Advent Attitudes: Peace

SCRIPTURE TEXT:  Isaiah 2:1-5, Rev. Monte Marshall

The season of Advent begins today.  Each week between now and Christmas, we’ll focus on an Advent Attitude that invites us to move more deeply into God’s transforming presence and work within us.  It’s a season to seek new meaning in the coming of Christ. 

To help us on the journey, a Sunday School class begins today that will meet over the four Sundays of Advent so that we might explore each Advent Attitude in greater depth.  Daily devotional materials have also been prepared to help guide us along the way.  A limited number of hard copies are available today, but the materials will be sent each week to all those with email addresses on file with the church office. 

So I think we’re ready to pray:  “God of surpassing peace, give us and all your people, peace of mind, forgiving peace, and reconciling peace.  Inscribe their signatures in muscle, brain and bone, so that we may know, share and give the peace beyond understanding that the world cannot give.  In Christ’s name we pray.  Amen.”[1]  

Yesterday morning, Laura Jean and I were in Fredericksburg, TX.  I was up early so I went downtown for a cup of coffee and a walk on Main Street.  I ended up in what, for me, is a special place:  The Japanese Garden of Peace at the National Museum of the Pacific War.  The Garden opened in 1976 and was constructed by a group of Japanese artisans as a gift from the people of Japan to the people of the United States.  The Garden represents a deep and profound longing for peace between two nations formally at war with one another. 

As many of you know, I worked on the staff of the museum for five years from 1994 to 1999.  Over that period, during every working day, I was immersed in the history of a brutal and costly war.  I heard the stories of veterans who survived the carnage.  I saw their tears and heard their voices crack with emotion as they recounted the loss of friends in the war.   To this day, I can close my eyes and see the images on display at the museum—images of violence, destruction and death.  The images are seared in my memory—and I am only a second-hand observer.  My heart goes out to those who endured the events depicted in the images first-hand.

Given this daily exposure to the history of a horrendous war, the Garden became a place of refuge for me.  Thanks to this special place, the terrible images of war seared into my memory have been countered by the pictures of peace emanating from the Garden. 

For example, I will never forget the opportunities I had to stand in the Garden with groups of visiting students from Japan.  At the end of each groups’ museum tour, we would gather in the Garden as the students presented to us a thousand paper cranes stitched together and hung from the branch of a tree in the Garden.  Each crane represented a prayer for peace.

Over the years, I’ve made my way back to the Garden on many occasions—even after I was no longer working at the museum—to spend countless moments pondering the things that make for peace.  I’ve even reflected in the Garden on this morning’s text—on Isaiah’s vision of Yahweh at the center of the universe with “the mountain of Yahweh’s Temple”—understood to be Yahweh’s dwelling place among us—lifted higher than every other hill.  I’ve imagined all the nations of the world streaming toward the mountain like a mighty river—yearning for torah—for teaching—for instruction—on the ways that make for peace.

In the prophet’s vision, Yahweh’s word points the way.  Yahweh establishes justice between the nations.  Yahweh arbitrates their disputes.  Yahweh removes their justifications for war. 

And in the prophet’s vision, Yahweh makes a promise:  No more war.  No more training for war.  Swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks as the weapons of war are transformed into the implements of peace and prosperity. 

Yahweh calls the people of God to walk in this light—Yahweh’s light—the light of peace—the same light in which Jesus walked.  In the deepest place of my soul, I yearn for a peace like this.  And I pray for Yahweh’s light to so shine within me that I might become an ever more effective instrument of peace in the world.  

But let me be honest.  In my Garden meditations, I’ve also realized that there is great resistance within me.  I understand all too well an insight offered by the late Walter Wink: “The roots of violence lie deep within us.  There is in each of us a vigilante that would kill to retain its position of privilege, however meager; there is a security officer that would love to torture those who have wronged us; there is an informer that would betray friends and even family to save its own skin….This is why Gandhi insisted:  ‘My first fight is with the demon inside of me, my second fight is with the demons in my people, and only my third fight is with the British.’”

Wink says of himself: “I would like to become nonviolent from the heart, but there is a killer, a torturer, a dictator in me still.  Call it Satan, the shadow, whatever, it is a brute fact documented down through human history…. Even recognizing that this potential for evil is in me does not free me of its power.”

But there is good news!  There is a way out.  This is Wink’s prescription for developing an Advent Attitude of peace: “I must bring a great deal of consciousness and forgiving love to bear on these parts of me in order to limit their damage.  I must continually offer them up to God for whatever healing and transformation is possible.”[2]

So here’s the bottom line in a paraphrase of words by author Richard Rohr: “Change really must start with me, with you.  [Peace] begins on the individual level…. As more and more people discover their True Selves—[that is, who they are in God]—grounded in love, [peace] will continue to multiply.”[3]

These are my Garden musings on the things that make for an Advent Attitude of peace.  What is the Spirit revealing to you?  Amen.     

LITURGIST:  You are invited now to enter a time of reflection on the attitude of peace in your own life.  We will begin by hearing a reading of St. Francis of Assisi’s “Prayer for All” and Alan Paton’s “When I Pray the Prayer of St. Francis.”

God, make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let us sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Maker,

Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,

To be understood as to understand,

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

It is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

PASTOR:  Alan Paton’s “When I Pray the Prayer of St. Francis” from his book, Instrument of Thy Peace: “When I pray his prayer, or even remember it, my melancholy is dispelled, my self-pity comes to an end; my faith is restored because of this majestic conception of what the work of a disciple should be.  So majestic is this conception that one dare no longer be sorry for oneself.  This world ceases to one’s enemy and becomes the place where one lives and works and serves.  Life is no longer nasty, mean, brutish, and short, but becomes the time that one needs to make it less nasty and mean, not only for others, but indeed also for oneself.  We are brought back instantaneously to the reality of our faith, that we are not passive recipients but active instruments.”[4]

TIME FOR REFLECTION AND RESPONSE

You are invited to take a “Response Card” and write your response as we reflect quietly for a few minutes on this question:  What one thing will I do this Advent season to reflect an attitude of peace?