Don’t Lose
Your Head[1]
I have been known occasionally
to start a sermon with a joke. Today I
want to tell you about something that’s funny in a different way. As I was studying the concept of peace, I
typed into Google, “Nobel peace prize.”
Do you know what came up at the top of the list? A breaking story about a famous Hollywood
star harassing somebody at the Nobel award ceremony in that way that we’ve been
hearing about so much lately.[3]
So, ironically, in my attempt to learn about peace, I was reminded of one of
the big ways that our world is not at peace right now.
Today we are talking about peace because it’s our Advent
theme for the day. Jesus Christ, whose
birth we will celebrate in just two weeks, is called the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6).
One of the great expectations that Israel had of the coming messiah was
that he would bring them peace, and he did, but not political peace. Jesus brings us a deeper kind of peace.
Peace is a big idea.
It’s the impossible dream. It’s
so many different things. The kind of
peacemaking that gets someone the Nobel prize is big. The award is given to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for
fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies
and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."[4]
In scanning the list of the 131 people who have been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I was surprised how many of the names were
unfamiliar. There are some familiar
names: Mother Teresa. Martin Luther King Jr. Desmond Tutu. And a whole bunch of names I didn’t
recognize, because people working for peace in various places around the world
don’t always make the news. Though they
don’t make the news, they do make an impact.
In 2014, the award was given to Malala Yousafzai, a girl from Pakistan. Malala was 10 years old
when the Taliban took over Pakistan and made it a law that girls couldn’t go to
school. Malala spoke out against the
Taliban, and wrote about her experiences on the BBC blog so that the world
would know. When she was 15, she was
shot in the head as retaliation for speaking out. Malala miraculously survived, and at 17 she
received the Nobel Prize, the youngest recipient ever.[5]
If there were a Nobel Peace Prize in Jesus’ time, maybe John
the Baptist would have been a recipient.
He was certainly making an impact in people’s lives. Mark tells us that “all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him” (1:5)…all the people…and scholars estimate
that as many as 300,000 people were baptized by John out in the Judean
wilderness.[6]
I’m not sure John would have been a willing recipient of a
Nobel prize, though. John was very clear
that his purpose was to prepare the way for Jesus, to point people to the Son
of God. Mark tells us about John’s
humility in telling people that, “The
one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop
down and untie the thong of his sandals” (1:7) In the Gospel of John (not the same John), we
hear John the Baptist saying, “He must
increase, I must decrease” (John 3:29-30), because he knew his purpose was
to point people to Jesus, not himself.
It might seem somewhat random that on the day in which our
theme is peace, we are talking about this guy who lived out in the desert,
wearing camel hair clothes and eating grasshoppers and honey, but it’s not so
random, really. John the Baptist was a bringer of peace. He was a prophet, pointing people to God,
because John knew that it’s God’s
presence that brings us that peace that goes beyond our understanding. A deeper peace.
One of my favorite Bible verses, Isaiah 26:3, tells us that God keeps us in perfect peace when we
keep our minds focused on and trusting in God’s presence.
There’s a scene from the movie Star Trek First Contact
(1996) that demonstrates the powerful implications of being aware of God’s
presence. The crew of the Enterprise
goes back in time to prevent their enemy from interfering with a critical point
in the history of earth when they make first contact with people from another
planet. It’s critical because after they
do, everything begins to change. “It
unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible. When they realize
they're not alone in the universe, poverty, disease, war - they'll all be gone
within the next fifty years.”[7]
The more we realize God’s presence, the more we realize it’s
not just us here, but us together serving and worshiping the almighty creator
of the universe, the more we see that God loves us all, and that he came for us
all. He is not some distant God, but he
is Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us.
John the Baptist’s message was simple and clear. He called people to repent, to turn from their sins and be forgiven and baptized. This is how he encouraged people to be ready
to meet the messiah. This is how we too prepare to meet the messiah. We repent.
Mark tells us that John was “proclaiming a baptism of
repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (1:5).
In the amplified version we get more of what that means:
“… [that
is, requiring a change of one’s old way of thinking, turning away from sin and
seeking God and His righteousness].”
Changing our way of thinking.
Letting go of our old ways and letting God lead us in new ways, ways of
peace. Turning to Jesus.
This year I’m participating in an Advent tradition that comes
out of the Episcopal church in which they send out a daily Advent word. The idea is to pray about that word and
meditate on it, and post your response with an image on Facebook or Twitter
using the hashtag #Adventword. This week one of the words was #simplify. I thought of John the Baptist living out in
the wilderness, living more simply, eating simple food. And I thought of John’s message. Repent.
Turn. Let go. Simplify.
Sometimes that’s the key in making peace in our lives, and in
our relationships. Lots of things get in
the way of peace, so if we strip away all the obstacles, all the clutter, and
simplify down to the core issue or the core value, we can find our way forward.
Recognizing our core issue is what the Bible talks about in
James 4:1: “What causes fights and
quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” Our core issue in quarrels is
selfishness. We fight because we want
things our way, but if we can let go of that enough to turn away from
ourselves, we can find resolution and peace.
What are the obstacles to peace in our lives today? What are we holding on to that we need to let
go? What do we need to turn away from so
that we can turn toward God?
There’s a song about peace that goes like this[8]: Let
there be peace on earth… Do you know the rest of the line? . . .
and let it begin with me. Peace
begins in us. We bring peace by being at
peace, and we find peace through repentance . . . turning away from our
selfishness and turning to follow Jesus.
Maybe it sounds backwards to focus on ourselves in
order to bring peace to others, but it’s really not. We must have peace in order to bring
peace. It’s like when we get on an
airplane, and the stewards tell about the oxygen masks. What do they tell us to do first? Put on your own mask. Even if you’re traveling with children or
people who need help. Because you can’t
help them if you’re passed out from lack of oxygen.
We must be at peace with God in order to be bearers of his
peace, and the way we make peace with God is to humble ourselves, admit our sin
and change our ways. We pray.
That might seem like an insignificant thing, but it’s
not. The more we allow God’s peace to
fill our hearts, the more we bring that peace with us wherever we go, because
it’s contagious.
Studies show that we unconsciously and automatically mimic
the emotions of the people around us.[9] If they are happy, we catch some of their
happiness. If they are angry, we catch
some of their angriness. If they are
peaceful, we catch some of their peace. And if we are peaceful, then
they catch peace from us. The
more we are aware of this, the more we can guard against taking on other
people’s anger, and the more we can be givers of peace. We can have more effective conversations that
bring resolution rather than stirring up more conflict when we ourselves bring
our peace to the conversation.
Peace isn’t about making things perfect, but letting God into
our brokenness and finding through God the kind of peace that is shalom,
the Hebrew word for peace that has a broader meaning of well-being and wholeness.
Matthew and Luke’s gospels show us Jesus, the baby. Mark skips right to Jesus as an adult, the
Son of God, the one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. During Advent we focus on four words – hope,
peace, joy and love. All of these are
signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
All of these together bring us wholeness, deeper peace, shalom.
.
For many of us, one of the most peaceful times in our lives
is night. At night, the commotion of the
day is replaced with silence. At night,
things we couldn’t hear in the bustle of the day become more audible. The hum of an appliance. Insects chirping.
People breathing. Maybe that’s why Jesus
came at night. In the stillness and the
darkness we are more receptive.[10] At night even the smallest light breaks the
darkness.
Jesus was born in the night.
In the simplicity and stillness of night, we find peace.
We sing a beautiful, peaceful song on Christmas Eve – Silent
Night. There is a hush and a stillness
at night, and this is what we imagine as we sing “all is calm, all is
bright.” But I wonder how silent it
really was? The town was crowded because
people had come from all over to register to pay their taxes. It was so crowded that Mary and Joseph
couldn’t find a room and end up in a stable.
Maybe that stable was outside the city and not quite so noisy, but it
was a stable, with animals. And people were
coming to see the baby – shepherds, wise men, who knows who else. Maybe it was quiet. I suspect it really
wasn’t.
But there’s a different kind of quiet. A different kind of peace. There’s a commercial for Apple’s iPhone that
conveys this well. A guy and a girl are
in the midst of a crowded, noisy city, but when they meet and instantly fall in
love, all the noise and crowds suddenly disappear and it’s as if they are
entirely alone.[11] Focusing on Jesus can be like that. We need those kinds of moments with Jesus to
help us know his peace.
Whether we find those moments in the stillness of the
morning, or the stillness of night, or in the midst of crowds and noise, turning
to God and giving him all our focus and worship, allows him to fill our hearts
with his peace, and that peace we then take with us into our daily lives and
share with the world.
All it takes is a turn, a prayer, and that can even be just a
word. Jesus.
May we all make that turn and know the amazing light of God’s
peace.
[1] Title alludes to John’s
death by decapitation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beheading_of_St_John_the_Baptist ) and to the chaos that many
of us experience during the holidays.
[2] By Rev. Melissa Krabbe, a
sermon that was preached at United Presbyterian Church, Sterling KS, on Sunday,
December 10, 2017.
[6] David McKenna, The Communicator’s Commentary: Mark
(Word Publishing), 30.
[7] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117731/quotes
[8] Harry Connick Jr. sang this song on his Christmas
album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1k8s2yMqY from What a
Night! (2010)
[10]
Adapted from Maria von Wedemeyer’s letter to Bonhoeffer, December 25, 1943.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. God Is In the
Manger (Kindle Locations 795-800). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle
Edition
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