme hope for the extreme peace that Jesus calls us to
work toward. Yet it sounds crazy in our society. Is that the fault of Jesus or
the fault of our society? The first great Christian desert father, the monk
Anthony, said in the 3rd Century, “A time is coming when people will go mad,
and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack that person saying
‘You are mad, you are not like us.’” Who is insane today? The proponents of
our society’s violence, or the proponents of Christ’s nonviolence? Which kind
of madness do you choose for yourself?
The latest issue of Northern Woodlands magazine reviews two recent
important books. One is by a man who has taught many members of this
congregation, Tom Wessels, entitled The Myth of Progress: Toward a
Sustainable Future. In it he explains how our civilization is operating on false
assumptions that break basic physical and ecological laws of nature. He argues
logically that we cannot sustain our civilization if we do not repent and observe
these unchangeable laws. Basic systems will break down, as we see happening
with our global climate. He shows how we have to change the way we think if
we are to survive. We have to align our thinking with the way that nature’s
laws work, what we in church might call the sacred way or the way of God’s
realm.
The other book is by Gus Speth, entitled Red Sky at Morning: America
and the Crisis of the Global Environment. Speth is a long time environmental
scholar and activist, Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
at Yale, former chief executive officer of the United Nations Development
Programme, and the former advisor to several United States Presidents. His
book describes today’s global environmental challenges, looks at the
international response to them, analyzes the root causes of the crisis, and gives
strategies for making a transition to global sustainability. Speth believes that
we must enter a new era if we are to survive, and that the most fundamental
change we must make is a “transition in culture and consciousness.”
You see, it really matters that we observe a true Advent. It really
matters that we come to church and especially get as many children here as we
can. It really is important that we spend time every week learning and thinking
about and practicing the teachings of Jesus Christ. It matters because the most
important work we have to do on this planet right now is to make a transition
in our culture and our consciousness, to transform the way we think
collectively and as individuals. The teachings of Jesus Christ describe the
sacred way of peace and sustainability—the attitudes toward other people and
toward material goods that we need to have if the human race is to survive.
The traditional practices of Advent are meant to prepare us to follow that way
by changing the way we think and feel and act.
The modern psychological field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
teaches us that how we feel is based on how we think. If we can change the
way we think, we will change the way we feel. If we can change the way we
feel, we will change the way we act. Advent is designed to adjust our thinking
and feeling and acting into the way of peace.
Every year on this Sunday I quote the Taoist saying,
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.
We should add another line to that: no peace in the heart without peace
in the mind. It is no good telling ourselves we must have a peaceful heart if
our way of thinking is stuck in the violence of compulsion and obsession and
addiction. It is no good complaining about our culture and trying to reform it if
we do not first change people’s consciousness beginning with our own.
We are caught in a spiral of violence in our world with its base in the
individual mind and cycling up from there through tense and divided homes to
nations at war to a world convulsing from the violence of our toxic way of life.
We cannot escape that spiral without changing its base—the way we think.
We should not feel ashamed of the way we think. It is not our fault.
We have been shaped by a culture that runs on compulsion, obsession and
addiction. It spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on advertising
designed to keep us feeling insatiable desire and a sense of incompleteness so
that we will buy whatever someone wants to sell us.
What is more, it may be only human, it may be only natural to be
violent. Many primitive societies and other species exhibit violence, as do our
children. I remember watching my nephews playing with blocks at a family
Christmas one year. The three year violently grabbed the blocks that the two
year old was playing with, and turned away and began playing with them
himself. The two year old blinked a few times, and then calmly picked up the
entire box of blocks and dumped them on his older brother’s head.
Violence begets violence, but the myth that violence fixes things is
embedded deep in our collective consciousness. To make the change we must
make now to survive, we need not to go back to a purer, more primitive time,
but rather we need to advance to a higher spiritual plane. The yearning for
peace is a yearning for a more advanced stage of social evolution. We have the
yearning because it is where God designed us to go. It is a yearning for the
advent of the realm of God on earth.
We are still waiting for the complete fulfillment of Zechariah’s
prophecy that we heard in the Gospel of Luke today. He said, “By the tender
mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to
those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the
way of peace.” The dawn from on high began with the birth of Jesus Christ. It
will be complete when we have followed where the way of peace leads.
The ancient practices of Advent are what we need to bring the dawn
from on high to full light, beginning in our own hearts and spreading to the
world. The Rabbi Abraham Heschel said that those who do not make
sacrifices on the altar of peace will be forced to make sacrifices on the altar of
war. It is up to us to decide. Will we sacrifice our compulsive busyness in
order to gain Advent stillness? Will we sacrifice our instant gratification in
exchange for preparing and waiting? Will we sacrifice our glittering material
addictions and choose instead the spiritual darkness that allows us to see the
coming light of Christ? Will we let the dawn from on high guide our feet into
the way of peace? Our children wait for our answer to know what kind of
future we are willing to give them.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 12/10/2006