In the Meantime

November 29, 2009

No one could say exactly how it started. The two families lived across from one another on either side of a stream that formed the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. They sympathized with opposite sides during the Civil War. One sued the other for stealing a pig. A daughter had a child by the son of the enemy and went to live unmarried with their family. Then on August 7, 1882, at an election day picnic, Tolbert McCoy stabbed Ellison Hatfield to death in a brawl. A few days later, the Hatfield clan caught three McCoy brothers and executed them. For the next five years the two families feuded until on the night of January 1, 1888, a group of Hatfields surrounded Randall McCoy's house, set it afire, and killed all the people who ran from the house. The attack was so brutal that authorities from both states finally joined to put an end to the most famous feud in U.S. history.

The Hatfields and the McCoys…The Hutus and the Tutsies…The Arabs and the Jews…The Muslims and the Christians…The Protestants and the Catholics. People don't get along. Someone once said "Our differences make us beautiful. Our unity makes us strong." But often we fail at that unity part. Our differences divide us. Words are exchanged. The words get abusive. Violence follows. Violence begets retaliation, which invites further violence until we have war.

After the riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles in Los Angeles in 1992, members of two rival gangs, the Bloods and Crypts forged a fragile alliance for peace. There had just been too much violence. Jim Wallis was there, and remembers one of the young Crypts gang members saying to the group, "We've got some habits that only God can cure."

Isn't that right? We long for peace, but "we've got some habits that only God can cure." We hear as much today in all our scriptures for this first Sunday in Advent. In Jeremiah's day the land had been devastated by war against the Babylonians and the leaders had been dragged off into exile … fathers and sons had died in battle … women and children were starving in poverty.  The prophet Jeremiah reminded the people of a promise God had made which only God could fulfill, a promise that "Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety." God would do this by raising up a "righteous Branch" from the house of David, a leader who would "execute justice and righteousness in the land" (Jer 33:14-16). How they longed for that day to come.

They still do, but they don't know how to achieve it. Violence returns to Jerusalem again and again. The papers tell us about Palestinian terrorists bombing Israeli school buses and killing children … about the Israeli army cutting down olive groves that Palestinian families have depended upon for their livelihood for generations because some children were hiding in the trees to throw rocks at Israeli cars. Each side doubts the other side’s intentions for peace. The old biblical adage of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has left a lot of blind and toothless people in its wake.

In our gospel passage, Jesus speaks apocalyptically of the signs of the end. He says, "People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken" (Luke 21:26). But, this is not new. Warfare and violence has brought cataclysm to every nation and every people down through history. Though we have become no more adept at creating peace, in the last century we have become even more adept at destruction. It was simply the most violent century in the history of humankind, somewhere around 150 million killed in war alone, not counting those who died from starvation because of political struggles around the world. World War II, widely acknowledged as the "good war" against fascism, saw the erasure of the time honored distinction between civilians and soldiers as cities like Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were bombed to utter ruin. And you don't have to live in Jerusalem to be in danger. Nobody is safe in a world where, even after the Cold War has ended, around 20,000 nuclear weapons remain.

It doesn't even take a world war to cause wide scale human suffering. I received an e-mail this week from Dita Dauti, who coordinates a refugee resettlement ministry in Kenya.  She had just returned from a visit to the camp - which house 75,000 refugees from other African nations where violence has displaced people from their homes. She shared pictures and stories, and I could practically see the tears in her eyes because after her visit these were not numbers but people to her, people she had met, people who are surviving on the thinnest hope.

Even here, in our own country, the temperature keeps rising. I don't know quite how to characterize the political rhetoric and hypocrisy surrounding health care, but righteousness and justice don't come to mind. I keep thinking of Pilate's words last week, "What is truth?" Just this week a study showed that one out of four youth in the United States has used a gun or a knife or has been in a situation where someone was injured by a weapon in the last year. One out of four! And I wonder, when did I get this old, because I am weary with the in-your-face, trash-talkin' smack I hear everywhere I turn. I can remember a time when people spoke to one another with respect, and people in the media were cautious about what they said about other people. Was it really that long ago? But now we accept and even reward verbal violence and rude sarcasm everywhere, in our media, in our sports, in our comedy, certainly in our politics, even from our youth, who don't realize it was ever different than it is now. But it was. Folks, "we've got some habits that only God can cure."

But that is the promise of New Testament apocalyptic in general and Jesus' words specifically in Luke. The promise is … it won't always be this way. God will cure those habits. God will bring us peace, teach us peace, make us a peace-filled people . God is making a new creation, one person at a time. It won't always be this way, and that is good news for some but it is bad news for others, for there are those who gain profit, and power, and status from violence and poverty. Desperate poverty in the third world makes for cheap labor, higher profits, for companies in the United States. In this complex global economy, we ourselves are participants in the violence and also threatened by it. And peace is not possible without justice, without some level of sacrifice for the sake of others, some level of effort to transform conflict into reconciliation in win/win solutions. We long for peace, but are we willing to let God change those habits of hostility within us?

To be sure God isn't finished with us, yet. We live in the meantime between promise and fulfillment, and it can be a pretty mean time. Advent is all about living in the meantime, waiting for Christ to come and end this tired old world bringing the reign of God once for all. But how do we live in the meantime? How do we become harbingers of the peace that Christ will bring? How do we become citizens of the new order which he will inaugurate in justice and righteousness?

Paul's letter to the Thessalonian church is all about that very topic. Jesus is coming, he assures them. Don't give up hope. In the meantime, he says, "May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you" (1 Thes. 3:12). We've got some habits that only God can cure. Only a love that absorbs suffering without passing it on will bring this world the peace it needs. And only God can provide that kind of Christ-love. Let God bring that kind of love to life in you which does not judge in arrogance, does not grasp in selfishness, does not retaliate in hostility, but sees others - even the enemy - with compassion, through the eyes of God. As Joseph Wood Krutch suggests, "The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing." As followers of the Prince of Peace, we especially should see that the world as it is, is not what God intends it should be. But we do not give up hope. Through the mission and outreach of this church we are being renewed, transformed. We are learning the ways of peace. We are dropping out of the business of violence in the name of values … hatred in the name of morality … poverty in the name of economy … indifference in the name of our blessedness. We have a vision the rest of the world does not share. We see what they do not see. In our hearts, in our imaginations, we "see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory." "Now when these things begin to take place," Jesus says, "stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near" (Luke 21:27-28).

How do we get ready for company to visit at Christmas?  We decorate.  Today I hope that many of you will stay to decorate our church.  Of course we are already weeks behind if we go by John Biggs’ schedule.  The jack-o-lanterns are barely back in the basement before angels adorn the parsonage.  And we shop. We buy our guests gifts they will enjoy … food they will like. We do everything we can to make our homes the perfect place for our company to enjoy.

How do we prepare for the coming of Christ?  How do we get ready for the peace Christ will bring? By creating as much of it as we can in the meantime … by making this world - as much as is within our power - a place where Christ would feel welcome.

We may not be able to change the world. We may not even be able to change much in our own lives. But God can change our hearts. God can lead us to invest more and more in the things that matter … in the things that last … so we will have less to lose and more to gain when the day of the Lord comes for us. God can prepare us for a better day that’s coming and teach us to wait for it with hope.

So if you are waiting for your ship to come in before your pier collapses … if you are waiting to strike it rich so all your troubles will be over … if you are waiting for the world to be a kinder and gentler place where there is no sadness, suffering, or grief and where greed doesn’t rob people’s souls, I have little hope to offer you this morning. But if you are waiting for God to keep the promises of a better place and a better time … of a world where sorrow and sadness will be banished and every tear be dried … of a day when no mother will worry how to feed her family and no child will be left with bloody knuckles knocking against the door of opportunity that is tightly locked closed … then take heart. Start getting ready. Because one thing is for sure: it won’t always be the way it is now. The future belongs to God.

"We've got some habits that only God can cure." And God will cure them if we let God work peace in us. Will we? Will you? God's peace!

May we pray?

Bless, O Lord, our efforts in the days to come, to be peacemakers in Jesus' name, beginning with those who have something against us. Our natural inclination is to look to our self-interests at the expense of others. Help us to see that peace can come only when we have everyone's best interests at heart. Our natural inclination is to love those who love us and hate our enemies, sometimes even in your name. Help us to love our enemies in your name until we can think of them as enemies no more. Our natural inclination is to retaliate against those who do us harm. Teach us to turn the other cheek, to seek reconciliation, to follow the path of peace in our thought and in our speech and in our actions. We confess we cannot do this on our own. So we invite and urge you to invade our world and claim our hearts and open our eyes and fill us with the love of Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Rev. Mary Anne Biggs, Pastor
Nekoosa United Church of Christ
Nekoosa, Wisconsin