Sermons

“Comfort in the Collisions”

Mark 1:1-8; Isaiah 40:1-11 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – December 10, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that your Spirit might fill our hearts with courage and faith in the face of fear. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

I’ve been working with a to-do list two pages long the last week or so. There are a lot of details to cover before leaving for three months. So naturally, we decided this was the perfect time to replace the carpet in the office suite! No, really, it was good to have an excuse to clean things out before handing my office over to Tim and Michael. Nobody should have to work in the midst of someone else’s clutter.

You find interesting things when you clean though. You know how when you get junk mail, you usually just toss it into the recycling bin? Except sometimes those non-profits include a free gift that you might want, so you pull that part out first? Well, the Friends Committee on National Legislation has sent me at least three of these bumper stickers, guessing that I might want to proclaim my commitment to peace-making on the back of my car. I think it might be time to put one on, along with the Chalice sticker I found. I’ve got extras of both, if anyone wants one.

Then when I was helping to put stuff back in the nursery, I saw this book, and realized it needed to be mentioned this morning. Jackie Urbanovic’s “Duck and Cover” came out in 2009. I’m guessing at the time, such a title felt like a humorous throw-back. The book is a silly story about a bunch of animals who live together with their rescuer, who are trying to hide an alligator that they think is in trouble with the local zoo. No ominous overtones of nuclear holocaust to be found anywhere.

But here’s the other thing that happened just a little over a week ago. Hawaii revived its monthly test of their air raid alert system, which hasn’t been active since the Cold War. I can only imagine what it must have been like for those who heard it, whether it was the first time for those who are young, or an eerie reminder of tense times for older folks who thought that was behind us. On Thursday, North Korea’s foreign ministry released a statement saying that war is now inevitable, not a question of if, but when. Interestingly enough, our local paper noted that China, in a statement urging calm, said that “war was not the answer”. Our Quaker friends must be getting through to someone!

I have preached a lot of Peace Sunday sermons. I suppose this is my seventeenth, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever given one before when the threat of nuclear weapons being utilized was as realistic as it is at this moment. And here is Isaiah asking me to comfort you. What does it mean to preach peace, to seek peace, to pray for peace and work for peace, in times of war? We don’t even need to include the hypotheticals of nuclear war to lament the violence of our times. Let us take a prayerful moment to lift up the places in our world where we know war and violence are devastating God’s people. (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, Nigeria, Turkey, South Sudan, Libya, Myanmar, Jerusalem… and of course, the homes and streets of our own country awash in guns!) Last week, we lit a candle for Hope, which has a reputation for being a little audacious. Today, we lit a candle for Peace, which seems almost nonsensical, in the face of the brokenness of our world. As you know, I will be traveling to Israel and Palestine in January, as part of my sabbatical leave. This is a wonderful opportunity, one which I’m really excited about. And yet, just this week, it got more complicated, when our president made more moves in the direction of recognizing Jerusalem, a half-occupied city, to be the capital of Israel. It is not fully clear yet how Palestinians and others will react to this provocation, but it’s not likely to make my trip easier, nor a viable peace process more probable.

“Comfort, O comfort my people,” we read in Isaiah. Jerusalem is supposed to be a “herald of good tidings.” But also, “the people are grass.” Isaiah is frustrated with the call he’s receiving from God to proclaim deliverance from exile. They’ve been in exile forty-some years, and God is promising to make the way home much easier than the last time, when they wandered for forty years in the desert. It may disturb our sentiments about scenery to imagine the mountains and hills being made low, but for a people who walk everywhere they go, it would have sounded like a major miracle. Good tidings, indeed! But “the people are grass,” Isaiah insists. Will they even believe me? Can there be any fruitful response to this good news? Do they even care what God is going to do for them anymore?

Our acquiescence to terrible circumstances is one of the things that make humans so good at surviving. But it doesn’t always serve us well when it comes to thriving. In order to rejoice in the news of God’s deliverance from exile, you need to keep yourself from getting used to exile. We mortals crave familiarity, even if that familiar situation is wretched most of the time. In order to embrace the coming of God’s shalom, we need to cultivate some level of discontent with the status quo. If we’re going to seek peace in violent times, we can’t pretend everything is fine; on the contrary, we must face the cold realities of war with eyes wide open, and continue to proclaim that another world is possible.

If you read my piece in the Disciples Seminary Foundation Advent devotional this morning, you’ll remember that I pointed out that the eight short verses we read from Mark this morning do not really qualify as a birth narrative. Mark is our shortest gospel; terse, one might even say, where Luke is more sentimental and Matthew more interested in meaning-making. But if read carefully, these eight verses could be seen as a God-becoming-flesh poem. Something very holy and powerful is happening: it’s “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” But the earthy details that are offered – John’s wardrobe, his diet, his metaphor about Jesus’ shoestrings – offer a sharp contrast to other biblical portrayals of God showing up on earth. The incarnation is about the holy and the earthly crashing into one another, a collision with cosmic consequences.

Collisions are rarely without discomfort. Whether it’s family cultures clashing when you visit the in-laws for Christmas, or the conflict that’s constantly rumbling and erupting as children move through their teen-age years, or an actual car crash, collisions are difficult. The impact of proclaiming God’s vision of shalom in the face of our global realities of war and violence is no different. To continue to insist that every life is precious – whether an orphan in Yemen or a refugee in Bangladesh or a child soldier in Nigeria – when the results of history try to convince us that some human lives are expendable is hard on our hearts. To work for peace – true peace, not false calm – requires that we be willing to face the horrors of our world unflinchingly, which comes at great emotional cost. How do we find comfort and persist in sharing the “good news of great joy” while living under the cloud of potential nuclear war?

There is a reason Hope Sunday comes before Peace Sunday. Without hope, we will not believe that peace is possible. Without hope, we will give up on seeking peace. The day-to-day collisions may be uncomfortable, but we can get used to them if we try. The familiar is comforting enough that we can let go of our need for the ultimate collision when the Divine arrives in our mortal lives, upending everything we’d worked so hard to come to terms with. “Comfort, O comfort my people,” we read in Isaiah. But there’s another cry in Mark. “Repent!” John the baptizer is saying. We must repent of our acquiescence, our willingness to adapt to the status quo, no matter how horrible.

If we can do that, we do discover that there is comfort in the collision that is coming. It is powerful and transformative to trust that within all the earthiness of life, the Christ Child is going to emerge in unexpected places. If we can lean on the power of the incarnation that we celebrate in this season, we will discover that we are not powerless in the face of global conflict. There are things we can do, even if they make us feel like a voice crying out in the wilderness. There are so many, many ways to build peace: feeding the hungry (Welcome Saturday), supporting humanitarian relief (Week of Compassion), calling our legislators to demand they counter war-mongering rhetoric, teaching our children to respond to bullies with firm and confident love, just to get started. Traveling to places that may seem dangerous, working to make our own homes less dangerous, connecting with people in faraway places to let them know we consider their lives just as precious as our own, these are all ways we can use the power of the divine-human collision that is Jesus to build peace in our world. And when we join in with that work, we do find comfort.

It is hard to leave you when our times seem so fraught with tension and danger. And yet, I have to believe that rest is also a holy method of seeking peace. The opportunity you have before you to try out new things, to test yourselves in new roles, or to see what happens when the things your control-freakish pastor does are held with a looser grip – this is a holy time, for all of us. If I may indulge in Isaiah’s mixed metaphors a little, my flower is a bit faded, so I need to spend some time being a lamb in Jesus’ arms. But also, to get myself up to a high mountain and proclaim God’s peace. I’m so grateful to be able to do this, and even if I don’t quite finish the to-do list, I know that it will be a time of renewal for all of us. Alleluia and Amen.