Second Sunday in Advent

In this season, we are moving through the anticipation of Advent toward the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas. As we wait, we are expecting the arrival of not just any baby – though everyone’s baby is beloved by God and special to his or her family. We are waiting with eager longing for God to come to us in the form of an infant who will grow up and challenge and change the world.

We are right to ask the question, what kind of baby will grow up and challenge and change our world? We know the answer in our everyday lives. Presidents and other world leaders grow up, in whatever country, and change their nations, and if they are the head of state of a super power, like the United States, they have the power to change the world.

The children in your life have changed you. They have likely caused great frustration and greater joy in your life. You are more attentive when you are with them, they have unleashed in you a kind of protectiveness and they have unlocked more love than you knew you had. They have brought one or two of you back to church so that your children will know the same loving faith community that you knew. And we all know people for whom, if their have not brought them back to church, they have surely brought them to their knees in prayer.

What child is this? The question is answered as we follow the themes of Advent. Last week the answer was Jesus, our hope, next week Jesus, our joy, after that Jesus, our love, and Christmas day, Jesus our Emmanuel.

Today, we answer the question this way – this child is Jesus, our peace. By peace I mean shalom – not just the absence of war, argument, and hostility, but a sense of calm, well-being, and tranquility in our lives and in the world. It is peace and quiet in our souls and it is peace and prosperity in the world. Peace is healing and hope and forgiveness and forward movement. We may remember past hurts, but we don’t pick at them. We may be cautious in the presence of people who have wronged us, or whom we have wronged, but we do not live in awful, angry places. We may have been stopped temporarily but our sense of shalom helps us to keep moving.

The Ephesians, a church of Jewish and Gentile Christians, of those who followed the rules of Moses and those who did not, is trying to find its way to peace. The church at Ephesus wants to be a faithful church. The problem is that Gentiles were considered without God; the word used to describe them has the same root in Greek as the English word atheist. Today the word atheist has come to describe people of no religious faith. They may be good moral people, but they do not believe in God. Then the word described a person utterly cut off from the God of Israel and the gods of Rome. To call a person an atheist was not merely to describe their belief system, but to pronounce an oath upon them. It was the same as saying to them, “you are worthless, you are hopeless, you are doomed”.

That is what some in the Temple thought of Gentiles at one time. But things have changed now. Now worshipers in the Temple and Gentiles who have come to know Jesus understand that he is their peace, and he is ours. Feeling worthless, doomed, hopeless? Perhaps there is a reason to feel that way, after all, the economy is growing for many, not for all. We drove to church today past congregations that are larger and richer than ours and we can’t figure out why sort we long for has been delayed. We are a nation at war, the murder rate in Columbus will be over 100 this year, and the burglary-robbery rate will be well over 4000.

Too many of our lives aren’t turning out like we planned, we feel put upon by people and institutions, yet we say insist on saying Jesus is our peace? It must surely seem to troubled hearts that what Jeremiah said is true: “From the least to the greatest, everyone is greedy for unjust gain, from the prophet to the priest every one deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace…yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush” (Jeremiah 6.13-15).

I believe that what Jeremiah says is true – our spirits, our psyches, our sense of personhood and nationhood have some big gaping wounds that are treated with band aids when major surgical repairs are needed. So we cannot find peace all by ourselves; instead our lives are full of discomfort and dis-ease. But I believe this too. Jesus is our peace. He is, this child we are asking about, the one who will be our source of healing and well-being. He is the one who brings us our peace.

It is Jesus in the first century and in the twenty first century that allowed people to cross lines of culture and race to gather together in his name. We celebrate diversity here – we show in every way possible that we do not have to think the same way, dress the same way, speak the same way, vote the same way, or live in the same neighborhoods to be good Christians. We understand that our diversity makes us richer in spirit and in our relationships in the church. We have peace in Jesus Christ and that is the peace that helps us appreciate and respect each other. It is what brings us closer to him and to God.

We talked about what it means to follow Christ yesterday in the first of the pastor’s classes. He is our peace, bringing us together, making us one people bearing the name Christian, being followers of Jesus Christ. It is he who has broken down the walls of hostility that separate us. What kind of walls?

Perhaps it was that very real wall that kept Gentiles in the outer court of the Temple along with the women; they were all literally separated in worship from Jewish men. There was a fence, like those “whites only” and “colored only” signs once seen in the American South. The sign on the Temple fence said, “no man of another race is to enter within the fence and enclosure around the Temple”, thus keeping non-Jews from Israel’s sacred altars. We see the heritage of such exclusion in churches that deny women full leadership opportunities.

You may have read in Friday’s paper that Congregation Agudas Achim a few miles down the street from here, has declared its commitment to the inclusion of both men and women in their synagogue by moving from an Orthodox affiliation to one with Conservative Judaism. One symbol of their shift is that they do not have a mechitza, the symbolic dividing wall that keeps men and women separate in worship (Faith and Values section, Columbus Dispatch, p. 1-2).

Perhaps the wall was more symbolic of the distance between the world, filled with broken, sinful humanity, and heaven where God reigns and the risen Christ and the risen Christ gives advice and counsel at God’s right hand. Another possibility is that the wall was the law of Moses with its hundreds of commandments to keep people faithful. Whatever the wall, it served more to separate than to protect. It became more and more like the walls we know when we build walls to keep out those not just like us.

Most of us saw the power of broken down walls in the late 1980’s when the Berlin wall was crushed and crumbled until now just a few stones stand to recall its existence. Here is the good news! When we put our faith in Jesus, all of those walls can come down (Interpretation series. Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon. Ralph P Martin. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1991, p. 35). So it can be with the walls that we erect in our hearts, walls that separate us from the love of God and from good relationships with each other.

Thank God it is Jesus our peace reconciles us and gives us hope. We see families hold on and find their love and hope renewed because Jesus our peace is with them. No longer two or three factions in one family, or in one church, no longer fighting about who has been here longest or who really belongs; in Christ, we find ourselves called to unity and service. The young people preparing to be baptized already understand, and they are already doing things to help others. It is why our youth and their parents are preparing for a mission trip next June, and its why we will be collecting a special offering at Christmas.

We sing, “we are one body in this one Lord” (“One Bread, One Body” Chalice Hymnal, St. Louis, Christian Board of Publication, 1995, #393). We live the song when we step over the rubble that used to separate us, if we believe the wall has been torn down, to enter into reconciled relationships with others. I heard the other day that Southern Baptists and mainline Protestants, that is churches such as the Disciples, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Methodists – United, African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion are working together to build houses in Louisiana and Mississippi. People who are theologically suspicious of each other, “they are too literal, too judgmental, too rigid”, “they are too soft, to unsure, too unwilling to say what they really believe, too liberal” have said, we all belong to Christ who loves us so much that we can’t help but come together in a united effort to provide a place to live for displaced and dispossessed people.

Jesus came with his message of peace to those who have been in church their whole lives and those new to the faith, and we can all claim him as our own. We are, Ephesians says, no longer strangers eyeing each other warily – wondering who is he? what does she want? We are members of the household of God. We are not called to be a church on a corner, but the church of Jesus Christ alive in this place, ready to serve Christ in this house of faith and beyond it. We are called into community with Christ and with one another. He endured the cross for our sake, surely we can build up a church committed to his hope and his peace for him and for the sake of the world.

As we do, we will discover that Jesus, our peace will abide in us and we will abide in him. We will find peace in our souls and we can become by the way we live agents of God’s peace in the world. We certainly are not the first believers. Room has been made for us by those who have come before us, and by prophets who called kings and common folk to faith and justice; the apostles who followed Jesus and whose lives of faith are a model for ours, and those of the generations who by their faith and trust in God built this church.

They knew that the foundation of the faith was and is Jesus Christ who holds us together and who builds us up and who creates room in our hearts for Jesus to live in us.

Advent is the time for us to explore who this coming child will be. It is a time for us to declare that the one who is coming, is already here – Jesus our hope and our peace. It is he who promises to comfort us just as the women and men were promised comfort on the road back from exile. What Isaiah promised is reaffirmed by Jesus. He is our peace and it will be Jesus who will show us the emptiness and foolishness of a world filled with animosity toward others and ourselves. He helps us see that if he is our peace, he will help us find that peaceable highway on which the barriers that separate us fall, where there is not only no war, but there is also no poverty, and no abuse – either physical, emotional, sexual, or religious. Jesus our peace will bring us home. The glory of God is about to be revealed, and all of us will see it together.

From the strongest to the most at risk, that is the world we seek and it is the world we have through Jesus Christ our peace.

Thanks be to God for the coming of the Prince of Peace. Amen.

Dr. LaTaunya M. Bynum
Senior Pastor