Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·December 5, 2004

The Second Sunday of Advent

Prayer of the Day

As we light the second candle of Advent, may we reflect on our own readiness for receiving God’s hope in our midst.  Receiving God’s hope means welcoming light into the dark places, peace into the jagged places.  It means making possible a world where wolves can live with lambs and the peoples of the earth will not bring harm to each other.  May our lives reflect that light as we dare to hope and pray for a world of peace.  Amen.

Preface to the Scripture and the Sermon

Before I read the Scripture, which is what I would normally do at this point in the service, I want to ask us to take a few seconds of silence.  Just 20 seconds of silence.  In this silence I want to invite each one of us to think about in these recent weeks past, when you upon hearing about something in the news, or in the paper, or just something by word-of-mouth, when you’ve heard about it, you have shaken your head.  Think about when you have heard about something that caused your heart to ache, and your mind to wonder, “What is this world coming to?”  Just 20 seconds to think back and to let those thoughts come to the surface of your remembering.  “What is this world coming to?”

Perhaps your thoughts went some similar places mine did: the so-called professional basketball game between the Pistons and the Pacers; that shocking hunting incident in Wisconsin; the escalating body and casualty count in Iraq; the execution of international humanitarian aid worker, Margaret Hussan.  “What is this world coming to?”

Now along side these thoughts, let us receive the Scripture from the Old Testament words of the prophet Isaiah – a living knowledge of God.

Scripture
Isaiah 11:6-9

The wolf will romp with the lamb, the leopard will sleep with the kid,
The calf and the lion will eat from the same trough;
And a little child will tend them.
Cow and bear will graze the same pasture, their calves and cubs growing up together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will crawl over rattlesnake dens, and the toddler will stick his hand down the hole of a servant.
Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill on my holy mountain, says the Lord.
The whole earth will be brimming with knowing God alive, a living knowledge of God, ocean deep and ocean wide.
May these words of the vision of God bless us this day.

Message
Visions of Peace Dancing in God’s Heart
Kim Ryan

These words are offered to God’s people of all time as hope and as promise that every situation that just came into our mind in that 20 seconds of silence does not have to be that way.  These words offer hope and promise that there is another way to live on earth other than the way of violence and of hurting one another.  That other way exists in the heart, in the will, in the intention, in the living knowledge of God.  Throughout all of time, God’s vision of peace has been known.  This isn’t a secret.  It has been known.  It has been revealed.  It has been offered.  It has been received.  It has been lived occasionally. 

Over and over again, poets and prophets have tried to remind people that the vision of God exists within the heart of God and within ourselves.  Thousands of years ago, the prophet Isaiah spoke that vision to a hurting and broken people. 

Today, a prophet and a poet of our own generation and our own time speaks of God’s vision to a hurting and breaking people and world.  His name is Bishop Desmond Tutu, an Anglican minister, a Protestant minister who has lived his life and ministry in South Africa.  Twenty years ago he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts and his country, which was then ripped apart by hated, and racism, and an institutionalized system known as apartheid.  Bishop Tutu was an eyewitness and a recipient of hatred, and injustice, and violence that few of us can hardly imagine.  He has been a warrior, but not with bullets.  Not with vengeance, but with words – strong words, kind words.  He has been a warrior with his nonviolent presence in a country that many predicted would be lost to revenge and chaos.  Many predicted and expected a bloodbath, instead of the peaceful elections of ten years ago – the election of Nelson Mandela – the beginning of democracy for that country, and their continued peaceful intentions today.  The chaos, the revenge, the bloodbath did not occur, and South Africa is one of the few places on this earth that has chosen to live toward a vision of peace.  It is one country that has kept its head above the downward spiral of hatred and retaliation.  It is not a perfect country, but South Africa offers tenacious hope to a broken and hurting world that there is another way to live.  It does that through gratitude to the many peoples who were willing to be a witness for such peace, Desmond Tutu being one of them.

I actually got to meet Desmond Tutu last year when I was in South Africa.  He is a short, chubby man.  He has a warm engaging smile, and a laugh, and the most gracious and kind eyes.  I have a picture of me and two friends with Bishop Tutu, this moral, spiritual, political giant of a man.  We have our arms around each other.  As the camera flashed, I realized I was patting Bishop Tutu’s love handles.  I was momentarily appalled.  Well, more than momentarily, I should say, because I’m appalled as I think about it right now.  I only found comfort in having read one of his books since that time.  He wrote it in 2004, this year.  In that book he emphasizes that we are all family.  Close family.

This morning I want to offer some of his words, because I believe his words describe the vision of peace that dances in the heart of God.  I invite you to hear these five statements as though they are a love letter – a love letter filled with the poetry of longing and promise.

• “God believes in us.  Dear Child of God:  God does believe in us.  God relies on us to help make this world all that God has dreamed of it being.”
• “God’s dream.  Dear Child of God:  Before we can become God’s partners, we must know what God wants for us.  ‘I have a dream,’ God says.  ‘Please help me to realize it.  It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts where there will be more laughter, joy, and peace.  Where there will be justice, and goodness, and compassion, and love, and caring, and sharing.  I have a dream that my children will know they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, my family.”  (See, I told you.)
• “God loves your enemies.  Dear Child of God:  If we are truly to understand that God loves all of us, we must recognize that God loves are enemies, too.  God does not share our hatred, no matter what the offence we have endured.  We try to claim God for ourselves, and for our cause, but God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict, or to any one religion.  And our prejudices, regardless of whether they are based on religion, race, nationality, genders, sexual orientation, or anything else or absolutely and utterly ridiculous in God’s eyes.”
• “Seeing with the eyes of the heart.  Dear Child of God:  I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.  It seems to be part and parcel of the human condition, that suffering can either embitter or ennoble.  Our suffering can become a spirituality of transformation, when we understand we have a role in God’s transfiguration of the world.  And if we are to be true partners with God, we must learn to see with the eyes of God.  That is to see with the eyes of the heart, and not just with the eyes of the head.”
• “Stillness.  Dear Child of God:  All of us are meant to hear God’s voice.  Frequently we assume this is reserved for some rare special people who alone have been called by God.  But the truth of the matter is that each one of us is meant to have that space inside where we can hear God’s voice.  God is available to all of us.  God says, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’  Each one of us wants and needs to give ourselves space for quiet.  We can hear God’s voice most clearly when we are quiet, uncluttered, undistracted, when we are still.  Be still.  Be quiet.  And then you begin to see with the eyes of the heart.  People often ask about the source of my joy, and I can honestly say it comes from my spiritual life, and specifically from these times of stillness.”

These are just a few of Bishop Tutu’s wise words.  They are gentle words, aren’t they?  As he is a gentle man.  They are strong words, though, aren’t they as well?  As he is a strong man.  They are words of conviction born out of his life experience in facing an oppressive system of hate, standing in front of tanks to prevent them from tearing down cardboard homes.  Standing between feuding tribes, standing before corrupt statesmen, standing for justice and human rights and reconciliation.  They are words of conviction born out of his faith experiences.  He would say simply he has been following Jesus Christ these many years.

Whenever I am tempted to dismiss Christianity, to dismiss the Bible, or the Christian way of following Jesus, to think of it as a sugarcoated illusion, as wishful thinking, or pie in the sky, and possibilities, I think of South Africa.  I remember Bishop Tutu and others like him.  And I love how down to earth this Nobel Peace Winner is.  His recommendation for the world, his recommendation for us is simply this, “Let us be gentle with God’s children, and we are all God’s children.”  Then he specifies one particular way to do that.  Are you ready for this?  He says, “Let us watch our tongues.  It is far too easy,” he says, “to discourage, to criticize, to complain, to rebuke.  Let us watch our tongues.  Let us be gentle with God’s children.”

And I will tell you these words…  He could have gone all day without saying these words, putting them in a book.  These are the ones that tap me on the shoulder.  These are the ones that step on my toes.  But then, again, that’s the job of a prophet.

I want to begin to end with this story that was circulated through the office this week.  Thanks to Dixie Lenau for providing it to us.  You may have heard this already.

A man was being tailgated by a stressed-out woman on a busy street.  Suddenly the light turned yellow, just in front of him.  He did the right thing, stopping at the crosswalk, even though he could have beaten that red light by accelerating through the intersection.  The tailgating woman hit the roof, and the horn, screaming in frustration with words and with sign language.  She had missed her chance to get through the intersection.  As she was still mid-rant, she heard a tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very curious police officer.  The officer ordered her to exit her car with her hands up.  He took her to the police station where she was searched and fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a cell.

After a couple of hours a policeman approached the cell, opened the door.  She was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with her personal affects.  He said, “Ma’am, I’m very sorry for this mistake.  You see; I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn and cussing a blue streak at that guy in front of you.  And I saw your bumper stickers: ‘What Would Jesus Do?’  ‘Follow me to Sunday School.’  And the chrome-plated Christian emblem on the trunk.  I just assumed you had stolen that car.”

Bishop Tutu suggests if more of us “could serve as centers of love and as oases of peace…” (Those are his words.)  “Centers of love and oases of peace” we might just be able to turn around a great deal of the conflict, the hatred, the jealousy, and the violence in our lives and in this world.

Let’s take another 20 seconds of silence, and this time imagine yourself as a “center of love, as an oasis of peace.”  Twenty seconds…

Amen.

Benediction

Author of peace, steady our hope when unrest surrounds us.  Fortify our hearts that we might seek and see your peaceable kingdom.  Let this search and vision be our guide.  Amen.