|
|
|
|
A Vision Of Peace In
A Time Of War External peace begins with world peace. Scripture Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-6, 13 A sermon preached by When I need deep theological insight, I still rely on the old Peanuts comic strip. Though the strip and its creator are now gone, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the rest of the gang continue to give me insight into the human condition. One December, Lucy came up to Charlie Brown and said, “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown. Since it’s this time of year, I think we ought to bury our past differences and try to be kind.” Charlie Brown replied, “Why does it have to be just this season? Why can’t we be kind and forgiving all year long?” Lucy looked at him and exclaimed, “What do I look like? Some kind of a fanatic?” In another strip, Lucy was chasing Charlie Brown, shouting, “I’ll get you, Charlie Brown! I’ll knock your block off!” Charlie Brown suddenly stopped running, turned around to face Lucy and said, “Wait a minute! Hold everything! We can’t carry on like this! We have no right to act this way. The world is filled with problems—people hurting other people, people not understanding other people. Now if we as children can’t solve what are relatively minor problems, how can we ever expect to…” Suddenly Lucy interrupted Charlie Brown with a swift punch to the jaw, knocking him out. She said, “I had to hit him quick; he was beginning to make sense!” It is hard to make sense out of the conflict in our world, isn’t it? Everywhere we turn, there seems to be some kind of a struggle going on. Our nation is at war in Afghanistan. The Israelis and Palestinians have escalated their hostilities again. In our communities, our schools, our homes, and even in our hearts, there is anger, bitterness, and conflicts. We are at war. Where is the peace God promised us? Didn’t he promise us peace? Can’t we just have it for a little while at Christmastime? There has never been a world without conflict, ever since the fall of creation with the first sin in the Garden of Eden. There have always been hostilities, and there always will be, until the Kingdom of God comes. But into this world of conflict, the prophet Isaiah comes with a vision of peace. He sees the day when “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand in the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:6-9) When everybody knows the Lord, then there will be peace. Isaiah himself lived in a time of political and cultural turmoil. It was no better when Jesus came along. The Romans occupied Palestine and ruled it with a strong and corrupt hand. The people were suffering, and they longed for assurance in the midst of their trouble. Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (John 14:27) The early church faced the hostility of persecution from the Jews and conflict with a pagan culture. Yet Paul gave them this assurance: “By steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus…May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:5-6, 13) The witness of Scripture is clear: peace is a possibility. How do we make it a probability? Peace is the vision of the preferred future. How can we make it a reality in our lives? First, REPENTANCE. Finding peace starts when we repent before God. We confess our sins and turn from our evil ways and return to God and his way. This is one of the major themes of Advent—repentance. We cleanse our hearts before God to get ready for the coming of his Son. That’s why we usually remember the ministry of John the Baptist during Advent. He came before Jesus, calling the nation to repentance. Who can forget that picture of John, clothed in animal skins, preaching by the Jordan River, baptizing sinners left and right? When he saw the religious establishment showing up, he really caught on fire: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able to raise up from these stones children of Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire!” (Matthew 3:7-10) These were some of the leading men in the country, and John was telling them to get their spiritual act together and to get back on the right track with God. That took some courage! But that’s what it would take for peace. I believe before we know peace in our land again, we will have to get back on track with God as well. When the terrorists struck New York and Washington on September 11, a great cry went up to God, and it should have. But my question is kind of like Charlie Brown’s; why had we not been crying out all the time? Why hadn’t we cried out to God as pornography became an accepted form of entertainment? Why hadn’t we cried out while drug abuse and violence overtook our schools? Why hadn’t we cried out when the divorce and teenage pregnancy and abortion rates skyrocketed? Were we afraid we might be considered fanatics? It’s time to say in America what John the Baptist said to Israel: “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2) I am so hopeful for our country today, that we will turn again to God, and that out of the great tragedy of September 11, not only will we cleanse the world of terrorism, but we will also cleanse our hearts before God. Last Tuesday, as we were praying in our sanctuary here for the National Day of Reconciliation, there were 30 Senators and 100 Representatives praying in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D. C. That’s a sign that things may be different; that’s a sign that hearts are changing. Before our world or our nation can find peace, we will have to turn to God. It will take individual repentance to make repentance happen on a cultural scale. I read a story this week about a man who woke up early one Sunday morning, and he decided he would enjoy just getting up and having some time to himself before the rest of the family woke up. But as soon as he had brewed a pot of coffee and sat down with the paper, his five-year-old daughter came down the stairs, wide awake. The man tried to send her back to bed, but she was up and ready to go. So he looked down at the newspaper and got an idea. There was a picture of the world on the front page, so he got a pair of scissors and cut it out. Then he cut the picture up into pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle, and told his little girl to take the picture into the den and see if she could put it back together. He figured putting the world together ought to buy him a half hour at least. Before he could finish a half a cup of coffee, his little girl was back in the kitchen, holding up the picture of the world, all back in order. “How did you do that so quick?” the dad asked. “It was easy, Daddy,” the daughter said. “On the back of the page, there was a picture of a man. When you make the man right, you make the world right.” Before the world can get right, the man or woman or boy or girl has to get right before God. You and I have to get right before God. Then everything else can fall into place, and we have peace. The second way to find peace is RELINQUISHMENT. Relinquishment simply means giving up control of your life to God, putting him in charge, making him the Boss. When we turn over our troubles, our hardships, our obstacles to God, then we have a shot at peace. This, too, is a major theme of Advent. Remember when the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she was going to have a child who would be the Son of God? What did she do? Did she complain or refuse or get angry that God was imposing on her well-ordered life? No, she relinquished her will to God, and said, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38) Mary had peace about leaving her life completely in God’s hands. I don’t know about you, but the biggest obstacle to peace in my life is my continual quest to fix things, to order everything, and to maintain my control at all costs. How foolish is that, when there is an infinitely powerful God standing alongside who wants to help? In the movie The Horse Whisperer, a very uptight woman from New York has two things she wants to fix. One is a high-strung, untrainable horse, and the other is an emotionally damaged teenage daughter. The woman takes the horse and the girl out west to a ranch where there is a cowboy who does miracles training horses. In the course of the movie, he also does a remarkable job with the daughter and the mother. There is one scene in which the cowboy and the mother have ridden out to a beautiful bluff overlooking a mountain valley, and she is talking about her desire for peace. She wishes she were old and had all the tough decisions behind her, all the problems, all the worry—then she would have peace. The cowboy says he doesn’t think you have to wait that long to find peace. He finds peace in nature, in working on the ranch, in knowing what he is supposed to do, and in having a home. The woman admits, “The more I try to fix things, the more they fall apart.” The cowboy says, “Maybe you should just let them fall.” She gets this incredibly pained expression on her face and says, “I can’t do that.” He says, “Why?” And the question just hangs in the air, because she can’t answer it. Why can’t we just relinquish our lives—our pains, our problems, our desires, and our dreams—to God? The harder we hold on, the more exhausted we become. Let go. Let God. Find peace. We can find peace when we repent and relinquish in PRAYER. Prayer is the time when we bring it all to God and lay it on him—and he takes it! He forgives our sins; he shoulders our burden; he smoothes out our rough edges; he comforts and strengthens us for the journey. If you haven’t disciplined a regular prayer time into your life yet, Advent is a great time to do that. If you already pray regularly, Advent is a great time to improve your discipline. This is so basic to the Christian walk that I almost hate to bring it up again; yet I can’t emphasize it enough. Pray to find peace, because you won’t find peace without prayer. Let me share with you a quote from the late Henri Nouwen, from his book The Wounded Healer: “Having said all this, I realize that I have done nothing more than rephrase the fact that the Christian leader must be in the future what he has always had to be in the past: a [person] of prayer, a [person] who has to pray, and who has to pray always….For a [person] of prayer is, in the final analysis, the [person] who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable.” Peace is reachable through prayer, as we begin to see the face of Jesus in the everyday people and events of our lives. September 11, 2001, of course, was no ordinary day. For John DeVito, it started off normally enough as he unlocked his office on the 87th floor of World Trade Center Tower Number One. He paused for a moment, before the rest of his office staff arrived, to reflect on the beauty of the panoramic view before him. Just before 9:00 a.m., John was knocked out of his chair as American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Immediately the smoke and dust and heat began pouring into his office, and he grabbed a bottle of water and ran outside to join his co-workers and hundreds of others who were trying to make their way down to safety. Halfway down, but still forty floors up, John Devito had an encounter he will never forget: It was then that I saw him. He was a fireman toiling up the stairs, heavy equipment strapped to his back and sweat streaming down his face. He stopped just below me and tugged off his helmet. Short-cropped blond hair, brilliant blue eyes, the map of Ireland on his face. He was red with exertion—but there was a glow about him I thought was more than that. Why did I feel I ought to know him? “You look like you could use some water,” I said, holding out the half-full bottle. The blue eyes looked into mine. “I’m all right,” he told me. “Give it to somebody else.” He put his helmet back on and kept climbing. I went on down. Thirty-eighth floor…thirty-sixth. Give it to somebody else. And suddenly I knew whose face I had seen above that fireman’s raincoat. It was the face of Jesus…. Twenty-ninth floor…twenty-eighth. I blinked. That young Asian woman with her arm around a frail old lady—surely it was Jesus who looked out of her eyes! Again…I glimpsed him in the eyes of the Pakistani man motioning me to go first. God far away? God was right here, all around me on that crowded stairway, wherever one person reached out to help another. John DeVito escaped from Tower Number One just as Tower Number Two collapsed. Blinded by the dark cloud, covered with ash and dust, and nearly choked to death, he was almost unrecognizable as he stumbled away from the scene of the tragedy. But he had recognized, in the face of so many, the One who was with him from the eighty-seventh floor on down. He said, “It was Jesus, of course. All of them. In a burning building. On a New York Street. Whenever darkness threatens to overwhelm us. Wherever love glows on a human face.” In this world of conflict and chaos, in the midst of tragedy and trouble, our peace depends on the presence of the Peacemaker. The One Isaiah foretold. The One John baptized. The One Paul knew. The One who held New York City in his arms on September 11. He is the Prince of Peace. He is our hope for peace today. Is he here? Is he in your heart? Have you repented of your sins? Have you relinquished your life to him? Then you will know joy. You will have hope. You will enjoy peace forever. Amen!
|
|
