Phil Kniss: The low road to high ground

(Advent 2) “PEACE: Proclaiming”
Luke 1:68-79, 3:1-6

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In this season of the year, everyone wishes for peace.
It may feel like this year, given all that’s going on in our world,
it’s an especially ripe year to wish for peace
But this year’s peace-wish is not unique.
It’s this way every year.
Advent and Christmas is a season that awakens our longing for peace.

Maybe it’s the songs we sing.
So many of them express this longing
for a world put right, and at peace.
Just look at the hymns and songs being sung today—
the Advent hymns we’re singing,
and the Christmas songs brought to us so beautifully
by the Clymer-Kurtz band.

Maybe our peace-wish is awakened because
everyone is oozing with holiday nostalgia,
longing for a day of peace like the days gone by,
when life was simple and beautiful,
candle-lit and snow-covered,
when Christmas was a time for slowing down,
reading a book by the fireplace,
breathing in the smells of cookies baking,
and ambling through the village streets
caroling to your happy neighbors.
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year . . .
it’s the hap-happiest season of all.”

In all likelihood, it was never like that at all,
but Christmas is a time when these images and dreams abound,
when everyone longs for a world at peace,
for enough of what everyone really needs,
for neighbors and families that actually, consistently,
get along with each other,
and value each other’s differences and eccentricities.

But, seasonal nostalgia aside,
there are deeper, and more theologically rich reasons,
why people like us should think about peace right now, 
and long for peace.

It’s the Biblical image of the “Promised One”—the Messiah—
the one that would reveal God’s real presence, 
Immanuel, God with us.
The promise of the real presence of God among us
makes us able to see peace as a real possibility,
and not just a wish-dream.
If deep peace in the world seems hopeless most of the time,
here is one time of year Christians specifically talk about
a pathway that might actually get us there.
_____________________

But the thing about wishing and praying for peace,
is that it often stops at the wish,
and rarely goes much further and deeper.
So few of us are willing to make the sacrifices necessary,
to actually change the dynamics of the conflict.

I think about the famous Christmas Truce
a little over 100 years ago,
during World War I on the Western Front in France,
where British and German soldiers
were fighting each other from the trenches.
On Christmas of 1914, early in the war, there were dozens
of these informal, soldier-initiated 1-day truces
scattered all along that 300-mile front,
where British and German soldiers got out of the trenches,
met in the middle and fraternized,
told stories, sang carols, traded souvenirs and cigarettes,
and in one location, at least, they played a game of soccer,
until Christmas ended, and they went back to war.

Folk singer John McCutcheon wrote a great song about that truce.
He sang it here at Court Square Theater a few weeks ago.
It’s one of my all-time favorite ballads of his,
telling this true story in detail,
about how these soldiers saw the humanity in their enemy,
and were changed forever.

And I imagine that part is true,
that they were changed forever, in some way.
But the harder part of that story is not in the song.
It’s the fact that this peace did not last.
The next Christmas, 1915, there were only a few
of these 1-day truces that popped up along the same battle line.
The authorities had come down hard on them the year before,
and ordered them not to happen again.
And by Christmas of 1916, with the war still raging,
there were no truces on the Western Front.
The bitterness between these enemies became even deeper,
especially after poison gas was introduced to the conflict.

The Western Front was one of the longest and deadliest
in human war-making history.
By the time it ended four million soldiers were dead.
Plus, almost one million civilians.
It was an unprecedented loss of life
that left Germany bankrupt and in semi-starvation,
cut off from the rest of the world,
and led eventually to the rise of Hitler and Naziism.

This, despite the inspiring and touching Christmas Truce of 1914.
Peace takes more than wishing,
and more than a feel-good story about our shared humanity.
_____________________

So . . . where can we find the path to peace?
Are we doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of the past?
Are we forever going to be at each other’s throats?
as a human race? and as a nation?
Where is the path to lasting reconciliation and peace and shalom
between racial and ethnic groups? between neighbors?
at our country’s borders? in our political institutions?
in the church? in our marriages? in our family relationships?
_____________________

I certainly cannot spell out for us the answers to those questions.
They are in many ways, unanswerable, for now.

But I think there is something to say
about the path to peace and shalom.
I think there is a road to the high ground, so to speak,
where we can find the fulfillment of our greatest aspirations.
But the road does not follow the path you might expect.
There is a road, but it’s not a shortcut.

And to look at it, we’d say it’s not a very appealing road.
It doesn’t draw us in, like the Blue Ridge Parkway,
with its lofty beauty and charm.
It’s more like a pothole-filled, gravelly, and dusty road,
that takes us off the beaten track.

If that’s the road to peace,
we could say—it’s a low road to high ground.

The road is named repentance.

It’s not the road most of us spend any time looking for.
It’s the road we’d rather avoid,
find a detour around,
or a shortcut that eliminates the need for that road at all.

It’s obvious why a road of repentance does not appeal to us.
To repent requires that I lower myself.
It involves the posture of bowing,
of acknowledging that I had it wrong,
or had done wrong.
It is a posture that looks like, and feels like,
a posture of weakness.

And that’s not very appealing—
especially at a time when power politics is on the rise,
when the winners have been those
most willing to exploit their own power,
and take power from their opponents.

No matter what the public arena—
politics, sports, entertainment, business, religion—
the winners are those that end up on top of the pile,
standing on top of the losers beneath them.

So, it seems counterintuitive to say,
in order to reach the high ground
of becoming the best and most fulfilled version of us
which God intended for us all along—
requires that we admit we are something considerably less.
At least, that’s how this road appears to us,
as we look at it from a distance.

But maybe . . . once we start down this road, following Jesus,
things are not quite the way they first appeared,
as is often the case when Jesus is involved.

Yes, repentance can be hard.
It can be daunting.
But I want to suggest that repentance,
what I’m calling the “low road,”
is actually, and paradoxically, not low at all.
Repentance is not about debasing ourselves.
It is not self-flagellation, self-punishment.
It is not meant to demean or diminish our selves.
Yes, it is hard, and it can be humbling.
Because repentance requires us to change our way of thinking.
And who wants to do that?
Who gets joy from saying, “I had it wrong all this time.”
Repentance means, quite literally, in the Greek,
“to change our minds”—metanoia.
We can’t change our minds,
without admitting we had it wrong the first time.
It need not be humiliating, but it is, by definition,
an act of humility.

This so-called “low” road of humility is the only path
that leads to the high ground of peace, of wholeness, of shalom.

So the invitation to repentance
is the invitation to live more fully and joyfully.
It has to be seen in that light if we read the Gospels.
People would not have been lining up
to be baptized by John the Baptist—
kind of a scary person to begin with—
if what he was offered
was demeaning or humiliating or shaming.
No, John’s invitation was an invitation to life!

We get stuck at his wild clothing and his brood-of-vipers language.
But that’s just style and rhetoric,
and made perfect sense to those in his culture.
They would have seen, easily, the hope and the promise in John.
John was inviting them into Isaiah’s grand vision,
of a world at peace, accessible to all—
of valleys exalted and mountains made low.

This picture in Isaiah, and repeated by John,
of the mountains being made low
is by no means a picture of a violent God
behind the wheel of a bulldozer destroying the landscape.
This is a positive and hopeful and liberating image.
Barriers are being removed.
The Berlin Wall is being toppled, so to speak.
Under God’s reign,
mountains are lowered,
valleys are lifted,
twisty roads are straightened.
And nothing will hinder the coming King.
No barrier will prevent the nations from coming together.
This is a picture of freedom.
This is a picture of the path of mercy.

And the way to get there is repentance,
it is to change our way of thinking.
_____________________

We have forgotten who we really are.
We are confused by the message
with which our dominant culture bombards us daily—
telling us to avoid any appearance of weakness or vulnerability,
to shun compromise and never yield to another,
to lift myself up by pushing others down.

So the calls to repentance of John—
and of Malachi and Isaiah for that matter,
and scores of other harsh-sounding biblical prophets—
are actually words we should welcome.

They are saying, “Here’s life!”
Here’s the shalom God intends for all people and all creation.
Here’s peace.

Repent and return to the covenant God made with you
from the beginning.
To love God with all your being.
To love your neighbor as yourself.
To treat the poor with respect.
To care for the widows and orphans and aliens,
and all people susceptible to exploitation by the powerful.
Stand up and accept the mantle God has placed on your life—
to reflect God’s good image,
to join with God in God’s good purposes in this world,
to not give in to any base desires you might have
to prove your worth at the expense of others.

If you embrace this vision,
and live into it by the power of the Holy Spirit,
you will be living the life God intended for you.
And perhaps you will inspire in others the kind of sentiment
that inspired Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist.

When John was born and Zechariah got his speech back,
he was overcome with gratitude
for what God was up to through his son John,
who would prepare the people for the coming of the Messiah.

We heard Zechariah’s song of praise from Luke 1, our psalm of the day.
He was filled with hope for the future,
at a time when his world was actually in shambles,
under occupation by Rome, ruled by the brutal king Herod.

At that point, he sang a song of praise to God’s justice,
that still rings with hope for us today.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace,
to guide our feet along the low road leading to high ground.

Let us sing our hope and expectation,
by turning to the song printed in the insert.
This hymn is proposed for the new hymnal.
It’s the same as the one in our current hymnal,
except there is a new verse, stanza two.
The hymn text by Charles Wesley has only two stanzas,
but the hymnal committee was wishing for a third,
so Adam Tice wrote this second stanza,
based in part on another hymn text by Charles Wesley.

So this is one of the first times
this stanza is being sung by a congregation,
and how appropriate it is to the morning’s theme—

Come, thou universal Savior; come, redeem the human race.Life and joy spring from thy favor; cheer each soul in need of graceStill we wait for thine appearing—make our senseless struggles cease.Guide us from our weary wandering into paths of perfect peace

—Phil Kniss, December 9, 2018

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Phil Kniss: How to keep your head up in the apocalypse

Advent 1: “HOPE: Watching & Waiting”
Psalm 25:1-10; Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

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A little bit crazy, and a whole lot inspiring.

That’s how I would describe Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet,
and Wendell Berry, the American writer, activist, farmer,
and cultural critic.

First, Jeremiah.
We just had a short, and very hopeful, quote of his
as one of our lectionary texts this morning.
“The days are surely coming
when the Lord will fulfill all promises made.
A righteous Branch will spring up for David;
and execute justice and righteousness in the land.
Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.”

What you may not have thought about
while you were hearing that scripture reading this morning,
is the part of Jeremiah that preceded it,
wherein things in the land of Judah are in a nosedive,
and all hell is breaking loose.

Jeremiah and all the people of Jerusalem,
were inside the city walls
under siege by the great armies of the Babylonian Empire.

Babylon had siege ramps built against the city walls.
They had heavy weapons aimed at the gates.
Not a soul could walk into or out of the city.
The Israelites had just enough military strength
to hold the gates . . . for the moment,
and keep the Babylonians from charging in,
but winning this battle was out of the question.
If they could hold on two more weeks, they would be lucky.
In fact, they had started tearing down their own houses,
so they’d have the stones they needed
to reinforce the crumbling city walls.
All Babylon had to do, was keep up the pressure . . . and wait.
Soon the people inside would run out of food.
After enough people starved to death,
they would weaken
and Babylon could break through the gates.
It was just a matter of time.
And Babylon had all the time in the world.

Then in the middle of this horror, Jeremiah does something crazy—
and inspiring—I guess.
He buys some land just outside the city walls.
God told him to, and he did.
Jeremiah goes downtown to the Jerusalem land office,
hands over 17 shekels of silver for this field,
and in front of a crowd of witnesses,
signs and seals the deed of purchase.
Creative, but not very bright.
In a few weeks, Jerusalem as they know it will be history.
Their own government will collapse,
and King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon will be in charge.
That property deed will not be worth the paper it’s written on.
And Jeremiah knew it.
But this was not the act of an entrepreneur.
Jeremiah was a prophet.
This was a speech act.
He was speaking hope to a hopeless people.
He was keeping his head up during an apocalypse.

In the middle of all the hell that was breaking loose,
Jeremiah saw signs of hope that no one else saw.
With upturned eyes, he looked, and saw a branch.
A branch—now that’s an odd metaphor, for these circumstances.
Jeremiah said the coming Messiah, who will set things right,
is like a branch.
A branch doesn’t burst on the scene and turn things upside down.
A branch emerges.
So slowly, you hardly see it when it first appears.
A tender shoot, when it first emerges from the trunk,
is both fragile, and hard to notice unless you’re looking.

Jeremiah was looking.
He saw the tiny bud of a righteous branch.
“The day is surely coming,” he said,
“when a new branch will come forth
and completely change the landscape.”
_____________________

I think you all recognize that we live in a world
where the landscape badly needs to be changed.

It’s not the first time for us.
Some of you can remember back to days of the Vietnam War,
when our country,
and yes, even our church,
was deeply divided over the right course of action for our country.
Everywhere was unrest,
outbreaks of violence,
hateful acts and hateful speech,
a reactive and defensive government,
who didn’t know what to do with the resistance to the war.

Here is where I point out Wendell Berry,
who in the early 1970s wrote an often-quoted poem, called,
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

He started out by naming all the things we could do,
to go along with the powers that be. And I quote:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors . . .
[Be afraid] to die.

But then he shifts gears, and speaks to those inclined
to resist those powers, and be a “Mad Farmer” like he was.
To those he advises, and I quote:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium.
Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Expect the end of the world.
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Practice resurrection.
_____________________

Now, do you imagine that either Jeremiah or Wendell Berry
were oblivious to the reality around them?
Were they living in denial, and suggesting we should, too?
Or were they trying to sell some psychological hooey—
the “power of positive thinking,”
trying to convince us that if we can imagine it,
it will happen?

No, it was neither one of those things.
It was neither denial, nor psychological manipulation of reality.

They were in touch with the same truth Jesus was in touch with,
when he taught his disciples how to live in the coming apocalypse.

Jesus said, in Luke 21, “Things will be bad.”
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,
and on the earth distress among nations.
People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming.”
That sounds vaguely familiar, like some op-ed pages I’ve read recently.
But Jesus goes on.
“Then,” he said, “you will see me coming.”
“When these things begin to take place,
stand up and raise your heads—raise your heads—
because your redemption is drawing near.”

When you see these things,
choose hope over despair.
Don’t crouch, stand up.
Don’t look down at the ground, lift your gaze.
Look up, not down.
Keep your head up in the apocalypse.

No, things are not the way they should be,
and it’s okay to name it.
It’s bad.
This is not the way God wants it, or the way we want it.

But the phrase, “Wait for the Lord,”
is not just a form of spiritual escapism.
Waiting is a normal, and good, part of the spiritual life.
If we desire a life in God, waiting comes with the territory.
Timelines belong to God.
Because God is patient, so must we be patient.
Because God refuses to take away free will,
and destroy all evil by sudden and divine fiat,
so must we wait things out.
Knowing how the story will end,
even while we are caught in the darkness of the present,
is a sensible way to live.
It’s not psychological denial.
It’s called spiritual patience;
it’s called faith-filled realism.

And it’s what Jeremiah, and Jesus, and Wendell Berry,
all had in mind.

Also the psalmist.
This morning we heard Psalm 25.
To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame.
For you are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all day long.

And listen—in the psalms,
waiting and patience is entirely consistent with
crying out to God, even in anger and desperation.

Don’t make the unfortunate mistake
of thinking that living in hope, and waiting on the Lord,
means that we need to be quiet and sit down,
and not make any waves.
Lament and protest and activism
can also be modes of faithfulness,
if they are done in faith.
The psalmist certainly exercised his right of protest.

He boldly registered his complaint against God,
tried to hold God accountable.
Yes, the Bible is full of faithful people
who held God accountable for God’s actions.
That is, they demanded of God an account
for what God was doing or not doing.

In today’s psalm we have,
“Remember your mercy, from of old . . .
“for your goodness’ sake,” remember and do something!

I love that spirit of prayer which the psalms do so well,
but which comes a little harder for me.
But no question. It’s biblical to ask God to give account.

I always thought it was cussing, to use the interjection,
“O, for God’s sake!”
And it could be, if you use it in a way that’s mindless or trivial.

But that’s exactly what the psalmist said, and what we can also say,
and it won’t be the least bit sacrilegious,
if we say it with intention and with respect.

It can be our righteous plea—
“Remember, God, you are good and upright.
So, for your own sake,
for the sake of your goodness,
for God’s sake,
undo this wrong,
make this world right!

That’s heads-up eyes-opened kind of prayer.
A prayer with which God is pleased.
_____________________

So . . . if we want to know how to keep our heads up in the apocalypse,
here are some practical suggestions.

One.
Speak the truth about what is, the way things are.
It does no one any good, and undermines our wellbeing,
if we pretend that evil is not staring us in the face.
It helps the evil lose its power over us
when we name it for what it is.

Two.
Speak your longing.
Give voice to your yearnings.
Articulate a vision for the way things ought to be.
Again, no one gains anything
if our strategy is just to play nice and quietly by ourselves,
and not push back against the present reality
with an alternative vision.

Three.
Be willing to wait.
The psalmist said to God, “For you, I wait all day long.”
And in God’s timeline, you know what “all day” means.
It’s not the sunup to sundown that happens daily.
It’s the sunup to sundown of our lives.
“Waiting all day” is holding on in hope
to something we may never see.
In Jeremiah’s world,
it’s buying and paying for a field he will never step foot on.
In Wendell Berry’s world,
it’s investing in the millennium, planting sequoias,
saying your crop is a forest
you will not live to harvest.

Four.
While you wait, expect visible signs.
Keep your eyes open and hold your head upright,
so you don’t miss anything.
The author Anne Lamott,
in her latest book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope,
she insists that even when life is at its bleakest—
when we are, as she describes it,
“doomed, stunned, exhausted, and over-caffeinated”—
even then the seeds of renewal are at hand.
She tells of her own failed attempt to deal with the evil,
by keeping her head down.

Here are her words:
“Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.
It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch,
the opposite of sticking together
and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.
The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump,
and it changes our vision as we scowl and paw the ground.
So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch
the best we can.
We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.

Those are Anne Lamott’s words,
but they echo, precisely, the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel,
“When these things begin to take place,
stand up and raise your heads,
because your redemption is drawing near.
Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down
with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life,
and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.
For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth.
Be alert at all times,
praying that you may have the strength to escape
all these things that will take place,
and to stand before the Son of Man.”

Too often when we read Jesus’ words about the apocalypse,
we get sucked into a debate
of when and how and where and to whom
this terrible day will come.
But the spirit of these words is not that of dread and foreboding.
It is Jesus encouraging us to live with our eyes open and heads up,
in a posture of expectancy and hope.
Because it is not terrifying doom that’s on its way.
It is our redemption.
God’s salvation.
God’s righteousness.
God’s end purposes. God’s telos.
It is coming. Be ready. Be patient.

Keep your head up. And of course, sing!
Let’s turn to #54 in Sing the Journey.
What an apt hymnal title for today!
We sing the journey, as long as it takes, even all day long.

Longing for light, we wait in darkness.
Longing for truth, we turn to you.
Make us your own, your holy people,
light for the world to see.

Christ, be our light! Shine in our hearts.
Shine through the darkness.
Christ, be our light!
Shine in your church gathered today.

—Phil Kniss, December 2, 2018

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