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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD 4th Sunday in Advent December 24, 2006 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kipi1@aol.com |
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Did you know that you can get a ”peace order” issued by a judge on your behalf? A peace order is different than a protective order in that it covers more wide ranging types of abuse. A peace order will include protection from harassment, stalking, trespass and destruction of property. And it can last up to 6 months at a time. I am watching the late night news on TV. The lead story: there have been two more shootings in D.C. This is a tragic ritual which gets played out almost nightly in news reports coming from places like Georgetown, Bethesda, PG County, Takoma Park and downtown areas. I watch the reporter on the screen give out sketchy details about when and where and who. It´s all too recent and still unfolding to give a complete story, and I look on concerned but conditioned to such things. Just then my phone rings, and it´s my daughter asking if she and her boyfriend can go down to Bethesda to eat a late night meal at a restaurant there. I find myself wishing I could issue a peace order on her behalf, immediately enforceable upon any violation. Wouldn´t it be wonderful if God issued such peace orders for individuals and whole cities? We would be protected by the ultimate peacekeeper and people would be required to live in peace even if they didn´t want to. It might be somewhat like an old Star Trek episode where all the inhabitants of a planet are required to walking around mindlessly parroting slogans of peace and harmony under the direction of a threatening dictator. And yet, despite my parental concerns and personal fears, God has not chosen for peace to come into our world in such heavy-handed ways. The prophet Micah was a younger contemporary of the prophet Isaiah. Micah prophesied to the southern kingdom of Judah right after the northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to Assyria in the 8th century B.C. Assyria had overrun the northern kingdom and was now threatening the southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital city of Jerusalem. Micah warned Judah in prophesies of doom that they would experience the demise of their kingdom like their northern neighbor if they did not turn back to God and God´s ways of right living. In fact, Micah proclaimed at one point that ”Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins.” But Micah also shared visions of hope, speaking words of promise to people who had known the insecurity of threatening armies and the chaos of impending military campaigns. One of Micah´s hopeful visions comes in our passage for today. He proclaims: ”But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me, one who is to rule Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days.” Micah reaches back to the city of Bethlehem, the city from which once long ago David had come. From Bethlehem, David had come forth to usher in a time of unity and glory for God´s people. Bethlehem was a small city or village--”one of the little clans of Judah,” Micah calls it. And yet, Micah envisions a time when the little town of Bethlehem would give birth to a new kind of ruler. But Micah goes on with his prophesy: ”Therefore God shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.” With this statement, Micah envisions God giving up the people into exile until the right time to bring them home has come. And Micah uses the image of a woman in labor to depict this process. As a woman in labor undergoes all the challenges and pain of childbirth until she delivers, so the people of God will undergo the pain and challenge of exile until the time of birth is right for them to come home. Then Micah continues, after the homecoming, the ruler from the little city of Bethlehem shall lead the people. Micah proclaims: ”And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.” This is Micah´s vision: a ruler will come from a little town, like King David, only this ruler will be characterized by peace and will bring blessing to Israel and ultimately to the ends of the earth. Peace is one of those big words which is not easy for us to come to terms with in relation to others. Earlier this year, a 17 year old student at Chevy Chase High School sent out an email to his school´s group list which caused quite a stir. He wanted to know why there had been no effort to remove the Peace Studies class from the school´s curriculum. He wrote in his email: ”The class is headed by an individual with a political agenda, who wants to teach students the right way of thinking by giving them facts that are skewed in one direction.” Within a few hours of his posting, there were more than 150 emails in response from parents and students, some passionately for the course, some passionately against it. You see, Peace Studies has been an elective class for interested seniors since 1988. It is taught by Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post reporter, and it has been fairly popular with students over the years. And McCarthy certainly seems to bring a perspective to his class discussions, even as he and others claim that it is about dialogue and not indoctrination. For now, the principal is standing behind the teacher and the class, but the debate will almost certainly continue. We in this society can feel strong and passionate about certain things, and peace issues is one of them. The temptation, though, is because issues like peace can be so emotionally-packed and can bring out our differences, we tend to pull back from talking about peace with others at all. And that is to miss an opportunity and to deny something at the heart of our Christian faith. You see, the earliest followers of Jesus Christ came to see him as the fulfillment of Micah´s promise of a peaceful ruler. ”Prince of Peace,” he came to be called. And Paul says of Christ in Ephesians: ”he himself is our peace.” But to associate Jesus Christ with peace in a general way is not specific enough. How did Jesus embody peace in his living? How did he show us the way of peace? Let me offer you briefly three ways in which Jesus embodied peace for us and our world. First, he encouraged basic trust in God. Jesus saw that all people wrestle with entrusting their lives to their Creator. He came to say, in word and deed, that God can be trusted with our lives, that we can walk with God in relationship, that the inner turbulence of our lives can give way to a center in God which can bring a peace that passes understanding. God will offer any of us possibilities for peace if we will open up our inner world of feelings and wounds and struggles, and learn to trust God with it all. That´s basic trust, real peace. Yet Jesus also showed us that peace is more than this. Second, Jesus challenged directly those attitudes and actions which create division among people. Jesus brought peace, not only by encouraging basic trust, but also by reaching across and challenging all divisions that were used to diminish people: rich and poor, unclean and clean, health and sick, saint and sinner, Jew and foreigner, female and male. Jesus knew that there cannot be fulness of peace until that which divides us can be addressed and overcome. Third, Jesus embodied peace by taking time to be with others. You may ask: ”how is taking time for others related to peace?” The answer is that peace takes time, peace requires the ability to create events and attitudes which allow us to make room in our lives for others, to hear and truly understand their lives and how our lives can be lived together with them. Jesus was constantly getting in trouble for attending parties and dinners and celebrations with people of all kinds, welcoming others, sometimes unexpectedly, into his care and understanding. Why did he take the time, some might say ”waste the time,” to do all this? Because he knew that peace wasn´t merely about stopping war, but that peace is an everyday affair, as we fill our common lives with moments of making space for others. When we are so busy that we have no time, no room in our lives for others, then we are missing an important dimension of peace. I believe Jesus Christ still calls followers to embody the ways of peace. Kasey Kasemann, the former director for CMR, used to say that Rockville is a big city that still has a village mentality. I´m not sure of everything he meant by this, but I understand part of it. Even as our city gets bigger, we still value small town ways which allow us to work together on common tasks. Bethlehem was a village out of which God brought a leader of peace. Micah prophesied this. We believe that Jesus fulfilled it. But peace isn´t limited to the Bethlehem of history. God still calls. Can cities large or small, cities like Rockville, still give birth to peacemakers for God? Sometimes we are tempted to think: ”what can I do, after all, I´m only one small person.” And still, small does not mean insignificant when it comes to God. ”But you, O Bethlehem, are one of the little clans of Judah.” Mattie Stepanek found out early in his life that he had a rare form of muscular dystrophy from which he would die early. In spite of this, he chose to live fully and give of himself for as long as he could. Early on, he found that he had a gift for language and poetry, dictating poems to his mother when he was 3, and writing them by hand at age 5. Somewhere along the way, he began to write and speak passionately about peace, and his books about peace and other things in life were widely published. He became friends with people like Oprah Winfrey and former President Jimmy Carter, and when Oprah gave him a wonderful platform through her TV show, he touched the lives of millions of people. Mattie died just short of his 14th birthday, and his funeral drew people from around the world, including Oprah Winfrey and Jimmy Carter, who both spoke to those present. A book of Mattie=s essays and poems was published after his death, called ”Reflections of a Peacemaker.” In the last few years of his life, Mattie lived with his mother in an apartment in the King Farm development in Rockville. Just four blocks away from his apartment, on a 26 acre site of land, a sign bear the words ”Mattie J.T. Stepanek Park.” This was also part of Mattie´s dream: to have a place where people can come together and play in peace. Earlier this year, the Rockville City Council awarded a contract to start construction on the park, which will open with a playground, a walking path and lots of green space. Other recreational facilities will be added in coming years as government and private donors are joining to create a gathering place for all people. Mattie´s supporters in King Farm have plans to memorialize him with a life-size bronze statue. It will be of Mattie seated in his wheelchair, as people came to know him, with a chess table, one of his favorite games, and with his pet dog at his side, as always. You should know that his dog=s name is Micah, yes, the same name which belonged to a Hebrew prophet long ago, a prophet who had the courage to envision a day when peace would come to the ends of the earth. IIs such a vision of peace too naive for our world? Sometimes I hear this claim, that being a peacemaker is nice but too naive about the sinister darkness and evil in the world. And yet, the peacemakers that are my heroes are the very ones who have seen the worst that humanity can do, still they worked for peace. I´m talking about Martin Luther King and the those who knew from experience and threat what a lynching or a Klan hood could mean. I´m talking about Desmond Tutu and those in South Africa who felt the blast of a water cannon, the sting of a rubber bullet or the indignity of a torturers´ prison. I´m talking about the Amish Community in Pennsylvania who lost their daughters this year when a gunman broke into their school and brutally shot them all before taking his own life. On the very day this happened, a grandmother to one of the slain girls went to the home of the gunman to comfort his wife and children and to invite them to the funeral of her granddaughter. Are all of these people, these peacemakers, simply naive about the real evil in the world? I don´t think so. They have surely seen the abyss, the worst that humans can do, and yet they have seen something else, something worth living and even dying for, and for all of them it was connected to the peace of God. Now, I´m not saying that in our tragic world, we don´t sometimes need armies and police and other institutions of order. We do. But we Christians, we followers of the Prince of Peace, are tempted sometimes to jump on the bandwagon of war and destruction all too quickly, even to use God´s name to justify it. We are made for something better. Let´s be people of peace in our city. Let´s start where we are and find ways to connect with others, overcoming our unnecessary divisions, encouraging basic trust in God, taking time to be with others in our lives. For ultimately, cities built on peace are the ones who will flourish, anything else is merely surviving. |
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