2nd Sunday of Advent (PM Contemporary Service—out of Lectionary
rotation)
December 7, 2003
Year C
Title: Do Not Be Afraid
Focus: We seek peace in a world of war, but like the shepherds we are
afraid of what we have asked for—peace within ourselves, and in
others. Why? Because like those same shepherds, we don’t recognize
the very gift we have been asking for when it comes to us.
OK, so how many people have seen a A Charlie Brown Christmas?
Show of hands, please. For those of you who haven’t seen it…well, I don’
t know if you know it or not, but you’ve been living in a cave all these
years, and it time to say good-bye to the wolves that have raised you.
This is the kind of Christmas special that EVERYONE has seen, and
believe me, if I’ve seen it you’ve got to have seen it! The scene we just
saw with Linus saying the Gospel text—classic stuff—and I just love the
incredibly innocent voice of Linus—he gets it, he gets it, and that’s
probably why it we love it so much, though it still is hard to remember to
get the truth of Christmas in the midst of holiday season. For us
preacher types, this is a busy, busy time, as it is probably for you—you’d
think we were working retail—think of us as doing spiritual retail—trying
to remind people to buy the only product really worth buying and keeping
in this world, which, of course, is the living Christ we meet over and over
again on Christmas Day.
I love this story for a lot of reasons, but mostly its because I just love
Charlie Brown…I actually a Charlie Brown wallpaper on my computer,
with Snoopy and Charlie looking out on a lake with their backs to me.
And to me, Charlie Brown is just so real—he’s always trying to find his
place in the world, whether it’s baseball or trying to get the attention of
the red-headed girl, or just trying to get the respect of Snoopy, his own
pet dog! There is something about Charlie Brown’s incredibly sincere
search for something in this life and this world that I think just touches a
lot of us—he feels real, and delicately human, and humanness and
realness are something a lot of people value in this world, including
myself. Charlie Brown, he is looking for peace, I would say, peace with
himself and with others—I know that’s probably stretching it a bit, but in
the end, I think Charlie Brown is searching for the one thing we’re all
looking for—peace with others, and but peace within us, that place and
emotional space within us where we .
When I was a younger pastor in my first parish in Spokane, Washington—
(Find pic of me in Spokane)—I had a woman come see me to talk about
some struggles that she was having in her life. She wasn’t a member or
even an attendee of the church I pastored, but we had gotten to know
each other in the community through various community events. She
had been going through a rough time in her life, she told me, and after
telling me of some of the pain that she had recently experienced, she
said, “you know, I know that God just wants me to be happy, I just know
it! I just don’t how to get to that happiness.” And it was one of those
moments in my life where I think I had my spiritual radar on—it doesn’t
happen that often, but sometimes, sometimes, when I listen, I can catch a
few truths here and there—it struck me that I wasn’t sure that what she
thought God wanted for her was quite true—actually, I said to her, “You
know, to be honest, I don’t know if God wants you to be happy, and I’m
pretty sure that we’re not promised happiness. Actually, we’re not
promised happiness—we’re actually promised peace, which is something
else altogether” In John 14:27, Jesus says to his disciples that he leaves
them peace, not as the world gives, but as he gives, a very different kind
of peace that stills the troubled soul. (Peace I leave with you; my peace I
give to you.) And what I think I meant by that is that you and I both know
that happiness comes and goes, from moment to moment, day by day,
even year by year, and it’s obvious that we can’t ever be happy all the
time—there are just sad and painful things that come to us in life—
people we love leave us, in body or in relationships, we lose a job we
love, we look at the painful ending of a friendship, or even the ripping
apart of our family. That’s hard stuff—and Christ never said that if we
followed him we wouldn’t have to experience the hard stuff in life. I
mean, if Christ, this God in human flesh, had to experience the hard stuff
like the cross, then I suspect we’re not going to be spared the hard stuff
either.
What we are promised, of course, is that peace, that peace that God can
give us deep within us that will make all those awful things bearable in
our lives. What we are promised is peace, not happiness, and you know,
we are actually promised the things we need, not necessarily the things
we want. In the end, there are some things that only the awful stuff can
teach us, and so the hard stuff must be gotten through, the crosses
have to be experienced, so that we can take what we need from that
experience and go onto a deeper relationship with God, or with some
other person, or with our family. The great thing about God is that get
us better than we get ourselves, and God knows what we need—and
what we need more than anything is peace, more than happiness, we
need peace.
And so it’s offered to us, this peace that the Advent candle we just lit
earlier symbolizes, and the peace that is offered to the shepherd in the
fields, and to all the world. And yet so often we don’t embrace it, we don’
t welcome it—maybe we even keep searching for happiness, or we keep
looking for other’s respect, through money or power, or whatever. The
peace is there, the peace within that is promised to us, and yet we keep
walking away from it—or maybe even running away from it, if you’ve ever
been like me. You know, I actually think the reason that we don’t
embrace it, why we don’t claim it, the peace that is offered to us in that
field thousands of years ago outside the city of Bethlehem, is because
we are actually afraid of it—so many of us are afraid of what we don’t
know. The reality is that we spend so much of our lives waging war that
we don’t recognize peace when it offered to us.
Let me explain, before you write me off as a nutcase. You know, I think
for most of us, we spend a lot of our lives waging a kind of war, but it’s a
war that has nothing to do with guns and ammo, army divisions and
tactical ground strategies—it is an emotional or spiritual war that we fight
within ourselves that seems to have no end. We spend all our time
waging war against ourselves, because, for whatever complicated and
mysterious reasons, we cannot accept ourselves as we are at this very
moment—maybe its trying to better ourselves by working out in the gym
to feel better about our bodies, or maybe even in having sex that may
not be life-giving for us, or maybe we even wage war against ourselves
by losing ourselves in a pool of drugs or alcohol or sex, Or maybe we
even literally make war against other people we don’t know—these
Iraqis, or Afghanistan’s who have been created by the same God who
created us, and yet we keep being told by Christ that we can have
peace. The war, literally with others, or even within us, it just keeps
raging—and we can’t figure out why we can’t embrace, we can’t welcome
what the angels said was being brought to us by Christ on Christmas
Day—peace, peace within us and peace outside of us. At some point, a
deep disappointment and cynicism sets in within so many of our souls,
and we stay there—at least the emotional and spiritual war we’ve been
waging against ourselves or even against others is something we know—
it’s no surprise, so we settle for war when we are promised peace.
And that is the problem, isn’t it?—we settle for war because we at least
know how to wage emotional and spiritual wars within ourselves—and
ironic thing about it is that we usually almost always wage war against
own selves, more than even other people. We go back to the same old
habits we know are going to destroy us—the same type of relationships
we’ve had before, the same types of jobs that have almost destroyed us
before, the same type of self-hating habits that have already broken us
over and over again. Why do we wage war on ourselves? Because we
know war, we’ve done war…but peace, well, peace, the inner peace
Christ brings, that’s something we don’t so easily recognize, its not so
familiar, and so, instead, we go back to what we know—it’s the same
reason an abused spouse goes back to their abusing partner—I hate
this, we say, but at least it offers no surprises, I know what I am getting
Its insanity—but war is like that, its insane, and its always been like that.
The devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know—or the war we
know feels better than the peace we do not know. War, competition,
beating up others or beating up ourselves—we are told that this really is
the way the world is, and we ought not to try to fight it, or we’re going to
get run over. And yet no matter how much we fight and how many times
we may think we win, in the end you quickly find out there have never
been any winners in war, wars waged in the inside of us, or wars waged
in the office place, or wars waged against our lovers, or even waged in
the lands of Iragi or Afghanistan—in war, there are really only losers,
and in the end, the only competition is avoiding being the biggest loser.
The other piece of all of this, I think, is that we don’t recognize peace
when we see it, we don’t know what it looks like and so we don’t embrace
it because we think it looks like something else—I mean, wasn’t that the
problems thousands of years ago, in the land of ancient Israel when
Jesus arrived on the scene? They thought a Messiah was supposed to
look like a military ruler, a king who would kick Roman butt, and free
Israel from yet another world empire who that had come in and
conquered it—this pattern was getting really old for the people of Israel.
Yet, here comes Jesus, the prince of peace, and he fails all their
expectations—Messiah’s are not supposed to look like this. Well, it’s the
same thing—I think we just don’t get what peace looks like, or at least we
don’t recognize the kind of peace Christ is offering us. We don’t get the
packaging peace comes in, and just because it doesn’t look like what we
thought peace was supposed to look like, we just pass it by—even
though it is the promise the angels and Christ gives to us over and over
again—peace, I give you, peace, he says to us, and yet, over and over
again we just don’t get it when it is offered to us.
Why? Because we think peace is a lack of conflict, and yet that is not
what Christ seems to be saying—after all, he was in conflict with a lot of
people all of his life, until the bitter end. Actually, having peace is not a
world without conflict—it is a world where being in conflict doesn’t mean
that we can’t see God in the ones we are in conflict with, and that
changes completely the way we struggle with them over the differences
we have with them. Peace means seeing God in others, and knowing
that we cannot wage war against those who have as much of God in
them as we do. How could we wage war against God?
And somehow we’ve gotten this idea that peace within us, the peace we
sometimes admire in others, that sense of serenity that some people
seem to carry with them—we somehow think that peace inside of us
means that there are no shadows or troubled places inside of us—we
sometimes think that if we have peace, there is only sunshine in our soul,
and no shadows, no dark places. Actually, peace isn’t the lack of
shadows in our souls or living life with a spaced-out grin—we know Christ
didn’t live like that, just check out the Garden of Gethsemane—no,
peace is actually is knowing that the shadows exist within us and yet
knowing that our very struggle with these sides hard, difficult sides of
ourselves is proof of the great light within our souls, the Holy Spirit within
us, the very presence of the living God within us. To know the less-than-
pleasant sides of ourselves is also to begin the process of forgiving
ourselves for these shadows, and to be healed from them. And
because we know those shadows are within us, I think we are less apt to
judge the shadows of others, the stuff we don’t like in others, and then
we can forgive the shadows of others, especially when they touch us,
and we can make our peace with them, even in the midst of our
differences and our struggles with each other. If we know the shadows in
our own souls, the troubles that haunt us, the you can forgive yourself
for those same shadows, the meanness and pettiness so often within us,
we’re less likely to demonize and condemn the souls of others, which was
never our job in the first place. Peace happens when we see ourselves
for who we are, people full of light and shadows, and we make peace
with ourselves, counting on God to transform us from the inside us, and
then we are free to make our peace with the shadows of others—our
partners, our family, the people at work, whomever.
You know, the amazing thing is that peace is always there for us, being
offered to us in ways that we don’t usually recognize—we think having
peace is living life without the hard stuff, but its actually living life FULLY
knowing yourself within the hard stuff—being able to go through it all and
yet finding yourself, finding the truth about yourself, good and bad, in the
midst of it all—and if you know ourselves more deeply, how could we not
come to realize the incredible ways that God knows us and loves us—
and how could we not come to the incredible realization of the incredible
grace that we’ve received from God! If we stop waging war on ourselves,
and we instead give ourselves what God has so clearly given us in
Christ, which is grace, how could we not respond to that grace by making
peace with others, by stopping the war we’ve waged against those who
have done us wrong, ?! You know, if God is at peace with us, if God has
seen us, inside and out, and yet is still at peace with us, and has chosen
to be at peace with us, how could we not do the same with ourselves and
with others?
Charlie Brown, in that wonderful special, I think he gets it…he makes
peace with himself and because he has made peace with himself,
because he sees himself for who really he is, the less-than-perfect
baseball player, and a not-so-great Christmas pageant director, he can
make peace with the imperfection of others, and so that peace can
happen within him, and it can happen with others, those who so often let
him down. In the end, what we hunger for, what we desire more than
anything is what the Christmas angels promise—to know and be known,
to have the peace within ourselves of being known by God, and the
peace that comes from knowing ourselves, in all our beauty and frailty,
and then passing along that peace to a world that needs a lot more
peace than war, a lot more grace than judgment. Behold, I bring you
tidings of great joy—see quote from movie
