A Welcoming Peace

Isaiah 11:1-9

Douglas S. Long

North Raleigh United Church, UCC

December 5, 2004

 

I received an email this week… (I received a LOT of emails this week) but this one caught my eye. It’s funny how things can catch your attention sometimes when you’ve never looked twice at them before. The email said…

 

Doctor Formulated H-G-H  (H/uman-G/rowth-H/ormone)

The health discovery that actually reverses aging while burning fat, without dieting or exercise!
* Enhance bedroom performance
* Remove wrinkles
* Restore hair color and growth
100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

 

The email message then substantiated its legitimacy by proudly exclaiming…

As seen on NBC and CBS!

 

Sometimes I wonder why I even pre-publish a sermon topic or title. I know a few ministers who publish their sermon topics a year in advance. Seriously… and that would probably make Saturday nights less stressful but, really, how relevant can a topic be that is prepared a year out?

 

So earlier this week I stated my sermon title would be “Peace in Fearful Times.”

…but by the time I got around to putting something on paper, I didn’t want to preach about fear.

But I do want to preach about peace.

It is the Second Sunday in Advent… and we wait in Peace.

 

Well, sort of… I mean, there is that war thing going on…

But I’m going to assume you know by now that I believe that that war is immoral, un-Christlike, wrong headed and anything but what God would condone. If you’re still not clear where I am on that score, catch me privately when I can be more blunt.

 

Well, OK, I’ll say a little more…

The prophet Isaiah spoke of a time, dreamed of a time when war would be no more. As a country we seem to have made peace with the idea that we are involved in a war that will never end.

That is true, of course, if we try to address it primarily through violence. Violence always breeds more violence. …and for every foreign father we violently eliminate, the sons and daughters will rise up against us.

 

History records that Abraham Lincoln said it well one day in a meeting of his Cabinet.

Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, a bitter man from Massachusetts, on the heels of the War between the States …Thaddeus Stevens shared the sentiment in the North to just crush the South after the War was over. When Mr. Lincoln was advocating in a particular Cabinet meeting binding up the wounds of the nation, and ideas such as forgiveness, and reconciliation, Thaddeus Stevens pounded the table and said, "Mr. Lincoln! I think enemies ought to be destroyed!"

To which Mr. Lincoln is said to have quietly responded,

"Mr. Stevens, do not I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?"

 

I’m not naïve enough to think we can simply make terrorists our friends. But neither am I naïve enough to believe that we are going to end terrorism through violence.

 

What the world needs... is peace. …and you can’t force peace.

Peace occurs in the context of respect and… welcome.

What the world needs …is more welcome.

 

I remember so well a brief event that happened years ago… let’s see, it was 1990… 14 years ago. Denise and I were in rural Mexico, working as International partners with Habitat for Humanity… and a small band of three campesinos, peasant folk, two men and a woman (none of whom was even close to 5 feet tall) approached us from a village several miles down the mountainous road. We were outside in the street. We invited them in, offered them a drink and sat with them for a while in the sparsely furnished room that was half the house we lived in there.  (We had four chairs. One of us sat on the bed.)

What I remember most was that they were incredulous.

“We have never been invited into a Gringo’s home before,” they said.

 

Do you remember that, Denise?

That simple welcome transformed our relationship.

From that day on they were our friends… merely because we had sincerely welcomed them.

 

Welcome, you know, I assume, is a hot topic these days.

The UCC developed a commercial stating it welcomed all people… and NBC and CBS refused to run it. Too controversial. If you welcome all people, they reasoned, it means you must welcome gay and lesbian persons (Well, actually that’s true.)

And if you truly welcome them, they deduced, it must mean you accept them equally…

(Well, yeah…)

And if you truly accept them equally, it must mean you’d be willing to treat them equally, to offer them all the rights of the Church…

(Uh-huh.)

…which means you’d be willing to offer sanctioned loving relationships, even marriage.

(Of course!) 

…though the commercial doesn’t say any of that, it doesn’t say anything except we welcome everyone… What NBC has deduced is all very true.

I’m actually amazed that the networks have been able to see the connection… and that they have further understood that the only way to truly counter the message of welcome is to flatly say… “but, you see, you’re not really welcome.”

Real welcome, radical welcome threatens the status quo.

 

In the holy mountain of the Lord, in the vision of peace that Isaiah proclaims the Christ will usher in…

The wolf might lie down with the lamb, but the peacock’s not gonna have any part of it.

 

Some claim the advertisement implies other churches, non-UCC churches, do not welcome all people. Truth is, we know all UCC churches do not welcome all people. The further truth is we know we, you and me, do not always welcome all people.

 

Alison Jones did a follow up radio story of NRUC’s eventual reception into the ENCA but couldn’t get NPR to buy it. Until now… Now, airing a story about division within the denomination that welcomes all… …. well, suddenly that’s a juicy story.

And that story of exclusion, within the UCC, played on National Public Radio this morning.

 

One person emailed me and said they felt the UCC was trying to proselytize… trying to steal members from other denominations. I emailed back and explained that the intent of the ad was not to proselytize but to target persons who felt excluded by the Church.

 

So, let me ask you a question.

Have you ever been rejected by the church?

I have.

…but my rejection was about theological differences.

There are plenty of people who have been rejected because of who they are… rejected because of who God fashioned them to be… not rejected merely because of what they believe (that’s the kind of rejection I’ve experienced)… but rejected because of their skin color, their gender (women are not equal to men in many churches)…

…And, clearly, people are routinely rejected for their sexual orientation.

Just this week… a gifted United Methodist minister was defrocked because she chose to not deny who she is.

And that, my friends… to defrock her, to strip her of her clergy credentials… that , my friends, is a sin, against God… by the Church.

She wasn’t denied entrance. She got thrown out!

 

I’d wager there are hundreds of people within a few miles of us right now who feel that the Institutional Church has excluded them. …because of their past lives, or their present choices, or their intellectual honesty.

And if we are who we say we are… we’d surely welcome them here.

We’d share with them, and each other, in this Advent season, the wonderful vision of Isaiah, which the Church has adopted as a mandate for following the Christ.

Here it again… 

All Nature, all creation is frolicking in the peaceable Kingdom that ensues.

Listen to this welcoming vision:

(From Eugene Peterson’s The Message…)

Isaiah 11:

6 The wolf will romp with the lamb, the leopard sleep with the kid. Calf and lion 
will eat from the same trough, and a little child will tend them. 7 Cow and bear 
will graze the same pasture, their calves and cubs grow up together, and the 
lion eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child will crawl over rattlesnake dens, 
the toddler stick his hand down the hole of a serpent. 9 Neither animal nor human 
will hurt or kill on my holy mountain. The whole earth will be brimming with knowing 
God-Alive, a living knowledge of God ocean-deep, ocean-wide.

The Peaceable Kingdom… Will the human race join in?

Joyce Hollyday, a UCC minister based in Atlanta but also working at a UCC church in Asheville, is one of the many who has responded to the controversy around the UCC commercial.

Her piece ran a couple of days ago in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Here is an excerpt from it:

 

In this religious season of Advent, as we await and prepare for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, we remember that his earthly journey took him from a feeding trough to a cross; … Jesus called his followers to simplicity and surrender, inviting them to abandon arrogant and violent ways, boldly confronting the status quo that enforced the power and economic arrangements of his day. He told them that whenever they fed, or clothed, or visited one of the "least of these" in the world’s eyes—the hungry, the sick, the prisoners—they showed that compassion to him. He proclaimed peacemakers "blessed" and exhorted his followers, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." He formed around himself a community of radical inclusion and compassion, welcoming in particular the people who were marginalized and stigmatized by his society: the leprous and the lame, blind beggars, despised women, hated foreigners.

Some of us Christians in America don’t see how you can follow Jesus and exclude some of God’s children from the circle of grace. We don’t understand how you can care for the poor and gut the programs that sustain them. … We don’t know how you can love your enemies and bomb them. … For us, following Jesus means we are called to mirror his compassion for the poor, his inclusion of the marginalized, his pursuit of peace, and his proclamations of justice. Those of us in the United Church of Christ would like to spread that message.

You may hear that as a defense.

I hear it as a challenge.

Am I following this radical Christ today?

Are we?

How do we live our “Welcome!”

 

Welcome… really, welcome. Come and be well.

-You are grieving…welcome.

-You are carefree… welcome.

-You are economically strapped… welcome.

-You are wealthy… welcome (and let me introduce you to our assistant treasurer!)

-You’ve heard a message from some church, somewhere sometime that you aren’t good enough… welcome.

-You’ve never heard such a message… welcome.

Come and be well.

-You are young, older, white, a person of color, highly educated, self-taught, gay, straight, curvy,

…Welcome.

We are on a journey of community we’d like for all to join.

…and we say, to each other and to all who would come along… welcome.

 

Amen.