December 6, 2009
See For Yourself: Peace
by James E. Eaton
Luke 3: 1-6
A moment ago, Advent and Christmas were distant things on the horizon; today we are halfway through one and looking expectantly toward the other. What should we do to prepare the way of the Lord into our world and our hearts? How do we turn toward the star of Bethlehem? Most of us, I suspect, have a set of preparing for Christmas rituals. Last Sunday we did our church ones and you see the beautiful result. We owe those who came and decorated a great thank you for their efforts. Again, our sanctuary is bounded in green; again, the gold balls inscribed with the names of families adorn a tree lit to remind us of God’s light in the evergreen hope of life. Again, the candles on the pews are raised, ready to be lit on Christmas eve. Yesterday the cookie walk culminated months of hard work and preparation by Sue Davis and Jean Curtis and their many, many helpers, and I know that all over Owosso today there are plates of Christmas cookies just waiting to greet visitors—if there are any left after the family gets done. All these things have long, rich traditions; as we do them we ask, “How was this done before? What did we do last time?”
The same is true at home. Our family Christmas traditions were disrupted when we moved here, but we reassembled them. “The Christmas tree will go there,” someone decreed, already picturing it. Places were found for the plastic live action skating rink, the Christmas tree train, the various Santas, and all the other things that come out at this time of the year. Last year, when it was up to May and I to decorate, we didn’t make decisions about where these things went; we just tried to remember where they had gone before. In just three years, we already have traditions. Is it the same at your house? Part of the comfort of Christmas is that it is the same every year, even though each year is different. We make the same foods, in the same way, sometimes with heirloom recipes; we put the nativity on the sideboard because that’s where it always has gone. A few years ago, I was wrestling with how to do a Christmas eve service in a new way; my Deacons quietly said, “Jim, at Christmas, no one wants new, we want to do what we always did.”
In the heart of this yearning for tradition, we hear John the Baptist’s strange, shrill call for change, for repentance. Repentance has come to mean feeling bad about something you knew you shouldn’t do but did anyway. I’m not supposed to eat eggs but last Thursday, at Men’s Breakfast, with Pete Hinds next to me eating oatmeal I ordered two eggs over easy, in clear contradiction of my Doctor’s express orders. I felt a twinge of guilt and resolved to do better next time but that isn’t repentance, that’s just misbehavior. The real meaning of repentance is change, fundamental change, change that turns us around, change that sends us in a new direction. “Prepare the way of the Lord,” John says—and the method is not writing a request for proposals or firing up a bulldozer, it is changing ourselves The world invites us to relax in a warm pool of Christmases past; John tells us bluntly that to prepare the way of the Lord, we’ve got to repent; the way to Bethlehem leads through change.
The way of the Lord implies movement: where is Christ going? He’s going to the Kingdom of God. That’s a place with a level playing field, where all are equally loved, equally cherished, equally invited. “Every valley shall be filled,” the prophet says. There will be no more valleys where some are left in twilight of sickness because they cannot afford health care. There will be no more valleys where some are left in the shadows of homelessness because no one wanted their god given gifts and they were unemployed. There will be no more valleys where some languish in the loneliness of being ignored because their clothes are shabby and their behavior ungainly. Every valley shall be filled. The signature feature of this kingdom is peace. When the prophet Isaiah, the same one Jesus will quote to define his mission, describes God’s kingdom, he describes a variety of natural antagonists at peace and concludes imagining God saying, “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” [Isaiah 11:9]
- We’re meeting on a Sunday in a week when our President announced a plan to send 30,000 more soldiers to war in Afghanistan. Africa smolders with a thousand conflicts and almost every day brings news of people killed in Pakistan. Families are still reeling from shootings in Texas. How do you make peace in such a world? In 1997, two ethnic groups in the African nation of Burundi erupted into a genocidal madness. The Hutu majority set on the Tutsi minority with machetes, guns, knives and even their bare hands. It was neighbors killing neighbors, a cataclysm of violence engendered by decades of mutual wrong doing and it’s terror was precisely that the killers were people you knew. Abbot Zacaharie Bukuru was a priest and principal of the Seminaire Buta, one of the most prestigious secondary schools in the country and a school with a mixed population of Hutu and Tutsi boys. Seeing the coming trouble, he organized sessions at which the boys discussed their differences, their views, their oppression. He made them pray for each other. It seems small doesn’t it? Let me say it again: he made them pray for each other.
....on the morning of April 30, 1997, [the Hutu militia] came out of the mountains and descended on the school, like the wolf on the fold. The soldiers busted open the doors to the dormitory and their commander ordered the students to divide themselves: “Hutu brothers over here, Tutsi cockroaches over there.” The Hutus would not abandon their schoolmates. The soldiers tried to kill them all. It was said that some of the dying boys quoted Jesus on the cross, crying out to God to forgive their killers because they didn’t know what they were doing. (1)
Of the 150 students at the school, some were wounded, many escaped, 40 were murdered, a small percentage compared to other places. Those who were killed are buried in crypts with their portraits. A visitor remarked to the Abbot that he couldn’t tell the difference between them, which was Hutu, which Tutsi. “‘The killers couldn’t see the difference, too,’ Whispered Zacaharie. “‘We are the same people.’” “Prepare the way of the Lord: make straight his paths.” We’re asked to come along on the project and we are. That’s the real meaning, the real excitement, of missions. When we buy goats for others, we are lifting up a valley. When we contribute to the Giving Tree food fund or buy a present for someone who would otherwise be left out we are filling in a pothole on the highway of God. Each time we act like we are all part of the family of God, children of one creator, it changes us and it makes a little bit of peace. It’s fine to put our Christmas decorations in the same place we always have; it’s a mistake to think we can come to Christmas if our hearts are in the same place. Advent is a time to repent, to seek a direction that leads to peace.
What is the way to peace? It begins with practicing a new way of seeing. The significant thing about those Jesus invites to the kingdom is that they served others. The treated them as if they were receiving Christ. The Hutu and Tutsi boys made peace by praying for and with each other and learning they were equally children of the one loving God. When we choose, actually choose, to see each person we encounter as a child of God, a brother or sister of Jesus Christ, it changes us, it changes how we act, how we live. This is the real mission of the church: to be a place where we are changed into people with the insight to see all are God’s children, to see each person as Christ sees them. Try it out this week. Pick someone you don’t know, someone you see perhaps, or pass by and pray for them. Imagine how Jesus would treat them; then do that. See for yourself if it doesn’t produce a peace in your heart. See if you don’t find yourself next Sunday a little closer to Bethlehem. Amen.
- Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains, p. 210
First Congregational Church UCC
Owosso, MI