ThisWeeksSermon December 9 The 2nd Sunday in Advent

“Peace in a world of war.”
The 2nd Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2007

Let us pray.
May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.

Christmas at war
My earliest Christmas memories are actually from a time of war, the Second World War.
I must’ve been about three years old when the United States entered that war.
I remember ration books and ration stamps and little reddish-orange ration “tokens.”
Those stamps and tokens were used to control the purchase of food and other necessities that were in short supply:
sugar, butter and meat, rubber tires and gasoline, and just about anything made of steel.
Mostly what I remember is Christmas with cardboard toys.
Previously, most toys had been made from metal.
Plastic hadn’t been invented, I don’t think, and all metal was being diverted from nonessential uses.
Metal was being diverted to the “war effort.”
On one of those wartime Christmases, I was given a cardboard gas station with wooden cars that had wooden wheels.
On another cardboard Christmas, it was a cardboard circus tableau.
Cardboard circus tents, and cardboard animals that stood on wooden bases.
In later years, I learned about the painstaking ordeal it had been to assemble “the cardboard circus.”
I learned that my parents stayed up most of the night on that Christmas Eve.
So my earliest Christmas memories were of Christmas during wartime, the Second World War.
A few years later, 1950 to 1953, it was Christmas during The Korean War, then the Lebanon crisis in 1958, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Dominican Intervention in 1965
and the unending Vietnam War, 1965 to 1974.
Then, on to Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Liberia, and now Iraq, another seemingly unending war.

A world at war.
Always, from the beginnings of history, a world at war.
The prophet Isaiah
This morning’s words from the prophet Isaiah are so welcome.
Seems even more so these days, when the world and the climate and the economy seem to be especially out of control.
Isaiah had made a prediction.
Another king would be on his way, a king who’s smart and understanding, a king who will stick up for the poor and the meek, and rid the world of evil.
The king will be righteous and faithful.
And not only that:
The wolf will live with the lamb.
The leopard will lie down with the goat.
The calf and the lion together.
The cow and the bear grazing, their young lying down together.
It’s a remarkable vision of a peaceful world, a just world, over which this Messiah king would reign.
It’s not like weather forecasting
Prophesying is nothing like predicting the weather.
Accu-Weather it’s not.
There’s no such thing as “Accu-Prophesying.”
And if Jesus truly was the hoped-for Messiah, then Isaiah got it all wrong, his vision of a return to a Garden of Eden and a world of peace and justice has not come true.
Personally, I do think of Jesus as the hoped-for Messiah, and I love the images presented by Isaiah, but that peace that the messiah offers, I believe, is a different kind of peace on earth.
A different kind of peace
Following that first Easter, after Jesus’ gruesome execution, his friends knew he had died, but they also knew that somehow he was still with them.
Somehow, Jesus had strangely fulfilled that remarkable vision of a peaceful and a just world.
Early Christian writers looked back at the life of Jesus.
They recalled what he had said.
They remembered what he had done.
They remembered how he had lived out his life.
Jesus had offfered, Jesus had shown, a new Way of Living in this world, in a different dimension.
Jesus offered the possibility of life in a heavenly dimension of peace and justice.
Jesus offered a peace that comes within the souls of people when they realize their oneness with the Universe.
It’s a state of consciousness in which everything is the same, life is the same as death, land is the same as the sea, day is the same as night.
To achieve that state of consciousness, what you have to do is let go of your Self, forget all your troubles.
Think of yourself as nothing, and totally forget yourself as you pray, or meditate, or simply sit in silence.
Just remember that you are hoping to experience the Divine Presence.
Sometimes that state of consciousness just “happens”, all on its own, the experience of disappearing into a Universe of Peace.
But it can also happen unexpectedly.
It can happen in a moment of grief.
It can happen in the midst of a wedding, when married couples are asked to remember the vows they made to one another at their own weddings.
It can even happen at an emotional moment during a movie in a darkened theater, or even in your own living room.
It can happen at the birth of a child.

Amelia Jane is born
Yesterday morning I went to my computer at about 7 o’clock to check my eMail.
Found a message from José, my son-in-law, sent half an hour earlier.
The subject line was this:
Jenn is delivering the baby.
The message simply read:
Will call you once all is done.
Got the call one hour and two minutes later, 8:02 a.m.
Amelia Jane Quiñonez Brooks had let out her first yelp.
She’s breathing on her own, in spite of the fact that she’s five weeks early.
She weighs 3 pounds and 12 ounces, and she’s 17 inches tall.
I went right out to Hannaford and bought her a birthday card, on the day of her birth, of course.
“It’s a Miracle” is what the card said on the outside.
Inside, I wrote a note welcoming her to “our world.”
Signed it from the two “grandpa’s.”
Handed it to the mailman, explaining how important that piece of mail was.
He agreed to give it special consideration.
As I was talking with that mailman, tears flooded my eyes.
Believe me, I know the peace that Isaiah was describing.

A different kind of peace.
Yesterday, the wolf was lying with the lamb.
The warring goes on and on out there, but in here, in my heart, it’s a Garden of Eden, a peaceful world of justice, in which everything is the same, life is the same as death, land is the same as the sea, day is the same as night, oneness with the Universe, not a “cardboard Christmas” by any means.

Prayer

Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.

Jerry Brooks
The 1st Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2007

AUDIOVERSION: http://www.episcopalmarlboro.org/Uploads/20071209ThisWeeksSermon.mov