The Absurdity of Advent: Enduring Peace
Catherine E. Williams, December 4, 2017
Princeton United Methodist Church, Princeton NJ
It’s all around us: civil war in Syria with its horrific scenes of human carnage in Aleppo, sectarian fighting in the Middle East as the Islamic State stakes out its battle territory, and right here in the U.S. we have the surreal example of a 500-yr-old human conflict: the standoff between Native Americans and state law enforcement at Standing Rock, in the Dakotas. This is the second Sunday of Advent and today we have what my mother would call the “royal nerve” to sing, pray, and preach about enduring peace. Last week Jana helped us explore the absurdity of hope, and today I am once again struck by how illogical and irrational this Advent theme is - of peace on earth and goodwill to all people. The contrast between the message of the gospel and our existential realities is a tension that preachers – if nobody else – are compelled to live in as we prepare to proclaim the Word of God to God’s people each week. And some weeks it’s really a strain. But both of this week’s Scripture readings tell us this tension between God’s Word and people’s lived reality is not new.
The Isaiah passage is such a comforting and familiar one to so many Christians, especially at this time of year when all the spotlights are on the nativity scene. Yet these words were originally uttered even as a nation prepared for war. It begins “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” This was no shadowy half-darkness Isaiah was talking about; the political situation into which he was speaking was pretty dreadful. There, in the southern kingdom of Judah, King Ahaz and his people were in a war zone, about to be crushed by two powerful enemies, one of whom was Syria; and the best survival strategy King Ahaz could come up with was to make a pact with the virtual devil, to appeal for help to the evil ruler of the Assyrian empire. As he is busy pulling his hair out, here comes the prophet, telling King Ahaz to keep calm and trust in God. Not only is Isaiah giving King Ahaz some pretty absurd advice, he waxes poetic in doing so. Really Isaiah? Poetry? Your response to these armed giants breathing fire down our necks, and the pending violence, oppression, and despair is a poem?
But Isaiah’s poetry is stirring up memory and calling forth powerful images of God’s mysterious deliverance in the past. He specifically reminds them of that pretty awesome and absurd victory over the Midianites where Gideon led an army with trumpets and pitchers containing torches!(You can read the story in Judges 6.)
Then Isaiah ends his poem of peace with words that have been immortalized in the work of George F. Handel, For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. In faithfulness to the biblical record I have to tell you Isaiah was not prophesying about the birth of Jesus in this poem. It was the gospel writer Matthew who adopted these words into his account of the birth of Christ. Yet I would say both Matthew and Handel made fair use of Isaiah’s words, if only because they capture the mystifying, amazing work of God in the world; they indicate the ability of God to break through as shining light into situations of deep human despair. These timeless words - about a child being born whose authority shall grow continually so that there shall be enduring peace, justice, and righteousness - were as true for Isaiah’s situation in the 8th century BCE as they were eight hundred years later when Jesus was born.
The political backdrop against which Jesus was born was also filled with war and human devastation. Rome ruled the world with a heavy imperial hand to ensure a peace referred to as the Pax Romana, a kind of peace enforced by military domination and constant threats of violent extinction to anyone or any group who even looked like they were thinking about defying Rome. Soldiers, armies, surveillance, census counts, crucifixions – these were all signs of the militarized first century Palestine into which Jesus was born as the angels appeared in the sky with what seem san absurd song about Peace on Earth and goodwill to all people.
The Romans are still exercising their ruthless control when Paul writes his letter to the Philippians (Phillippians 4: 4-9) As a matter of fact this letter, so full of affection and joy, is written from the confines of a dark Roman prison cell. Paul’s life isn’t peachy perfect when he urges his congregation in Philippi to rejoice in the Lord always. He is not a free man when he says to them “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Can’t you hear some critical thinker asking Paul, “Yeah, so tell me how that’s working for you there all locked up in your Roman prison cell? Tell me what difference this peace that passes all understanding has made in your condition.”?
It’s paradoxes and existential tensions like these why non-Christians have accused us of having an opiate religion. Because it doesn’t make sense that a small nation would not ask a bigger nation for help in a pending war, but choose rather to trust in God’s deliverance. It doesn’t make sense that a Messiah called the Prince of Peace would be born in a barn, grow up to be ridiculed and eventually killed within a bloody, political system of militarized occupation. It doesn’t make sense that three days after they killed this Prince of Peace he rose from the dead, seen by at least five hundred witnesses. And it doesn’t make sense that a highly educated Jewish scholar like Paul would risk his life, and suffer repeated imprisonment in order to preach and teach about this crucified Prince of Peace – a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. It all makes no sense unless…you are a person of bi-focal vision.
Those with uni-focal vision see life in a singular dimension. But as the people of God, born again by the Spirit of God, we have the capacity to see both as humans see, and as God sees. It’s not absurd to rejoice while you’re in a prison cell if you’ve encountered a God who has been known to use earthquakes to open prison doors and loose chains. It’s not absurd to sing songs of freedom as a slave if you’ve encountered a God who has given you freedom of mind and spirit that no bondage of body can take away. It’s not absurd to live a life of energized service to others while your body is fighting a terminal disease. It’s not absurd at all if you have the divine capacity to see both earthly and heavenly realities at the same time.
Yesterday I spent the better part of the day at a Jesuit retreat center in Lancaster, PA, at an Advent prayer retreat. There with over a hundred other men and women I was invited into stations of prayer and reflection that had been set up for us to experience the peace of God in different ways. One of my most powerful experiences was in a dark crypt with no light other than that which crept through the open entrance. This was a place of Holy Darkness. And what do you know? God was there! Not only through the sense of peace we found in that dark, hollowed out space, but in the connection we felt with one another as fellow dark dwellers. The speaker of the day shared movingly with us how she experienced God in the midst of her own prolonged darkness as she went through brain surgery; how she came to realize in a visceral way that God’s presence is so pervasive that there is no place it is not. Sounds much to me like the thoughts of the psalmist in Psalm 139:7-12.
And wherever God is there is a doorway to peace. How we find and enter that doorway is what the apostle seems to be suggesting in his letter to the Philippians. I don’t think we have to do everything he says all at once in order to find that path to peace in the midst of strife and conflict, but I think any one or any combination of his instructions can get us there.
First he says rejoice in the Lord – the “in the Lord” phrase is critical because our joy does not come from our circumstances, it comes from a wellspring that draws from our relationships – with God and with others.
Then he says let your gentleness be known to everyone. This is an outward-looking stance we take in being generous or magnanimous in our consideration of others; there’s something about being generously kind to others that makes for inner well-being and peace.
Do not worry about anything Paul says – this is easier said than done, especially for those of us with advanced degrees in worry. But worry – no matter how good we are at it - does not lead to peace. What does lead to peace the apostle says is to give the source of our worries to God through prayer, supplication, and thanksgiving. Then he says these things will generate the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding and will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
I had an epiphany of sorts about this peace that passes all understanding, at my retreat yesterday. We were introduced to the insights of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist from Harvard Medical School who suffered a major stroke, and who wrote about her experiential discoveries in a book called,My Stroke of Insight. This brain specialist writes, “peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.” Now that’s as contemporary an interpretation of Paul’s words as I’ve ever heard. Paul’s words: peace that passes understanding.
Taylor’s words: access peace by silencing the voice of our dominating left mind. It follows that if we are both left and right brain people, there is a way to use each side of our brain to know things, but when it comes to knowing enduring peace, according to Taylor the left brain needs to be silenced so the right hemisphere can tune into the presence of God all around us. It’s similar to bifocal vision, where to change our perception we look through a different part of the lens in our glasses.God’s vision may look absurd to some, but just as there is a way of knowing facilitated by each hemisphere of our brains – the left and the right, there is a way of perceiving, facilitated by each aspect of our nature – the human and the divine.
Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about – contemplate, reflect on, meditate upon, fill our minds with – these things. I encourage us all to make this passage part of our spiritual Advent practice this week: Philippians 4:4-9. It contains what one of my colleagues calls “the pieces of our peace.” See which of those pieces resonate with you at this time: tapping into our source of joy, being generous in our dealings with others, actively resisting worry, intentional prayer, supplication and thanksgiving, or times of reflection and inspiration.
We will always have war and conflict around us; it’s part of living in a world with other humans. War and destruction won’t go away until that ultimate age of God’s Kingdom, which our Advent waiting reminds us of. Yet in whatever way we respond to or engage the issue of human conflict – in the midst of our activism, our working for social justice and human rights, in the midst of any kind of darkness, my prayer for all of us this morning is that our ways of knowing and our ways of perceiving would integrate us, would fold us – in spite of ourselves - into God’s vision of enduring peacefor all of creation.In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.