SunDec42011
Scripture: PSALM 85:1-2, 8-13
It was a passing remark. “Sometimes,” the man said, “life seems so difficult.” He had just heard about Paulie McGhee, the sixteen-year-old boy who died on Thanksgiving Day in a single car accident right before his Aurora football team was to play a state semi-final football game. And then, because that death was probably more than this man wanted to contemplate, he veered into a remark about the erratic ups and downs of Wall St.
The quick change in subject matter was not enough to undo the truth he uttered, though, the reality that lurks just under the surface. Life is, so often, difficult. Boys die in car crashes. Girls succumb to the fierce tyranny of eating disorders. Co-workers barely endure each other’s perceived idiocies. Parents and partners drift off into an alternate reality of dementia and decline. Vocational dreams die or fail ever to take root. And there are days when everything seems like a forced march up a dismally steep and dreary hill.
The Bible knows all about the struggles that underlie so much of our daily routines. In the part of the psalm we didn’t read this morning, the psalmist laments the frequent absence of light and happiness and progress. Having endured a torturous and extended exile in Babylon, after the Israelites have been promised their own land, they understandably wonder where God is in all this mess. “Show us your steadfast love, O God,” the psalmist pleads, “and grant us your salvation” (85:7). Salvation, or wholeness, seems a million miles away, and they aim their daggers of complaint and despair at God.
Advent is the time for that sort of lament, for us as well as those Israelites. It’s the time when we acknowledge the cracks in life and beg God to glue them together. Fix things in Egypt so the people are able to govern themselves civilly, with respect and freedom. Fix things in Iraq so that harmony and settledness reign. Fix things in Afghanistan so the Taliban is declawed and thriving is the order of the day. Fix things, here in our land, between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall St., so the economy grows and everyone who wants a job has one and everybody has what they need and no one has too much. Fix things, in our homes, between Mom and Dad, so the fighting is ended and the tension is lifted. Fix things for the one who’s going to be alone again on Christmas, so they’re not as desperately lonely as they’ve been these last few years. Fix things, God. They’re broken, and we need you to make it all right.
And the Advent promise is that it will happen. It may not happen fast or in exactly the way we’d like it to. But it will happen. God will not renege on those holy promises. The grimness that so often stalks us will not have the last word.
What the psalm promises, in its liltingly poetic way, is that “God will speak peace to God’s people” (85:8), that “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (85:10). What an alluringly compelling image: righteousness and peace kissing each other! We tend to have a rather negative sense of what “righteousness” means because we so often hear overtones of “self-righteousness,” or of a merciless set of rules and expectations. But what righteousness means here is simply that everything will be made, as the word implies, right: societies and relationships will be just and equal; everyone will have enough food and adequate health care; no one will be taken advantage of or abused; the earth will be honored and cared for.
There are people out there who will tell you that’s a pie-in-the-sky dream. And so it may be. But it’s God’s dream. And it will not be silenced. The righteousness of God is about justice, right relationships, respect, care.
And what the psalmist says is that, in the consummation God promises, that sort of righteousness will kiss peace. The two—righteousness and peace—will, in a sense, be mated. They will coexist and they will set the tone for everything. The Hebrew word for peace, often used now in English as well, is “Shalom.” It’s a quality that has an honored place in the worship of Christian churches. “Peace I leave with you,” says Jesus as he nears his own death; “my peace I give to you” (John 14:27). And when the risen Christ mysteriously returns to the disciples after having died, his first words to them are “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). The apostle Paul begins nearly all his letters with a wish for “grace and peace,” and he tells the Philippians not to be anxious because “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:6-7). That peace is at the heart of what God wills for the earth and its people.
The thing is, of course, that this peace asks something of us, as well. Peace is a gift from God. But it’s a peace that’s enacted by you and me. One of the strangest truths about the blessings of God is that they are both gifts given by the Holy Spirit, and, at the very same time acts put into practice by us. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet when we make the introductions. Righteousness and peace kiss when we figuratively pucker up our lips and open our arms in that holy embrace.
Any experience of peace, in other words, takes our participation. If we want the sort of internal peace that dispels anxiety, it will probably not come entirely on its own. It generally entails some sort of practice or discipline on our part. We have to invite it. If we want that deep peace that passes all understanding, we will likely have to sit ourselves down and intentionally open ourselves to a gift we couldn’t create on our own. This can happen in a number of ways. We can, for example, say, “God, I’ve reached the end of my rope,” and then fall into the arms of the only one who can grant that peace. We can do yoga, which is a way of embodying that peace. We can exercise and meditate and envision that peace overtaking our bodies. And all of these disciplines take time and a kind of sustained attention. God does the giving, but we do the inviting and opening.
That’s the personal part of this peace that God grants. Then there’s the interpersonal part, the part where we have to do the hard work of really listening to someone who bugs the living daylights out of us, where we choose to share some of our resources with people who have less, where we strive to forgive someone who has cut us to the quick, where our nation works at defusing tension and inequity. If we don’t put ourselves out for it, peace will seldom if ever take root.
Several years ago, in the 2006 war between Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah, an Israeli man named Motti Tamam lost his two brothers to a Hezbollah rocket. When he heard about their deaths, Tamam wanted their eyes to be available for transplant. One of the recipients of one brother’s eyes was Nikolas Elias, an Arab man who was blind. Later, the two men met, and Tamam, an Israeli, and Elias, an Arab, shook hands and exchanged phone numbers (Talitha Arnold, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, p. 36). There, steadfast love and faithfulness met, righteousness and peace kissed. And what they did, we to are called to do. For in each such gesture, the Advent hope for God’s transcendent oneness is realized, if only for a moment.
The meal we are about to receive is one more sign of that oneness, that peace. We gather around one table, and are reminded that we are one people. So as we prepare to receive and celebrate, may we take a moment now to ready ourselves for that sublime peace by saying words and making gestures of peace with each other. I invite you to turn to each other, to shake hands or embrace, and to say to each other, “The peace of God, or the peace of Christ, be with you,” and to be aware that this is more than a handshake and a “how are you,” but that it’s a desire to convey to each other God’s deep and lasting peace.