A HOMEOPATHIC DOSE OF RELIGION

Isaiah gives us this picture of the Kingdom of God.

The wolf shall live with the lamb

            the leopard shall lie down with the kid

the calf and the lion and the fatling together

            and a little child shall lead them.

When we pray

Thy Kingdom come;

we are praying for that peaceable kingdom of diversity 

celebrated in innocent harmony.

We are praying for an end to all violence                                  

     – domestic violence, terrorism, 

       the nihilistic violence of mass shootings, 

partisan rancor over politics, war – all violence.

We are praying for God’s ways to replace the world’s ways.

In God’s Kingdom, money doesn’t make the world go round;

            love does that.

In God’s Kingdom, our success doesn’t come

 at the expense of someone else’s failure. 

In today’s Gospel lesson, 

       John the Baptist announces that Christ is coming

to inaugurate that Kingdom, to change everything, 

to overturn the ways of the world with the ways of God.  

John is angry at the Pharisees and Sadducees

because they have forgotten Isaiah’s Kingdom vision. 

They have reduced their religion 

            to a way of getting through life,

            instead of a way to change the world.

We need to hear from John the Baptist each Advent 

because we are apt to do the same thing,

apt to lower our sights, shrink our faith to fit the world.

We need help with our guilt, our shame, our loneliness, 

             our anxiety. 

We need some grace; so we ask God for it.

That is right and good. 

I do it every day.

There’s a market for anything that helps.

So, like the Pharisees and Sadducees, 

we tend to reduce our religion 

to a way of getting through life

       instead of overturning the world’s ways with God’s ways.

When life throws us  more than we can handle,

we need a homeopathic dose of religion.

That’s most everyone’s first step on the path.

But Jesus lived, died, and rose again

            to usher in something far bigger 

– the Kingdom of God.

Even for our own peace of mind,

that first step doesn’t get to the basic source 

of our unhappiness

because the first step is still about me.

It’s about my guilt, my shame, my loneliness, my anxiety.

Our basic problem is the my.

It’s being stuck in myself that makes me vulnerable 

to all that bad stuff again and again.

The real liberation comes in step two.

That’s when I give myself away to God’s Kingdom mission.

I can’t make the Kingdom happen.

But, like John the Baptist, I can prepare the way of the Lord,

I can make straight the path.

So how do we get past the Pharisee and Sadducee religion 

of just getting by and take that second step?

We start by changing our basic assumptions about Reality. 

We dare to believe that the life, death, and resurrection 

of Jesus shifted the foundation of the universe.

After Jesus, it’s a whole new ballgame.

When God was born not as wealthy monarch

            but as a poor baby in a stable -- 

    soon to become a homeless refugee in Egypt,

the power of humility won out over the power of pride. 

When Jesus forgave his persecutors from the cross,

the power of love won out over the power of violence.

And when the angel rolled the stone away,

the power of life and hope won out 

over the power of despair and death.

After Jesus, it’s a whole new ballgame.

At the basic level of reality, the spiritual foundation,

the victory is already won. 

  

But Jesus left us the mission of helping the material world

            catch up with its spiritual foundation.

Our task right now is aligning earth with heaven.

That’s a tall order. 

But Jesus gave us that mission for our own good.

The Kingdom mission is part and parcel of our salvation

because the mission liberates us 

from our misery-making self-focus.

After we recognize how things now stand in heaven,

then we follow through with prayer and action.

Whenever we pray thy will be done on earth 

       as it is in heaven,

we invite the Kingdom into this world.

We are praying for the day when 

            They will not hurt or destroy 

            on all (this) holy mountain

            for the earth will be full of the knowledge of God

            as the waters cover the sea.

And every time we act out of God’s ways 

instead of the world’s ways,

we push the gate open a little wider.

Breaking the world open to God sounds big 

– maybe too big for us.

But in last week’s Gospel, Jesus said the Kingdom comes

            at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways,

sometimes small ways, little candles in the darkness.

Jesus taught about a pinch of yeast leavening a whole loaf,

            a few loaves and fishes feeding thousands,

            mustard seeds moving mountains, 

            and the peaceable Kingdom led by a little child.

This is a cynical world of arms length transactions

            and horn-honking, lane-cutting relationships –

     a harsh world where people act 

     out of fear, anger, and avarice.

But we can usher in the Kingdom 

with small acts of kindness and generosity 

-- fairness and mercy.

God merges all our small acts of kindness

like tiny ripples into a huge tidal wave 

to change the world. 

But the danger with small act spirituality is thinking that 

the Kingdom is just being nice and polite,

            that God’s ways are just good manners.

God’s ways are often small,

            but they are odd, unexpected, out of left field.

The wolf shall live with the lamb

                        the leopard shall lie down with the kid

the calf and the lion and the fatling together. . . .

We practice Kingdom ways 

when we are the wolf befriending the lamb

            or the kid trusting the leopard.

We practice Kingdom ways when we don’t 

            just gather into our people-like-me pack

            but do some good for someone

                        you wouldn’t expect.

That doesn’t happen automatically.

It takes intentionality and imagination.

It takes thinking and acting out of the box.

People have been known to leave candy canes

            on car windows,

            or buy desert for someone they see

                        eating alone in a restaurant,

            or drop off coloring books and crayons

                        at the pediatric wing of a hospital.

The important thing is not to just be nice.

It’s to throw the cynical, hard old world

            a curve ball, to do something fresh and gracious. 

Christmas is about the coming of Christ and his Kingdom.

So if you want Christmas to really happen this year,

            take a leaf from Ebenezer Scrooge’s book

            and buy a goose for the Cratchits. 

We don’t have to do anything big,

            just something gracious and unexpected.

Surprise somebody. 

Surprise yourself. 

Make God smile. 

PATIENCE, PRAYER, & PEACE: PRACTICING KINGDOM WAYS

Advent is the season of not yet,

the season we practice patience

because patience is the virtue essential

         to another Advent theme – peace.

Isaiah was Jesus’ favorite book.

Isaiah gave Jesus his main theme -- the Kingdom of God.

The coming of that Kingdom is what we are waiting for.

In Advent we learn how to welcome God’s Kingdom

-- prepare the way, open the door to God.

The key to Isaiah’s vision of the Kingdom is in today’s lesson:

         They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

         and their spears into pruning hooks;

         nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

         neither shall they learn war anymore.

The gateway into God’s Kingdom is peace.

 It’s like an Old West saloon

         where we check our gun at the door.

We invite the Kingdom to come 

         by practicing Kingdom Ways here and now.

That starts with the intentional practice of peace.

Is this about the war and peace made by governments?

Absolutely. But it doesn’t start there.

The wars of nations are bloody flowers on a cultural tree

         with deep, deep roots of violence.

Beneath political violence lies spiritual violence.

We won’t have much luck persuading 

         our governments to practice Kingdom Ways

         until we get the plank out of our own eye

and become people of peace ourselves.

In the Creed we say, We believe in God . . . .”

But in the real world, we believe in war. 

Before the Wars in the Middle East, 

we had a War on Terrorism.

Before that, we declared war on drugs.

We have declared war on inflation, on poverty,

         on salt, on pineapples and even on war itself. 

If we don’t like something, we declare war on it.

Maybe, that’s just a metaphor.

But metaphors create reality. They shape action.

They cause us, for example, to spend fortunes 

         on so-called drug enforcement

         while cutting drug rehabilitation Medicaid funding.

Is war ever the right response to a crisis?

Maybe, but it’s hard to know when war is such a dominant metaphor

         that it is our knee jerk response.

New Testament scholar Walter Wink said

         that the central point of the Gospels is to repudiate 

a religion he calls the myth of redemptive violence.

That religion teaches that violence sets things right

         and vengeance is the sweetest repast.

Jesus said just the opposite.

Violence begets violence. 

There is no end to it until someone like Jesus

         suffers but does not strike back.

Only then can it stop.

But tv shows, movies, and video games brainwash us 

with the myth of redemptive violence.

So, we keep spending far more money 

on our capacity to kill people

         than feeding, healing, and educating them.

How do we change it?

How do we practice Kingdom Ways while living 

under what Paul called the Powers and Principalities?

The answer has two equal and closely connected parts

-- peace within and peace with others.    

Let’s look inward first.

The Dalai Lama – who may not be a Christian but he’s good friends 

with the Archbishop of Canterbury --  says, 

         We can never obtain peace in the outer world

                  until we make peace with ourselves. 

The outer world doesn’t just mean hostile nations. 

It means our families, friends, and neighbors.

We blame each other for our unhappiness,

         but the balm for our pain is inside us. 

That balm is a kind of patience – not pretending our pain away –

         but learning to let it be. Stop picking at it. 

         That’s peace.

The seductive appeal of violence is its speediness.

Peace is a kind of stillness born of patience.

Paul put patience right beside peace

         in his fruits of the Sprit list, because, 

as St. Bernard of Clairvaux said,

Patience leads to peace.

Patience with each other begins by learning

patience with our own thoughts and feelings.

St. Francis de Sales said,  Have patience with all things,

         but first of all with yourself.

Rilke said,

         Have patience with all that remains unresolved in your heart.

To make peace, we have to become people of peace.

Jesus said you don’t get good fruit from a bad tree.

Peace starts within, through disciplined patient prayer.

So prayer: centering prayer, breath prayer, 

         loving kindness meditation, Taize chant,

         yogic asanas, tai chi chuan, any kind of prayer that brings us 

         to the Serene Center of Reality – peace starts there.

Peace doesn’t mean we always feel calm.

It isn’t some blissed out zone.

Peace means when we feel sad or afraid, 

we can just be sad or afraid awhile and not panic 

– terrified we will feel that way.

Usually hurt morphs into fear that we will 

         get never get over it. 

That fear turns to anger. Anger lashes out. 

Someone retaliates. 

Then we get hurt worse –and it all snowballs.

Deep prayer lets us just feel what we feel when we feel it,

         then let it go.

We don’t get lost in the fantasy of forever.

We let the hurt, the fear, the anger sweep across the surface

         – but not capture us and carry us along.

We have our feelings

         but our feelings don’t have us.

That’s what it means to be patient with ourselves. 

In Byron’s poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the ocean symbolizes our mind

         and those thoughts and fears are ships.

He wrote,

         Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean -- roll.

          Ten thousand ships sweep over thee in vain.

Prayer rolls on like Byron’s ocean. 

So the passions sweep over us in vain.

They don’t carry us into aggression.

Shakespeare’s Viola in 12^th Night

         repeatedly trusts unfolding time to resolve

         the dilemmas that are beyond her.

Prayer teaches us to say with Viola,

         O time, thou must untangle this, not I.

         

But if inner peace doesn’t manifest outwardly,

it’s just spiritual narcissism.

Peace is essentially and ultimately about relationships.

While we are learning patience with ourselves,

we can simultaneously learn patience 

         by befriending people we don’t agree with.

Anyone can make a shallow easy friendship 

             with like-minded people.

That’s just enjoying our own reflection. 

Reinhold Niebuhr said such friendships 

just make us more dangerous.

That isn’t what Church is about.

Speaking of this congregation, Mother Kim said,    

we are not like-minded but like-hearted.

We don’t base the Church on agreeing with each other,

         but on caring for each other.

Spiritual practice includes befriending people who disagree

and letting our differences lie at rest between us

without dividing us.

Some want the clergy to keep quiet

about the political part of life,

and I’ll gladly do that if we can 

first get the politics out of the Bible. 

Until we can do that, God help me, I’m stuck with it. 

Our differences these days are often political.

Bishop Kym says,

         In this world of division and hate,

         of chasm digging and wall building,

         a faithful church will be . . . connected//

         to God, to each other and to our community.

Staying connected takes patience. 

Isaiah doesn’t answer all our political issues.

But he does tell us how to treat each other 

         across our differences – with patience and respect. 

Church isn’t the only place to practice  Kingdom Ways.

They are for our whole life.

But we start here,

         maybe because if we can make peace in the Church,

                  we can make it anywhere.

So I invite you, this Advent, to the patient practice of peace.

Start slowly beating your sword into a ploughshare.

Do it prayerfully, gently with the quiet grace of waiting.