Humility: We Need Each Other

December 8, 2013

Scripture   Isaiah 11:1-10

I. I have served as an ordained pastor now for nearly two decades – and three church staff positions before that.

And unlike the gentleman holding the “I Am Humble” sign at the top of our bulletin today, I would say that thanks to my pastoral experience, my sign reads, “I Have Been Humbled.”

And I have been humbled. I have been humbled by the experience of standing up in Worship one day and exclaiming, “Something’s wrong with my microphone.” And the congregation responded as one, “And also with you!”

And I have been humbled by the sign I found on the warm air hand-blower in the men’s restroom at my last church: “Press Here for a Message from Your Pastor.”

And I have been humbled by the woman who approached me after Worship today and said, “Pastor Chuck, I so enjoy your sermons. They are always better than the next one.”

And I have been humbled by the same woman who then asked me when I was going to publish my sermons. “Well,” I said, flattered, “I am thinking about setting aside a few of my favorites and having them published posthumously.” “Oh,” she replied, “That can’t happen too soon!”

Even after all these humbling experiences: I have never awakened one morning and convincingly said, “I Am Humble.” Humility is not part of my individual emotional make-up.

Nor do I think humility is a part of anyone's emotional make-up. For I believe humility is intrinsically relational. It is something I receive in relationship with others, and with God’s universe. It’s not a virtue I have acquired or can acquire unto myself. It’s a result of what I learn from being alive.

Humility is intrinsically relational. Humility is learning over and over and over again that I have more sources from which to receive than from which to give. Humility for me is – in one word – teachability.

Humility means we need each other.

II. The prophet Isaiah today offers his longsuffering people a vision of the renewal of God's promise at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. The Captivity occurred in the sixth century BCE when the Hebrew leaders of Judah were captured and deported hundreds of miles east to Babylon.

Humbled they were, these captured leaders. And humbled we are, the presumed leaders of the free world, when we realize – captive or free – that we cannot make any hard journey alone.

We need help. Each of us needs help.

And yet, we deny it. For I have discovered there are three words I rarely hear church people say. Three words I believe are words of true humility: “I … need … help!”

Oh, we love to help – we church people. We need to be needed. Instead, we are so afraid of being seen as needy.

And yet, to need help doesn’t mean we are needy. To need help means we are human. (And we must be human to be humane.) To openly express our need for help means we have given up being godly or playing God – at least for the moment.

Humility: We need each other.

Can you say it with me? Let’s say it together: “I … Need … Help!”

In the words of Mister Rogers: "There. I knew you could!"

I knew you could – we all could – be humbled.

III. And so many of us can be humbled – needing each other’s help – as we approach one of the most difficult seasons for more people than any other.

“Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of the yearrrr”, we hear – for so many! And because our culture preaches and teaches and reaches out to tell us, every caroling moment of every Christmasy day, that it should be that way for all of us  … more and more and more, we buy into these unrealistic expectations which are nothing but resentments waiting to happen.

Or, if you are like many I know: You never bought into those expectations to begin with. You are instead tempted into the sadness of being reminded once again that the Christmas cheer of some nostalgic past will not be re-created. That Christ child innocence will be with you no more.

Which is why we’re having our first-ever Blue Christmas service two Saturdays hence. A time of meditative Worship at 5 pm – immediately following the falling of the sun on the Winter Solstice – when many of us can come together in this transept of the sanctuary with carols, candles, prayers, and the memory of a loved one – which we may wish to share, and will have the opportunity to share. This Longest Night service – December 21 – will honor the grief of the holiday season for many. BPC – this Place for Healing – will offer healing and hope to those who desire it: your family – your friends – it could even be you.

A time not when we can be humble, but when we can practice humility. Leaning on each other. Needing each other. Saying in the presence of our sisters and brothers, in the cacophony of God’s compassion – in the whisper of the Spirit – in the stillness and presence and hearing of one another – three simple words: “I … need … help.”

It’s not a Christmas gift we need to be given. Not yet, at least.

It’s an Advent gift, on the other side of Hope: The gift of Humility. Needing each other. Hearing others say – hearing ourselves say – “I … need … help.”

IV. It’s the Advent hope and humility from a prophet today who envisions fraternal shoots from national stumps … and spiritual branches from religious roots.

And it’s the fraternal spirit – versus the national religiosity – of reaching out that grows faith community in the most surprising and grace-full ways … if we but “shoot” and “branch” ourselves just a little this season.

Not to give just the right gift. Not to catch just the right spirit. To extend ourselves – our presence – to one another. We church people need each other – and need to reach others – in a Xmas culture gone Xmas mad. We church people need each other – and need to reach others – with an open heart and tender soul that says to one another: “Do you need help? Well: I need help, too!”

Help we receive when we approach this Lord’s Table with an open heart – and an open mind – and a willing and welcoming spirit this day …

Just Peace: Forging Weapons of Mass Construction

December 1, 2013

Scripture    Isaiah 2:1-5

Welcome to Worship! …

Happy New Year! The long night’s journey into day that is Christmas begins this very day: the first day of the Church year. The first Sunday in Advent. Advent 1.

Happy New Year! And yet: What’s so happy about it? We gave thanks for much on Thanksgiving Day. And then, the very next day, we trampled on one another to get what we did not yet have.

But now, Black Friday: Meet Good Friday! Peace-through-Consumer-Victory: Meet Peace-through-Human Justice.

The story of Just Peace. That’s today’s scripture story of Advent hope.  Of creating Weapons of Mass Construction.

Sermon …

What we have just heard is the Hebrew scripture reading for the First Sunday of this Advent season. Translation: This is our scriptures’ very first words to us as the new church year begins.

Act I … Scene 1.The curtain rises. A prophet walks onto the darkened stage in a circle of light. His first utterance: “In days to come …” A new beginning! He begins to sing – of a mountain. Of nations streaming there, for holy instruction. To be judged by that instruction. To make peace from that instruction.

As the song is ending, another sound arises. It’s a ringing sound – of a hammer striking metal. It fills the room. In the church’s new year, it’s the first sound we hear. A harsh sound. Hammer on metal: Bam – bam – bam! Forging weapons of mass construction.

It’s a new church year: “In days to come.” This First Sunday of Advent, we begin to peer into God’s future. A Christmas future, where the holiest ground is a place of just peace.

Just peace. God’s judgment of and arbitration for the nations, and our peaceful response that flows from this. A just … peace.

Isaiah’s destruction-into-construction images of just peace – destruction-into-construction – of swords forged into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks – provide the inspiration for a large sculpture that stands outside the General Assembly tower at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Just peace – a sculpture for all nations to hear the prophet’s call to justice and to be shown the way of peace from that call. Just peace – the United Nations’ mission is symbolized by this sculpture.

And yet, when was the last time we have heard of nations gathering at the UN to arbitrate, as this passage puts it, for a just peace? What we hear arbitrated instead are rationale for just war.

Just war. A protocol whose criteria originates not with a nation-state, but ironically with a churchman – St. Augustine – in the late fourth century.

Well, things have changed a bit in the ensuing 16 centuries. More than a bit.  We live in an age where more people were killed in war in the last century than in all prior human history. We live in an age where civilian war casualties are no longer five percent, as they were as recent as 100 years ago – they are 50 percent, or higher. We live in an age where 1/25 of the world’s population – here we are – own more military weaponry than the next 25 countries combined.

Can we engage anymore – therefore – in a just war? Leave we any room in our political lexicon for Isaiah’s vision of just peace: “in the days to come”?

The search for a just peace. According to Isaiah, our holy ground provides that highest ground. The church, the synagogue, the mosque, the ashram: These holy places and others can best speak of such a magnificent thing. All the just-warring nations will be judged by the voice emerging from those mountains.

And yet we know that this is not true. Faith communities throughout our land – especially the most influential faith communities in our land – are co-opted into driving the just war debates. Exhibit A: Iraq; Exhibit B: Afghanistan. Isaiah’s vision of a just peace – where God arbitrates and judges, where we respond with weapons of mass construction: Where may we see it? Where may it be heard?

And yet, sometimes – sometimes – God’s voice in Isaiah today – “I do the judging, I do the arbitrating!” – is so arresting, so compelling, the most powerful on the planet find themselves transformed. Transformed into warriors for a just peace.

It’s a call that a war-weary general-turned-President named Eisenhower overheard when he was urged by his military advisers and his Vice-President to intervene forcibly in a land known to very few in the 1950s: Viet Nam. Eisenhower’s reply: "I am not sending our boys ten thousand miles from home to fight a war in that elephant grass.” Ike left that quagmire for future presidents. A moment of just peace, Eisenhower’s was – consummated by his farewell address, warning us all with a prophet’s edge of the rise of “a military-industrial complex.”

The sounds of just peace reached the ears of President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The voices around his table rang clear: Attack the Russians! Drive them from our hemisphere! Kennedy’s response: Wait. History has chronicled that he heard another voice – and banked our country’s, and most of humanity’s, entire fate on that voice: the voice that said Khrushchev was hearing the same. Both of these statesmen heard it then: the voice of the Holy One judging us by how peacefully we respond. The voice of just peace.

That voice – God’s, saying “I judge, I arbitrate, you transform your weapons in response” – is heard among the culturally powerful, as well. When the professional basketball superstars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and their respective teams, the L.A. Lakers and the Boston Celtics, squared off throughout the 1980s, they carried with them “just war” hopes of separate races and separate coasts and their own ambitions to be recognized as the greatest at their craft.

And then, Magic Johnson discovered in 1991 he was carrying the HIV virus – a pandemic we remember, on this World AIDS Day, in our continued fight to vanquish it. And it was then that the uber-competitive relationship that has developed between Magic and Bird over the years became transformed.

“The day that I heard about Magic(‘s plight),” Larry Bird said, “It just sort of changed my love for basketball. It shook me up. Probably the same kind of feeling I had when my father died.”

Through tears, Magic Johnson remembered his archrival’s response. “I’m choked up because he did call me. You know, when something happens to you, and then you find out who really your friends are, the people who really care about you, you figure all those battles, all those things we had to go through as warriors, as competitors, and then as men … this man says, ‘You know what? You’re okay.’ And that was my greatest moment … to have him check on me, to make sure I was okay.”

The just war on the court between Magic and Bird had now become – in the game of their lives – transformed into the construction of a just peace.

The voice is God’s through Isaiah – it’s a voice of justice: “(I) judge the nations, (I) arbitrate (among) the peoples.”

The response to that voice is ours – it’s a response of peace: “(We) shall beat (our) swords into ploughshares, and (our) spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

God’s judging and arbitrating voice is sometimes – sometimes – so compelling, the most powerful people on the planet are turned into the most prominent warriors for a just peace.

Friends: We cannot lay our Advent hope on the “sometimes”. We can only trust in the Advent “days to come” that the prophet’s concluding invitation today may prove too compelling for us to resist: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”

In a world of institutions, political and religious, lost in the delusion there can be a “just war”:  Who but we who are faithful to the gospel can present on more than a “sometimes” basis God’s alternative to God’s world? Who but we can commit to the light of just peace – and hear others doing the same? And lead others to do the same?

This table of Holy Communion is where Isaiah’s “all the nations” and “many peoples” gather. This table reminds us that we are that Advent light of the Lord to the world. We come here today as erstwhile just warriors – each of us. We come carrying just warriors’ weapons: of resentment, of anxiety … of fear. We come here to be transformed into “weapons” of mass construction.

We come here knowing all this: locked in the stare of a world looking to justify war all around us. For the “just” in “just war” is not justice – no. It’s self-justification.

And so we come here knowing the burden of hope ironically falls upon us. But our burden is light. For we are not alone. For it’s a burden of a just-peace hope that Jesus carried. He died for that “peace-through-justice” hope.

And so now, we participate at this table in his dying once again. Dying, to the warring chimera of “peace-through-victory” all around us. Dying, to live into God’s calling : peace-through-justice, forevermore!

And so, I bid you – as the prophet bids us: Come. Take the first small steps with me of this Advent journey: This long night’s journey into day. The first small steps, from just war (peace-through-victory) to just peace (peace-through-justice).

“Come,” Isaiah proclaims to us today. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord!”