Peace on You!

Learning Peace

Isaiah 2:1-5   Matthew 24:36– 44                                                 

Advent occurs in a time of gathering shade, as we enter into the winter season of frost and longer nights.  It asks us: How do we face the dark?   Spiritually, it is a time to resource ourselves to face the dusk around us and within us, and to turn toward the light and peace of God’s way.  Within us Advent sparks a longing for comfort, for warmth, for harmony and goodwill, in a world of violence, uncertainty and cold hard facts.   Advent calls us up toward a vision of God’s peace and of our coming Savior, whose light illuminates a better way.

A symbol of this is a star – the star that the wise sages followed that led them to a manger in a stable to witness a humble birth.   A star is a small gleam in the dark, a glimmer of hope, a tiny glow of warmth in a frigid landscape.   Jesus says that he is the light of the world, a single candle that illuminates a great space.   We carry this light within us in a cruel and heartless world.  We remember and trust the bright embers of our divine Parent, who watches over us and carries us in loving arms. 

Truthfully, we know that stars are light-years away, spinning through frigid voids of outer space, seemingly haphazard in their journeys and uncaring in their consuming radiance.   We know that we ourselves are on a watery, fragile planet, in an otherwise lifeless solar system, at the mercy of the random changes of time and space.  We are at the mercy of uncertain events, when hardship and accidents and cruelty are daily occurrences.   How can we feel at home in this universe?   How can we feel that someone cares? How do we foster inner peace in an environment that seems to have no mercy or kindness?

Some would say; too bad; that’s the way it is, live with it.  Eat, drink, and be merry.  But as people of faith, we long for more.  We seek a star of hope, of conviction that whispers to us that we are not alone, that love is at the heart of this universe.  Our loving Savior walks beside us.  Christ comes to share our heartache, our fear, and our deep distress.  As we face the darkness, we catch a glimmer of radiant warmth beyond the raw gloom and horror, and that reminds us of our heavenly home.  Perhaps we are deluded and foolish.  No, I suspect we feel in our hearts an eternal truth: that we are connected to a Source as vibrant, as warm, as luminous, and as brilliant as a star.  

I believe Jesus had this experience when he was growing up, and it forced him to confront the vicious and violent nature of this world.   Out of confrontation with evil, he came to a realization of God’s love and peace that transcends hatred and war.  God is greater and more powerful and loving than the dark.  Let me explain….

The biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan, emphasizes that to understand the teachings of Jesus, and even the stories of his birth, we need to have a picture of the matrix of history into which he was born.  This is not just background, pictures at the back of the stage; this is about influences and powerful forces at work.   For example, you can’t get a clear take on Abraham Lincoln just by hearing stories of growing up in a log cabin; you have to learn about slavery and the approaching civil war.   You can’t get a good sense of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. without knowing about segregation, racism, and the civil rights struggle.  In a similar way, we can’t really understand Jesus’ ministry and teaching without having some familiarity with the world into which he was born.  

         Jesus’ world was impoverished, violent and oppressive.   It was ruled with brutality and greed by the Roman Empire and their proxies.  Roman rulers, like Herod and his sons, extracted raw materials, food, and taxes to send to Rome, from poor peasants and fisherfolk, who had little extra to contribute.  Jesus saw them kill his mentor and teacher, John the Baptist.  Roman legions were called in several times to restore order, after major uprising by Jewish inhabitants, who became fed up with the cruel oppression.  One that must have particularly influenced Jesus and his community occurred after the death of King Herod the Great in 4 BCE.   The region most affected by this rebellion was Galilee.  Four Roman legions under General Varus marched in from the Parthian border, to punish the rebels.   Here is John Crossan’s description of what happened:

“Jesus was born, as best we can reconstruct the date, around 4 BCE with all of that strife as natal background.  ‘At Sepphoris,’ according to the historian, Josephus’s Jewish War, a rebel named Judas ‘broke open the royal arsenals, and having armed his companions, attacked the other aspirants to power.’  And the result?  ‘Varus at once sent a detachment of his army into the region of Galilee…and routed all who opposed him, captured and burned the city of Sepphoris and reduced its inhabitants to slavery.’”  

“Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a tiny village about four miles – a walk of one and a half hours – over the ridge and across the valley floor from Sepphoris.  What do you think happened to Nazareth when Varus’s legionary troops struck nearby Sepphoris in 4 BCE?  Josephus does not give any detailed description.  But a town just across the Jordan, Gerasa, had this happen: They ‘put to the sword a thousand of the youth, who had not already escaped, made prisoners of women and children, gave his soldiers license to plunder the property, and then set fire to the houses and advanced against the surrounding villages.  The able-bodied fled, the feeble perished, and everything left was consigned to the flames.’” 

“In Nazareth around the time Jesus was born, men, women, and children who did not hide successfully would have been, respectively, killed, raped, and enslaved.  Those who survived would have lost everything.  I speculate, therefore, that the major stories Jesus would have heard while growing up in Nazareth would have been about ‘the year the Romans came’… At some chosen moment in Jesus’ youth, did Mary take him by the hand and bring him up to the top of the Narareth ridge, pointing out Sepphoris, and talk about ‘the year of the Romans’?  From all such talk, what did the young Jesus decide about God, Rome, resistance, and violence?” 

Crossan leaves us with this question:  “How does Jesus deal with living in such a violent and oppressive world?   What I believe, is that he came up with a very creative solution: non-violent resistance, represented in loving, rather than destroying, one’s enemies.”

Jesus faced the darkness; he confronted the savage brutality of Roman power and the poverty and disruption and despair that stem from oppression.   His response was to counter with love, peace, and communities of healing and hope.   It was a very creative solution indeed.  It is still a creative solution in our world – so caught up in a fascination with violence as the answer to our problems.  As we enter into the Advent season, let us look toward the light – to the small stars of hope that glimmer around us.   They can easily be missed in the dazzling lights of the mall or on TV or on our computer screens.   Small stars of kindness, peace and sharing can easily be eclipsed.  But they are there.  They are the “Kingdom” that Jesus is building here on earth. 

Isaiah speaks of this from 700 BCE, when he reveals God’s vision of a time when “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
 and their spears into pruning-hooks; 
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
 neither shall they learn war any more.” (Is 2:5)  We have a vision of peace that calls us to a new way.

Here is an example of this star of hope from Shane Claiborne from the magazine Sojourners: “As Mary and Joseph celebrated their newborn baby, other moms and dads were in utter agony because their kids had just been murdered.  Jesus entered the world in a posture of absolute vulnerability – an unarmed, innocent child during a time of tremendous violence.  In Jesus’ time, too, there was a terrible massacre, an unspeakable act of violence when King Herod (actually the Romans) slaughtered children throughout the land.  The church now remembers this as the massacre of the Holy Innocents.

So, let’s imagine…what would the Prince of Peace say today to a nation where these things are true?  Fact:  More than 10,000 people die from gun-related homicides each year in the US – that’s one Sandy Hook massacre every day.   Fact: There are nearly 90 guns for every 100 civilians, making us the most heavily armed society in the world.   Fact: after car accidents, gun violence is the leading cause of death among young people.

Everything in our world, just as in Jesus’ time, argues that we must use violence to protect the innocent from violence – the very thing Jesus came to help us unlearn through his non-violent life, death on the cross, and resurrection.   Jesus was a violence interrupter.  He interrupted the ‘myth of redemptive violence,’ the troubling assumption that we can use violence to get rid of violence or that we can destroy a life to save a life.   He also taught his followers to be holy interrupters.

One example of this was when I joined folks for our first ‘weapon conversion.’  A welder buddy of mine took an AK-47 and transformed it – before our eyes! – into a shovel and a rake.   Soon after, we heard about RAWtools, a group of Mennonite black-smiths in Colorado, who melt down donated guns to make trowels and such.  Inspired by Isaiah’s vision of ‘beating swords into plows,’ these metalworkers decided to turn guns into gardening equipment.  They chose the name RAWtools because they want to ‘turn WAR backward and forge peace.’

There is something special about seeing the transformation happen before your eyes, about hearing the sound of the forge, the white heat and sparks, the pounding of the metal.  Something therapeutic happens when you take a hammer to the barrel of a gun.   What would Jesus do?  He’d keep the sparks flying.”

Let’s keep an eye out for the sparks of hope, the tiny stars in the dark, that remind us that there is hope, that there can be peace, that we are not lost and alone and spinning in cold, dark void.  We are not meant to be victims of violence and war, or to surrender to random cruelty.   As we take communion today, let’s feel the spirit of love here in this place, and know that this is how we are meant to live.  God is here.  God loves us.  We are embraced by the light of the Bethlehem star.   Amen.