The Advent of Peace: A Whole Community

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Sunday, December 13, 2015 - Third Sunday in Advent

“The Advent of Peace: A Whole Community”

Romans 12:9-21   (The Message paraphrase)

Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Lord, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy saints; be inventive in hospitality.

Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.

Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”

Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.

Sermon: “The Advent of Peace: A Whole Community”

A woman once bought a parrot for a pet.  All the parrot did was treat her bad.  It insulted her and every time she tried to pick it up, it would peck at her arm.

One day she got fed up with the parrot and, as it was insulting her, she picked it up.  It continued with the insults..."you're ugly! I can't stand you!" and it pecked at her arm as she carried it.  Deciding this pet was now her enemy, she opened the freezer door and threw him in and closed the door.  From inside, the parrot was still going on for about 5 seconds and then it was suddenly quiet.

She thought, "Oh no, I killed it!" But when opened the door, the parrot just looked at her.  She picked it up.

The parrot said:  "I'm very sorry. I apologize for my bad behavior and promise you there will be no more of that. From now on, I will be a good parrot."

"Well okay," she said. "Apology accepted.”  The parrot said "Thank you” and then he continued, "Can I just ask you one thing?" She said, "Yes, what?"

The parrot looked back at the freezer and asked, 

"What did the chicken do?"

Our impulse, when we feel threatened or antagonized, is to freeze that person or group of people out. 

Paul’s letter to the Romans calls us to a different impulse: not retaliation, not angry overreaction, but love.  As the Message paraphrase puts it, to “love from the center of who we are.”  We fight fear and hatred not with fear and hatred, but with love.  We pray for our enemies (and know who do and do not deserve that name).  We recognize that compassion is the greatest weapon against evil we have.  We eat together.  Psalm 23, that favorite of many of us, says, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.  My cup overflows.”  This, in my read of scripture, is not a gloating table, to sit at and enjoy food while our enemies starve.  This is a Table like what we come to today, where we realize that people who sit down and eat together have an awfully hard time staying enemies.  Perhaps that’s why Jesus fed Judas, knowing he would betray him anyway, but trying to save him from his own greed and violent ways, not by fighting him, but by feeding him.

The Message paraphrase of Romans 12 also says, “Don’t let evil get the best of you, get the best of evil by doing good.”  This begs the question: what is evil?  You might think of people who for you fit that description.  You might think of structures and systems.  But evil in the original text isn’t a noun.  It’s an adjective.  It means inner malice and wickedness, and is used to describe people and things.  Describe, not define. 

This means that evil is not some disembodied force in the world, twisting and tempting us against our will.  This means that evil is not an entire group of people because of what religion they hold to or what country they’re from.  This means that evil is that impulse within all of us towards malice and wickedness. 

And so, as we seek to overcome evil in our communities and in the world, we do not seek to destroy people – we seek to destroy the hatred within all of us that makes us see each other as enemies.  And we overcome that with good, with loving from the center of who we are because, though we are sinful and all have the potential for evil within us, we are all also made in the image of God, God who is the greatest good.

If we remember that we also all have this goodness within us, we see each other in our communities much differently.  Beautiful things can happen when we do this. 

Sabiha Kapetanovic, a 23-year-old international relations student from Bosnia, tells one such story of a small community being transformed by love.  She writes,

"In Bavaria, southern Germany, there is one small place called Dachau.  The medieval town of Dachau is important for history as it was the location of the first of the Nazi concentration camps.  Today, if you go to Dachau you will find a church standing in the place where the concentration camp once was.  For me, this church is situated there to tell a beautiful story – the story of two best friends.  These two best friends are not just any kind of best friends; they are the kind that makes the sun rise and shine again, the kind that makes nights seem neither dark nor cold, they are the type of friends that teach us that love and forgiveness are possible.  One of the friends is a priest who works in the Dachau church, yet his father was a Nazi and one of the main builders of the concentration camp of Dachau.  The other friend is a Dutch Jew, whose father was imprisoned there in times of war.  After the war ended he built the church on the place where the concentration camp once was.

It confuses me how everything is so contradictory – how we are so good, but at the same time how we are so evil, so hurtful, and so full of jealousy.  When I heard the story of the two best friends, it inspired me and showed me that I am not the only crazy fool in this world that believes in the goodness of people.  Because if they were able to build a friendship and leave their pasts behind, and that of their ancestors, then everyone is capable of spreading positive energy and love, while forgetting the negativity of stories that are actually not ours; we did not live them, we did not write them.  It sends out a clear call important for all to remember – the past is something finished, unchangeable.  We have to enjoy this beautiful, but indeed short life.  Do not destroy it by constantly [worrying about] things that cannot be changed.  What is important is what remains, not what is lost."

How can we build this sort of good and friendship in our community of Cameron?  I have one area I’d like us to focus on for this coming week, our next Advent challenge together.  That aspect of our community is racial division.  You see, this wonderful little town has a not-so-wonderful part of our history.  There were white landowners, and there were African American slaves who worked on their farms and in their homes.  Some white masters were kind and as fair as they could be given the system; some were not.  But everyone, white and black, wealthy and poor, suffered because of the systemic evil of slavery that used this very holy text to say God made some people more human, more in the image of God, than others.  Whether we like it or not (and I surely hope we don’t), that is our history.

But as Sabiha said, “the past is something finished, unchangeable….what’s important is what remains, not what is lost.”  What we do with our time now and the future is what matters.  But still, in our charming community, we have many people of color who live on the literal other side of the tracks.  We know these people.  We see them at the gas station and post office.  But knowing and seeing isn’t enough.  Romans 12 calls us to something more.  It calls us to friendship.

So our challenge this week (and hopefully longer than that) is this: looking at our community, and your friends within it, who among them are not of your same ethnic background?  Reach out to people who look differently from you, not just because you want to be polite, but because you want to follow God’s word, to break the cycles of our history so that the evil that separated us from one another will not win.  So that’s the first challenge: look at your friends, and see if you have any who don’t look like you. 

The second part is this: look at how you describe people of color – African American, Latino and others.  Do you use language similar to what your ancestors might have used?  Or do you use language of love? 

If the son of a Nazi concentration camp builder and the son of an imprisoned Dutch Jew can be friends, anything is possible by the grace of God.  This is what it looks like to overcome the evils of our past with good.  This is what it looks like when the peace of Christ advents into our lives and communities.  That peace is drawing ever closer, sinking into all of our best hiding places for hatred, and leaving wholeness in its wake.  Nothing is safe when God takes on flesh and blood and moves into our community – thanks be to God!

Amen.