A vision of plowshares

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on April 30, 2006.

Two years ago today was my first morning to wake up back in my own country. The whole week, indeed month, before my leaving Paris had been a whirlwind of goodbyes, official and personal, a trip to divorce court, weeding out and packing up, and one final spectacularly tearful and poignant au revoir at Charles de Gaulle airport. For quite a while, nostalgia was my main activity. After a few months, Bishop Bruno shook me out of that. By sending me here, he reminded me of the commitment that I had made to God. That commitment was to do God’s will, to find a way to interest others in God’s ways. Even before I was ordained I had made an offering of my life – literally using those words “God, I give my life to you. I’ll go where you want me to go. Show me what you want me to do.”

I truly believe that God put me here to help you build, to pick paint colors, to help you know that you can set the world on fire with the spirit of love and adventure, to be a companion in grief or trouble as well as joy, to be someone for you to lean on and to for me to learn that asking for help isn’t a sign of incompetence. I believe that God gave us a gospel of love and peace. I’d love to be able preach bunnies and sunshine for all of Easter but I’m pretty sure that God doesn’t want me to do that. I truly believe that God expects me to challenge you to move out of comfort zone and into gospel zone.

The prophet Micah is that voice of the uncomfortable gospel zone. His words thunder to us from thousands of years ago – they were ancient words at that first Easter. Little is known about Micah except from some of the autobiographical hints in his seven chapters. He was a farmer not an aristrocrat or scholar. He was a part of a busy prophetic era – the eighth century bce. He was a contemporary of the original Isaiah, Hosea and that thunderer Amos. These prophets all stood up and exposed injustice. Isaiah and Micah both spoke eloquently about the injustice of war. They are clear that the only way to true peace is through justice.

Listen to Micah’s words;

"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths."

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
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 any more;
but they shall all sit under their own vines
and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;

How do we get from a culture of war to one that learns war no more? If those words were not new in Jesus’ time, they are much less new now and we’re no closer to living them, indeed with each passing moment we blithely accept war as the normal option in conflict. Bob Dylan was right, “When will we ever learn”

I have been slowly making my way through Dominic Crossan’s new book In Search of Paul. His overview of the book is stated this way… “This entire book is about the clash between those alternative visions of world peace. One is Augustus’s vision, following civilization’s normalcy, of peace through victory. The other is Paul’s vision, following Jesus’ radicality, of peace through justice. Crossan begins by comparing the building blocks within these opposing visions of peace. The building block within the global victory model is hierarchy. Within the global justice model it is equality. Paul understood that Easter, being part of Jesus’ resurrection, did away with all division and distinctions. In Christ, all of the ways we separate ourselves from one another, are simply gone. In Him, there is no Greek or Jew, no slave or free, there is no longer no male or female – all are equal in this new Easter life. Paul’s work promoting equality that leads to justice that leads to peace put him at odds with an empire that was steeped in the tradition of order (which is not really peace) through military victory and clearly defined roles and the privileges or lack thereof that go with them. For Paul, once he understood what the resurrection meant, he had no choice but to preach this gospel. He really got people upset. Crossan believes that the statements attributed to Paul about slaves obeying their masters and women being subservient to their husbands were later additions to make this subversive equality less threatening. Paul understood what it would take to make Micah’s vision of peace a reality. It’s been a tough sell.

My favorite passage from all of scripture comes from Micah. He answers his own question “With what shall I come before the Lord?” In the 8^th verse of the 6^th chapter Micah carves these words into my heart and imagination “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” But I would also say that to do those things and to follow through on them to work for the goal of peace requires courage. We’ve all seen examples of one person making a difference. Well I want to tell you about Ava Lowry, a 15 year old girl from Alabama who needed to express her feelings and frustrations about war in general and the war in Iraq in particular. A year ago she began her website called Peace Takes Courage and started creating what she calls animations. The first one I saw was called Wonderful World. Images of the suffering of war, particularly children, unfolding over Louis Armstrong’s gentle peaceful song broke my heart. Ava’s animations are meant to move us and they do. Ava has continued her work and now hundreds of thousands of people visit Peace Takes Courage each month. The hate mail that she has received would curl your hair. I listened to a radio interview she did on a San Diego station the other day and a more matter of fact, not self-aggrandizing person you will never find. Ava began her calls for peace because the images of war that we were seeing through the regular media did not adequately portray the horror. She is convinced that when we see what war is really like, we won’t be able to romanticize it and then we might actually do something about it.

The interviewer asked Ava whether she had a lot of support there in northern Alabama or was she a lone voice. She hesitated and then said “except for my Mom, really nobody else. I don’t think my Daddy’s even looked at site, he’s pretty conservative.” I would like you all to see a couple of her animations, particularly the one called The Time is Now. (Note from the Vicar, I did not show this during worship, but in my office afterwards.)

Ava is a modern day Micah. She was called out of comfortable private life and thrust into a prophetic role that is really shaking people up. That’s what Micah did, it’s what Jesus did and then Paul, it’s what God expects me to do, and oops, God expects it of you, too. Alleluia!