Disturbing the peace

 

Luke 3: 1-6
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 8, 2024

Photo of a black baseball cap with YB ÷ in white, sitting on top of a gray chain-link fence with spiraled barbed wire.

In the 25th year of the 21st century, when the Worst President Ever™ was voted for another shot at the title, and a boy who cried wolf installed as his vice president, with a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist as speaker of the House, a bunch of cronies and stooges nominated to his cabinet, plus a couple of billionaires who want to get rid of government excess but keep what they have, and the high priests of the Democratic Party still trying to decide between the needs of the people and corporate money and greed, the word of God came to who exactly?



Here we are yet again. The prophets have been calling out from the wilderness, from the margins for millennia. John the Baptist stood in a long line behind him, from Hosea and Daniel, Micah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah, to Elijah and Moses who led his people out of slavery. That long line carried forward to people like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass to Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. and a whole host of others. Eight years ago, I saw a protest sign at the first Women’s March that read “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this [stuff].”



Who is the word of God coming to these days? God’s prophetic word of peace through justice. Certainly not to anyone who thinks justice comes through the barrel of a gun or any other kind of violence. For far too long violence is exactly what justice has looked like. The death penalty. Extrajudicial killings. Or assassinations, depending which side you’re on. War. None of these have been proven as a deterrent to wrongdoing. None of these have solved any problems or led to a lasting peace, only a temporary one.



And yet nonviolence has its pitfalls too. Civil rights leader Kwame Ture said, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.” His conclusion was that the United States does not have a conscience. I think it still does but in many places it has been sedated, numbed, hardened like any addict. What we're witnessing in our nation is what happens when a body refuses to acknowledge its sins and its addiction to lies, all in the name of self-interest. White supremacy and Christian nationalism are a disease in our society and capitalism is the enabler. And when our nation’s conscience is pricked, like facing our nation’s actual origin story rather than idolizing its myths, there are politicians, corporations, and religious leaders who would rather double down, millions of people who are following them, and billionaires funding all of it and raking in the profits.



As Methodist minister Ted Loder wrote, “Lord, grant me your peace, for I have made peace with what does not give peace, and I am afraid.” And yet in order to be afraid, one has to care. And not just care for oneself, but care more for others, especially those who have no peace at all. In order to care like that, one’s conscience cannot be sedated or numbed or hardened. It must be tender and open, tuned to the lives of what Jesus called “the least of these”: the incarcerated, the sick, the hungry, the unclothed and unhoused, the stranger. Which sounds a lot like defund the prison industry, Medicare for all, a living wage and affordable housing for all, and a robust, welcoming immigration process.



Perhaps it was the hope of Jim Strathdee who wrote the song “I Am the Light of the World”, but in his poem “The Work of Christmas”, civil rights spiritual leader and grandson of enslaved people, Howard Thurman did not write “to make the powerful care”. I’m not sure that’s possible, it’s probably even futile, given the addiction of the powerful to power, money, and control. And most folks’ addiction to certainty and convenience and the comfort that comes from those.



But resistance is not futile. I think those of us with privilege who do care are about to find out what it’s like to live as exiles in our own country, like the millions of already oppressed people. And make no mistake—poverty, our healthcare system, lack of affordable housing is oppression and violence. The mission has not changed—to make the pathways direct, fill in the valleys, level the mountains and hills, even out the crooked places, make the rough places smooth, make the kin-dom accessible for those whose peace is non-existent. But it is also high time that the Church resisted the powerful by making their smooth ways rough, by disrupting the peace of the powerful. Which means disturbing our peace.



Author and self-avowed heretic Jim Palmer wrote, “Jesus raised hell against the religious establishment, and his life was a middle-finger to those religious and political hierarchies and powers that sought to dominate, control, oppress, exploit, shame and divide people. Whether in the name of God or Caesar, Jesus would have none of it. Each time Jesus opened his mouth, he was pulling out another wooden Jenga block that destabilized the power towers of his day.”



That, my friends, is the Jesus we follow. Peace is a moral problem. As Dr. King said, peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. We are disturbed more by poor people abusing an unjust welfare system or unhoused people with mental health challenges than by the billionaires who are normalizing this violence with their extreme wealth and exploitation and yet it is the latter who are the existential threat.



How close are we to those whose peace is non-existent? How can we be someone else’s peace? I sometimes wonder if most people’s idea of peace is more like bubble-wrap or reprieve. I think peace looks more like interdependence and sustainable living and care for everyone, but that takes work and disruption and commitment.



Advent is less about waiting for baby Jesus to arrive and more about what June Jordan meant when she wrote, “We are the ones we have been waiting for” in honor of the 40,000 South African women and children who protested apartheid with their bodies 36 years before that regime ended. If we are waiting for justice, we must disrupt injustice. If we are waiting for equality and equity, we must disrupt inequality and inequity. If we are waiting for peace, we must disrupt our own peace.



Who is the word of God coming to these days? Who is the word of God coming to if not to us? Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com

May we move gently and boldly through our lives,
protecting one another and tending robust peace.
Go forth warmed by the flame of the Holy Spirit,
Holy Love who lights our path.