Seasons of Peace: Presentation Outline

Friends, if you were unable to participate in Sunday's presentation on the PCUSA Season of Peace, here is my outline for the session.  You can click on the links below and navigate around to many of the topics we discussed:

Seasons of Peacemaking

September 22, 2013

1.  What is the Season of Peace?

2nd Sunday in September through World Communion Sunday

Includes options for a 9/11 Remembrance and International Day of Peace

2.  Peacemaking brought Pastor Le Anne to the PCUSA

Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

Fellowship of Reconciliation

Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions

UN Program; Peacemaking Program

3.  Resources:

Special offerings video on Peacemaking Offering (1 minute)

Compassion, Peace, and Justice Program video (1 minute)

Peace Fair, Bible Study, and Peacemaking Devotions

Travel Opportunities and Meeting International Peacemakers

http://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/peacemaking/

http://www.pcusa.org/seasonofpeace

http://www.pcusa.org/blogs/swords-plowshares/

http://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/peacemaking/international-peacemaking/

http://www.missioncrossroads.org/  

(Peacemaking, Disaster Relief, and Mission work closely and often overlap in our PCUSA ministries)

The Peace Pipe

More information at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calumet_(pipe)

We were privileged to have an authentic peace pipe with us in worship on Sunday, which was given to the great-grandfather of one of our members by the Ho-Chunk Nation here in Wisconsin many years ago.  

A ‘peace pipe’ was used by a variety of Native American tribes, for primarily ceremonial purposes.  They were most often not owned by one person, but by the community.  However, they might be given as gifts, and tradition hold that if you were carrying a peace pipe, you may be granted safe passage even as a stranger.

A peace pipe might be used to seal a treaty or contract; often smoked together at the end of a war.  Another purpose was to pray--the smoke was believed to carry the prayers up to the Great Spirit, or God.

Making peace with people, especially with folks who have hurt or upset us deeply, is a lot of hard work.  When we need to make peace with each other, it takes lots of prayer, it often takes help from our community around us, particularly our elders who might be wiser and have greater perspective, and we will certainly need help from God.  We should never be afraid to ask for help when we are in conflict and wish to make peace.

Giving Grace

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

Friends,

These past few weeks we’ve been working through some tough scriptures in the Bible--we’ve had the prophetic book of Jeremiah, speaking to the situation of a people unaware they were about to be overrun and exiled from their country; and we’ve had some difficult teachings of Jesus which have at least on the surface sounded rather harsh.  And we get a little bit more of that this week, as we come to the parable of the shrewd manager.

The Anti-Hero

At first glance, you might wonder why this is even in the Bible.  You have a dishonest manager who’s been skimming off his boss, and when he gets caught and is about to get fired, he apparently skims even more off his boss by cutting in half all the debts of the people who owe stuff to the boss--and then he gets rewarded for costing his boss money!  Does this make any sense at all?

Well, first off, we have to know the world in which this parable is told:  Often, the wealthy owned land and the poor became tenant farmers: they paid to work the land and make a (meager) living.  These landowners hired managers to keep everyone in line--and often, those managers were crooked.  They exploited the tenants and filled their own pockets.   Now, you might even argue that while the manager isn’t a saint, the boss is also cheating everyone, at the top of the system; and while we’re discussing all of this, do you recall all the stuff going on about the 1% and the 99%?

Now you should also know, in this crowd gathered around Jesus, they probably were the 99%.  They are the tenant farmers, they’ve been cheated by these managers, they know they’ll work their tails off and never get ahead.  These parables, then, are enormously subversive speech, and the crowd around Jesus knows it.

It was a system of savage inequalities, in a world where there was no social safety net, and no mercy.  And this shrewd manager was crooked but not stupid; he knew he’d likely die as soon as he lost his comfortable position.  So, on his way out the door, maybe he’s putting it to his boss, or maybe he’s making friends where he once had enemies.  After all, in having their debts even half-forgiven, the tenant farmers who have been exploited and mistreated by this dishonest manager, are more likely to be in a forgiving mood.  They are much less likely to attack this man with the revenge they must surely desire.

Deliver Us From What?

In our Brewing Questions group this week, we talked a bit about how so much of our faith tradition seems to assume a life that is nasty, brutish, and short, with lots of emphasis on deliverance from the world--not only in the Bible, but also so many of the religious writers that have come in the centuries since. It may not resonate so well today because at least in the past few decades, things have been relatively stable for us.  When was the last time, here in rural Wisconsin, that the teeming hordes swept through and burned the village and slaughtered the masses?  When was the last plague around here that wiped out entire families?  Fortunately, we’ve got antibiotics and we can listen to Dr. Zorba on NPR and we’re going to probably all be okay.  But not so long ago, daily life could be overwhelmingly, inexplicably tragic.

Perhaps the only folks around here fairly recently who would have known this quite so well, were the Native Americans, as the early settlers came through.  They knew diseases brought by pioneers that wiped out entire tribes; they knew slaughter and the burning of homes.  They knew exile and the destruction of their entire way of life.  In fact, our theology of Manifest Destiny, we know, became their Trail of Tears.  We haven’t been able to talk about these realities of our how our country was founded, and who was harmed in the process, very often.  It was often kept out of schoolbooks and the media of the day.  Talk about such things was also considered rather subversive speech.  We know there are still tensions and prejudices between Native American communities and several of our own towns and villages even here in Wisconsin.  We know that even today, Native American communities continue to suffer and often live in deep poverty.  

In light of this context, we can begin to understand the anger in the Psalm, asking for God’s jealous wrath to burn like fire against their enemies, since they themselves have been slaughtered and humiliated.  And yet the Psalmist also asks for forgiveness for themselves, for whatever harm they themselves have caused.  And you can really hear the overwhelming grief in Jeremiah, who asks for eyes to be a fountain of tears to weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!

Which Master?

Jesus says we cannot serve God and wealth.   Now, wealth can serve us; it’s not wrong to earn an honest living and invest faithfully, and even to be wealthy as a result.  However, when we earn our wealth dishonestly, through exploiting others, or investing in things which cause harm, then we are serving wealth, where the wealth matters more than the people who are harmed while we’re creating it.  Since God’s concern is for the health, dignity, and wellbeing of all God’s children, wealth earned in these ways would put us directly in conflict with God.

There are ways to be conscious, which even our own PCUSA programs of Compassion, Peace, and Justice help us to learn, in order to be good stewards of our wealth--how to shop and invest more ethically, how to even give our money in ways that cause good and not further harm.

Praying For the 1%

If we are the ones on the bottom, the tenant farmers, the exiled, those in the lowest positions, and it is someone else’s boot that is on our neck, it might be very hard to forgive.  It would be hard just to control our anger!  And yet, we have Paul’s teaching that we ought to pray for everyone, including kings and others in high places, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.  Let me reiterate: we pray even for our enemies, even for those who treat us unjustly, that we may lead lives that are quiet and peaceable, and that we might also live lives that are Godly and with dignity.  It is hard to live with dignity when we see ourselves as a victim.  By praying for others, we act to restore our own dignity--not by force or violence, but through peaceable means.  This robs us of nothing, relieves us of revenge, and fills us with hope and renewed purpose. And when we have discovered our dignity, we are able to work with others to address injustice and inequality in our world.  The path towards such a systematic reconciliation may be difficult, but it very well may be our balm in Gilead, that makes our woundedness whole and heals our sin-sick souls.

Go Ahead, Be Shrewd

There’s one phrase in there that I thought quite interesting, which struck me anew in this reading:  “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.  What does this mean?

Sometimes we may also be like that manager:  We too are caught up in systems that we know to be unjust, where we see vulnerable people being harmed.  It can be at school or work or even in our social circles.  it can be in our government and on our streets, or anywhere in our world.  We may not be sure that we can take the risk to change anything about it, until like that manager, we realize we’ve got nothing left to lose by doing so.  

We who would call ourselves children of the light, can't pretend we don't see suffering, can't close our eyes and refuse to get our hands dirty. We need to be a little shrewd, a little streetwise.  To get a little involved and stir up trouble, lest we be accused of squandering our too-comfortable lives.

And yet the good news is, we who have received such abundant grace, grace to cover all our sins and bring us to new life, are now free to extend such grace to others--those above us and below us, in high places and low, next door and across the street.  In doing so, we can truly be children of light, reflecting the true Light, which outshines all darkness. Amen.

++

Prayers This Week:

For our Native American sisters and brothers

For all who are nearing the end of their earthly lives

For all who are caregivers

For all who struggle with chemical dependency

For all peoples who are displaced from their homes

For all who have suffered from violence

Does God Get Angry?

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14:1-7; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

Friends, last week we talked about how some of the Scriptures we’re reading right now don’t really sound like a gentle, loving kind of God we probably prefer to think of, and we continue to get some of that this week.  So I’d like us to continue to explore what it is that actually might make God angry, as well as perhaps some things which don’t, and what happens afterwards.

When does God get angry?

Jeremiah tells us that God gets angry when people seem to be too good at doing evil and don’t seem to know how to do good.  When God talks about what it’s like when God’s angry--we hear about how the world grows silent and trembles with fear.  After all, the rest of creation knows God and what God is capable of doing.  When I read the description there of just how angry God is--no light, birds fleeing, land waste and void--I’ll admit:I kind of hear that western music that they always play right before the shootout.  God is sort of fantasizing about some really dramatic stuff here, because God is angry.

But even though God is angry, God hasn’t cut God’s people off.  They’re still God’s children, whom God calls, “my people.”  And so to help us understand a little better, let’s talk about parentalisms:  those things which parents say when they are really fed up with their kids.  Such as, “oh, you think this is angry?  You haven’t even seen angry…”  The Jeremiah passage reminds me a lot of that.  Or, can you imagine God, the parent, with the whole world in the back seat, bickering and squabbling and picking on each other and whining, and finally God saying, “Don’t make me pull this car over and come back there!”  

Have you ever asked yourself, as a parent or as a child, what exactly was going to happen if the car did get pulled over?  Did you try to find out?  Or did you just get the picture that it was time to knock it off?

Maybe God isn’t literally going to pull the car over.  However, like any parent knows, there are times when you have got to step in and get the kids’ attention before they really get hurt.  And God knows that if they keep going down the road they are going, they are indeed going to get seriously hurt.

Seriously: Don’t Eat People

So, what exactly makes God angry?  Well, the Psalm tells us God is angry when people become corrupt, that the evildoers are the ones who “eat up my people like they eat bread,” who exploit the poor and vulnerable.  If you’re going to get where you’re going by making life more miserable for those below you, then you should know that God is providing refuge for them, and your plans are in trouble.

I wonder if you’ve heard it said that if you took a knife and literally cut out everything the Bible had to say about something like healthy sexuality, or gay people, you wouldn’t notice the difference.  But if you tried to cut out everything the Bible had to say about our responsibility to care for the poor and vulnerable, the whole thing would fall apart.  Treating those who have less power and material wealth than ourselves with respect and dignity is at the very core of our faith.  So often, the world entices us to do otherwise, and to treat them like a nuisance, or simply forget them.

And wouldn’t that seem easier?  Even with the Gospel story:  If you had 100 sheep, and lost one, a 99% retention rate is still pretty good, like an A+, right?  Even losing just one coin out of ten, that’s still 90%, like an A-, right?  Ah, if only it were so easy, and the stakes weren’t so high.

More Joy In Heaven

The Gospel goes on to say that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, rather than 99 righteous ones who need no repentance.  There’s a little bit of a sarcastic undercurrent there, since Jesus is responding to people criticizing him for eating with tax collectors and sinners, when a “good” religious person would know how awful they were and wouldn’t associate with them.  In criticizing, they’re demonstrating how very self-righteous they are.  Surely, they themselves don’t need to repent for anything.  But God isn’t that excited about such self-righteous people.  Besides, they’re really rather boring.

Re-calculating...

It’s hard for many of us to admit when we’re lost--literally or figuratively.  Literally speaking, how many of you have a GPS?  How many of you disagree with the GPS and then get irritated when it sits there and says, ‘reCALCulating, reCALCulating….’  How many of you just turn it off?  My mom is one of those people, who has no idea where the thing is taking her and everytime she comes out to visit, she gets within five miles of the house, gets frustrated, and turns it off.  Has no idea where she is or how to describe where she is, and I get to go out in the middle of the night (and it always is, by that point) go find her, and get her back to the house, where the grandkids are eagerly waiting.

When we get lost, when we miss the right turn, God re-calculates.

It’s hard to admit we’re lost in other ways too.  As you may have seen, the local chapter of Al-Anon which met in our building recently disbanded.  In the weeks since, I’ve had so many conversations with families who feel very lost, even helpless and hopeless, as they try to find resources to help their loved one struggling with an addiction.  And certainly part of the difficulty for many of the families as they try to find help, is not wanting anyone else to know--they’re worried what their friends will think, or maybe even worried about their insurance.  I admit I wasn’t equipped with a lot of knowledge about what resources were around and where to direct folks when they started coming to ask for direction.  But I’m learning, along with our other local clergy, and hopefully we can figure out how to offer folks more than a seeming dead-end.

God Understands Loss

There is so much pain in these families that I’ve met over the past few weeks.  And yet it helps to remember, God knows pain.  God even knows losing a child due to all the violence and evil in this world.  When God sees us hurting, or even our children hurting, even if it’s because of our own wrong turns, God hurts with us.  And God does not abandon us to our own devices, even when we are sure we can trust only ourselves.  God’s depth of love and mercy and grace surpasses anything we can imagine.  Indeed, God’s anger lasts for a night, but God’s steadfast love is forever.  [Now that is some pretty Amazing Grace].

A Real Rascal

Some people do get lost, and don’t realize it, until they are found--and that’s what’s going on in the letter to Timothy.  Paul, who is instructing Timothy in Christian life and leadership, admits that he once was a real rascal--a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.  We might forget that Paul was formerly Saul, a man who was actually lauded for his harsh persecution of the early Christians, including holding everyone’s cloaks as they attacked and stoned Stephen to death.  This is a man with some real blood on his hands.  He is willing to admit he is the foremost of sinners, since he was working so hard to squelch the followers of Jesus--until he had his Damascus Road incident, literally knocked off his donkey by a vision of Jesus speaking to him, became blinded, and repented, and then was given a new role in life, as Paul, who would go on through his letters and teachings to build and support the new Christian movement and take it much further than any other person had before.  

Cause for Celebration

God got angry enough with Paul to stop him in his tracks, but God also didn’t get rid of Paul.  God had a purpose for Paul, and the rest is history.  That is cause for celebration.  When people we’d rather write off as total losers are found, that is cause for celebration.  When we cease our self-righteousness and join the celebration, that is cause for rejoicing.  And when we are found, over and over again, whether we realize when we’ve been lost or not, that too, is cause for rejoicing.  Thanks be to God!

Prayers This Week:

For all who are recovering from surgery

For all who are in hospice care

For all wrestling with chemical dependency, and those who love them

For all affected by flooding

For our Presbytery during this visioning process, grant wisdom and clarity of purpose

For a true peace in Syria

For all who wrestle with hunger and homelessness, that they not be forgotten

Broken, Re-shapen: Counting the Cost

Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

(Look these up at bible.oremus.org)

In the Scriptures today we have the prophet Jeremiah going down to the potter’s house to see how clay can be shaped into one thing, then broken down and re-shaped into another--a metaphor for our own lives; we have the Psalm which reminds us how God has knit us together in the womb and knows much more about ourselves than we ever will; we have the letter to Philemon in which Paul asks for the freedom of the slave Onesimus, in order to return to Paul as a servant of his own free will.  And then we have a Gospel which says we must hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and yes, even life itself, if we are to be Jesus’ disciples.

First of all, I would completely understand anybody who said they didn’t like these passages about Jeremiah and Jesus, or talk about them like everything that’s wrong in the Christian church as we know it.  Neither of these sound like the gentle, loving Jesus or God we might prefer.  So I think it’s worth addressing what these passages might really mean.

To Hate, Or Simply Dismiss?

Let’s start with the Gospel and especially at that word, “hate.”  The root word is probably better understood as to ‘disregard, or dismiss.’  That’s a little more comforting than ‘hate,’ but still, it doesn’t sound all that comforting.  It wasn’t comforting back in the day either, when family was absolutely central to one’s life and livelihood.  People didn’t just go gallivanting off for any reason besides to try to earn a living in times of crisis--certainly not to fulfill individual curiosity.  Even adult children were expected to stay home and work the family business.

What if a situation arose where you had to disregard your family’s wishes, though?  There might be times--what if everyone in your family was racist or homophobic, or what if everyone you knew supported a war that you did not, and you had to say, “I just don’t think that’s right?”  It takes a lot of guts to stand up to the people you love, and Jesus was asking that crowd, which probably included a lot of people from good Jewish families--to probably upset their families quite a bit.  If they did become disciples, their families probably wondered what they did wrong, how their loved one could betray them like this, embarrass them in front of everyone like this, they probably prayed for their mortal souls and hoped that someday they’d finally see the light.

Yes, Jesus had a reason for such hyperbole.  Jesus was not asking them to simply show up once a week for sixty minutes, sing three hymns and listen to a sermon.  Jesus was not even just asking them to help out at a food pantry now and then.  Jesus was asking them to turn their entire lives around, to break down the status quo and social custom, in order to practice barrier-breaking love.  Everybody they knew was probably going to hate them for this.  They might be disowned and lose everything they had.  And they might very well get themselves killed for doing so.  Perhaps the closest thing in recent history we have to compare to this is getting on the bus and heading south to de-segregate lunch counters in the Civil Rights era.

And as was wisely observed by our friend Aaron this week,* Jesus would likely not be welcome in most of our churches today.  He would look funny and possibly smell funny; he would have radical ideas that would disrupt the status quo; Jesus in fact has a history of being kicked out of congregations. He was a radical, counter-cultural prophet.  Discipleship had a high cost, Jesus didn’t want people entering into it lightly--and so you might say if you became a disciple, to turn against your loved ones, pick up your cross, and part with all your possessions, then you, my friend, were about to hit rock bottom.

Well, what would you be willing to give everything for?

When you join the military--that’s a situation where you really go all in: you have to decide that you are willing to part with your life or limbs or health.  Sure, there are folks who never see combat or come out just fine; many others are just not so lucky.  I do sympathize with all the young people who signed up prior to September 11th, 2001, and thought it was just a good way to pay for school.  Many have paid with their lives.

Some people do give everything to take a courageous, even if unpopular stand.

I’ll tell you the story of a man who gave pretty close to everything for what he believed, and many rejected him for it.  Recently, Veterans for Peace held their national gathering in Madison and my husband had a chance to meet S. Brian Willson.  Brian grew up by all accounts as a good son and good citizen who went to serve in the Viet Nam War; when he returned, he joined other veterans who went on to protest nuclear arms and all manner of warfare.  As a trained lawyer, he documented the consequences of U.S. foreign policy throughout Central America and other countries.  In 1987, while sitting on the railroad tracks to protest a Navy train carrying munitions, for which he fully expected to be arrested.  Instead, the train sped up and ran him over.  He lost his legs and a part of his brain.  An ambulance nearby even refused to help, because of the stand he had been taking. Later, he would learn that although he had never used violence against the government, the FBI had labeled him a "terrorist," and the train had been directed not to stop.  However, even after a lengthy recovery, Brian has never stopped protesting war.  Now, when he attends protests, even on prosthetic legs, he dances. You can learn more about the story here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Willson

Broken Down and Re-Shapen

Let’s go back to talking about Jeremiah for a moment:  the audience was the Israelites: God’s chosen people.  They believed that because they were God’s chosen people, they couldn’t possibly be wrong.  They’d gotten comfortable in ways of exploiting the vulnerable and currying favor with the powerful.     Systems and structures of unjust power were about to be broken down as a natural consequence of their corrupted ways. During the time of Jeremiah, the Israelites would go from complacent prosperity, to the fall of Jerusalem, to being captive to Babylon, to exile in Egypt.  However, like clay, they weren’t simply discarded; God was still with them, even in exile.

There are other ways of being broken down, and re-shapen.  Recently I had the opportunity to see a video, Loving Someone With an Addiction, which talked about the point at which families would realize that they weren’t helping matters by paying the legal bills, the bail, the rent, while their loved one kept spending all their own money on drugs, or kept getting into trouble.  At some point, they realized if their loved one was going to get better, they would have to let them face the natural consequences of their addiction, even though it hurt to see.  It wouldn’t be until they hit their own rock bottom, when the consequences became costly enough, that they might actually be able to be receptive to recovery.

From Useless to Useful

Let’s talk about another guy that was close to rock-bottom.  Back in the Greco-Roman world of Paul, anybody could get into debt or trouble, and be sold as a slave into someone’s household.  Onesimus was a runaway slave, and he was in big trouble; a wanted man.  His owner, Philemon, had the right to punish him severely, including killing the man.  Somehow, Onesimus runs into Paul, who is in prison, and when you were in prison like Paul, you needed helpers to get your messages back and forth, and even to bring you food and clothing and medicine.  And oddly enough, Paul knows Philemon--he’s one of the leaders in the church at Colossae, which “meets in his house.”  Paul didn’t just keep him.  Paul sent this man back to face the potential consequences, but also offered another, more constructive path forward. However, Paul asks that this “useless” person be returned to Paul, since he was indeed ‘useful’ in his employ.  it’s a play on words, as the very name Onesimus means, “useful.”  He becomes quite useful indeed, later on, as we believe he is one of the first bishops of the new Christian movement.  His life and his world of being a slave is broken down, and re-shaped into service for God.

Asking For the Terms of Peace

There’s one more thing I want to talk about, since it comes up in the Gospel text as well as in our current events, as we hear about rulers counting the cost of going to war, and I think it’s a very appropriate question to ask, whether we can truly afford a military solution in Syria.  The heads of churches in Syria and the Middle East, and the heads of churches in this country as well, ask us to pray for peace and to not support the use of such violent means as missile strikes, because they will simply lead to more killing.  I think we may also have to be prepared that if we bomb, others might bomb us back.  I think we have to be prepared that if we use a military solution, even if we say we’re just making a quick strike, that it will become another ten years or more before we’ve seen the end of things.  There are so many options on the spectrum between bombing and doing nothing, and somehow we always manage to overlook them all.  My entire life, we have been tangled up in Afghanistan and Iraq--going back to the 70s and 80s, and we might well be for the rest of my life--we sell weapons to one side and then the other, and we use them ourselves.  It’s brought nothing but grief to us and to them.  Granted, you don’t make a lot of money by not selling weapons to warring countries, or by using weapons ourselves, but the cost of war is so much higher than the price of a real peace, built on truth and reconciliation.

So yes.  As a nation, then or now; or as a people; or even as just our own selves, it is possible to hit rock bottom for any number of reasons.  Everything we thought we knew might come smashing down around us.  And yet, there is good news, even in these painful moments.  As long as we are living, we are never completely destroyed; we may just be knocked down into our bare substance.  No matter what we do or what happens to us, God has known us in our inmost being; God knows our substance; God will even be with us as we take courageous stands; as we struggle to find God’s path for us, to follow in the footsteps of Christ.  By God’s grace, we are being re-shapen into something new.

Thanks be to God!

*Several people have indeed noted this wisely, but most recently this was mentioned by Aaron Bates.  Thanks for the good point!

More on Philemon: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1767

More on Jeremiah: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1767

Prayers This Week:

All who are struggling with serious or long-term illness in body, mind, or soul

All who wrestle with chemical dependency

For the people of Syria, that true peace may come through truly peaceful means; and that we be moved with compassion to feed, shelter, and welcome the many refugees

For the safety of all participants in our local area “Iron Man” competition this weekend

All who are wrestling with discord in their families and homes.