12-9-18 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Baruch.

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.

Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God.

Put on your head the diadem of the glory of the everlasting.

For God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven.

For God will give you evermore the name Righteous Peace and Godly Glory.

Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height, look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them.

For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies.

But God will bring them back to you, carried in glory as on a royal throne.

For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low, and the valleys filled up to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.

The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God's command.

For God will lead Israel with joy, and the light of his glory with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.

The word of the Lord.

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel.

He has raised up for us a mighty Savior.

Free to worship him without fear.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

As it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever.

Amen.

I'm reading from Philippians.

I thank you, my God, every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you.

Because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now, I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to its completion by the day of Jesus Christ.

It is right for me to think this way about you because you hold me in your dear in your heart.

For all you share in God's grace with me, both by my imprisonment and in the defense of the gospel, in the confirmation of the gospel, for God is my witness.

Know how long for you, of you, with compassion of Christ Jesus.

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best.

So in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God, the word of the Lord.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip, ruler of the region of Iturea and Trachonidas, and Lysanias, ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah.

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make God's path straight, every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

The gospel of the Lord.

Welcome to the second Sunday of that.

And which again we're invited to cultivate, I think, extraordinary virtues, so when the Christ child arrives, there will be a ready welcome.

Reminded last week we were invited to spend the week cultivating hope.

Hope that did not necessarily reflect our wishes, but actually a fundamental trust in what God is able to do with that hope, and that trust, the invitation for us to set smart goals about how it is, how it is we are to convey lives of hope, both for ourselves and our family and friends, and of course for the world.

How it is that we go about setting goals that reflect our trust in what God is going to do.

This week I think we get this opportunity to cultivate peace.

I probably, this is gonna be the one time I'm gonna do this.

I'm gonna apologize, this may be rough because it's going to be prickly in some spots.

I'm gonna do this now so I don't have to do it again.

It's going to be prickly and it's gonna be rough, and if I'm completely honest with you, I struggle with peace myself.

I think part of the struggle with peace that I have and that many of us have is we often think of peace as some commodity, something that we either have or we don't.

I don't know that there's much you can do if that's our sense of peace.

I think the other struggle we have is that we often associate peace as something very ordinary.

And of course, here in holy places, we're invited to cultivate and think about things that are extraordinary.

Ordinary peace we confuse with quiet.

Give me five minutes of peace.

And of course, what we mean is stop singing jingle bells for the 58th time so I can catch my breath.

Give me some quiet, some rest.

You either have that or you don't.

Of course, I think peace has about as much to do with quiet biblically and theologically as loneliness has to do with being alone, which is of course not much.

Most of my teenage life being alone meant loneliness.

It's one of those gifts of adulthood where you realize those two have nothing to do with each other at all.

And nor do I put to you, has God's peace much to do with quiet.

You could ask any one of our day school kids, they're really, really sharp about opposites.

They know that the opposite of short is, of course, tall, and they know that the opposite of skinny is of course fat.

And any kid will tell you that the opposite of war is peace.

So please think about that carefully.

War is destructive, which means surely peace must be creative.

Yet I'll tell you, I think we all too often settle for peace as stillness.

To be honest with you, I would often rather take just some stillness.

I would often rather things just be quiet and still instead of I think the creation that God has in mind for us to cultivate this week.

Prickly.

Well I can remember very, very distinctly, about eight years ago when I was teaching math at a Christian school, I was an early adopter of the Blu-ray DVD player.

I went out on Black Friday to Circuit City when that existed.

And I bought a Blu-ray DVD player.

And one of my students said, you know the amazing thing about Blu-ray, you have to watch the Matrix because you can hear the bullet casings hit the floor in Blu-ray sound.

By the way, you can.

And let me tell you, this was a school where people paid$15,000 in tuition to spare their children the violence depicted in that movie so that they could, in gated communities, be nourished by it.

We live that paradox.

Five years ago at my parish in Coronado, where I was the associate four-star Admiral Bud Edney gave arguably the strongest polemic I've ever heard in my life against the use of drones in warfare.

Whether you agree about the subject or not, it doesn't really matter.

What Bud Edney said, of course, though, is that our teenagers play video games in which they go around blowing people's brains out.

And these 19 and 20-year-olds, who at that time were only in Las Vegas, are flying drones on the other side of the world that look like games and are taking people's lives.

And I'll have you know that's happening at Ellington Air Force Base as well.

We are nourished by violence.

And Bud Edney said, and I'll tell you, I have utmost respect for this man, hard to know for the people flying those tools of death, whether it is real for them or a game.

I think you are probably familiar with another form of violence.

I'm gonna call it outrage culture.

We are outraged about everything.

How dare you put up a Christmas tree and it's not even Advent?

Is that outrageous?

Or is it just not what you do?

How dare you pay for a breeded dog instead of going to a shelter?

Is that outrageous?

Would we lose friends over that?

God, I hope not.

This I think is an interesting invitation for us.

Does outrage make peace?

Or does it frankly at the end of the day create just more division?

Jesus never said, blessed are those who have peace.

He said, Blessed are the peacemakers.

And I wonder if this isn't part of our invitation.

Having some fundamental trust in God's ability to effect reconciliation beyond our wildest dreams, having hope, if we aren't then invited, to make some peace.

Not to have stillness, but to have some creation.

The most peaceful thing I've ever seen in my life is probably also the most violent thing I've ever seen in my life.

The birth of my daughter.

Jeremiah wrote at a time in which the Neo-Babylonian Empire had completely laid siege to Jerusalem and was about to burn its temple down.

And shortly after the prophet Jeremiah, anybody who could read or write, Baruch included, we presume, was exiled, taken away from Jerusalem, a journey of some thousand miles away to Babylon, taken in chains, to be really a brain-drain, to be put to work in the Babylonian bureaucracy.

Baruch writes this word in the middle of exile, forced labor, being far from home.

He says, in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.

Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill laid low.

Baruch has this suggestion that for people who are living in exile far from home, that God is about to do something that amounts to building a superhighway through marshes and ravines and mountains, briars and thickets and hazards, God is going to make a 12-lane highway of restoration.

Baruch literally has in mind that the people are going to go back home.

Cognitive dissonance.

A thousand miles away from home in slavery.

Baruch says God's going to make a way, and it won't even be a hard way.

It'll be level and straight, and there'll be lots of access.

It's a word of hope, but don't you see it's also a word of peace?

Because peace is about creating the way.

Peace is about raising up the low places and leveling the high.

And Luke hears those words, both from Baruch and Isaiah, and says John the Baptist is the one who makes that call for Jesus.

You know your scripture well.

Actually, Luke gets the quote wrong.

The quote goes like this The voice of one calling, begin, quote, in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.

Luke changes the quotation.

The voice of one calling in the wilderness, begin, quote, prepare the way of the Lord.

Luke does something even more radical than Baruch.

He doesn't put God's voice in Babylon or in between Jerusalem and Babylon.

Let's iron it out.

Luke puts John the evangelist in the wilderness, in the low and dry, and hopeless places.

John's ministry is to make the low places high and the high places low.

It amounts to some sort of redistribution of dignity.

It's almost as if John, the prophet, is saying something like, God's will is distributive justice.

That is, that all have equal access to what is just and what is right, regardless of their position or place of their birth or the number of mistakes they've made hitherto for.

John says, there is a super highway to God.

And notice the end of the quotation, it's not that some good people will see God, it's that all flesh will see God.

And John spends his ministry not being the way, but preparing the way of the Lord, making the crooked places straight.

If you know your civil rights history, this comes right out of Martin Luther King Jr.'s playbook, or rather, Martin Luther King was reading this carefully.

That's why you said, of course, that peace is not the absence of war, but it's the presence of justice.

The civil rights movement was not very still.

It sure wasn't very quiet.

It was about distributive justice.

It was about low places being raised up and high places made low.

And about having a super highway of access to dignity.

It's a course of movement we continue.

If we're wise, we continue to try to do ourselves, which makes us, I think, as peacemakers, makes us sort of, well, road workers on God's super highway.

I don't know how many of you have ever done road work.

It is not easy.

It's pretty hot.

And it smells bad.

And it's exhausting.

Sometimes I'd rather just have rest.

But this week is not about that.

This week is about cultivating not some sort of ordinary peace, but making some kind of peace that is extraordinary.

This week invites us to examine the ways in which we settle for stillness, or even worse, we choose to be nourished by a violence that is destructive.

Instead of contemplating something that is creative.

Once again, I would tell you, the most violent thing I have seen is the birth of my daughter.

I guess I'd call that creative violence.

Good news for us is that God does not ask us to be the way.

God just asks us to help make the way.

Sometimes, of course, and I'm especially guilty of this as a cleric, I get in the way.

And on a super highway, you don't want to do that.

Because you might get run over.

And we're asked to make this way.

And you know, I'll tell you what's especially difficult for me, because I'll just play my hand.

I've played it many times.

On the Myers-Briggs fourth letter, I definitely test J.

And J stands for judging.

And of course, what I usually do with judgment is turn it into condemnation.

Because after all, since I judge correctly, you must just be wrong.

Which means less than.

I think Advent is this opportunity to disassociate condemnation for judgment and to say, given what I have judged, it is incumbent upon me to help make access to God more level for you.

Not so that I can be right, but so that we can live in peace together.

And you see, that's a fundamentally different approach than the one I most enjoy, which is teaching you how to do it my way, the right way, because then I'm proved right.

So this kind of piece I think requires me to do a little bit of violence to my own tendencies, to wipe out those tendencies with condemnation.

So that all flesh might hear the good news that God has for them.

So that I can get out of the way of that good news thinking I'm the purveyor of it.

No, it is from God.

My work is not to be the good news, don't you see?

It's to prepare the way for the good news.

That looks like it looks like a lot of work for me this week.

I guarantee you I won't get it done.

Which is why next year I'll get another work week on peace.

You will too.

But I pray this week we'll make room to make some peace on the superhighway God intends between God's own self and everybody else on earth.