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From July 16, 2006 Every so often a minister writes a sermon, one she can hardly wait to share, and then she goes home, turns on the news, and discovers that the human family has taken a dangerous turn. It is then that she must decide whether she will gloss over or ignore reality or prepare an entirely new message, one that seeks a conversation between current events and faith. This was just the case Thursday. I crafted a sermon I imagined fit for a king, one that after news of fresh warfare in the Middle East simply did not seem fitting. How can you and I feast on the sweet fruit of God's amazing grace here in western Kentucky while our brothers and sisters halfway around the world seek shelter from the hard and bitter fruit of destruction? We can't. Not if we seek to be faithful to the Prince of Peace and the lives to which he calls us. It's hard to watch what has been happening in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon and not flinch or weep. For many, it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to refrain from fast forwarding our imaginations to picture the worst of all possible scenarios. Will Syria and Iran aid in the escalation of conflict? Will the United States come to Israel's defense? Are we perched on the edge of WWIII? Are the end times in sight? Tune into CNN and it certainly looks that way, doesn't it? Metaphorically speaking, the Middle East bears a frightening resemblance to southern California. The Middle East is as dry and tinder-rich as Yucca Valley. And is every bit as prone to devastation. It takes seasons of drought and the right kind of conditions for fires like the kind California is seeing. The same with the Middle East. What we are witnessing has needed more than a few years or even a few decades to ignite. It's taken even more than a century or two. What we see happening in the Middle East is built on dynamics reaching back for millennia. Follow the thread running through today's acts of aggression and you will find they are rooted in thousands of years of enmity, violence, and vows of retribution. Thousands of years of struggles over military, economic, cultural and religious dominance in a region we were taught in grade school was the very cradle of civilization. Can't you feel how old this current reality is, how embedded it is in the memories of our brothers and sisters in the Middle East? Is there any man who inhabits that part of the planet who can honestly say his family has not been touched by conflict, loss of life, and the avowal of revenge? Is there any woman in that region whose heritage, as rich as it is, does not also include the memory of war? And what of the memory of the soil? Is there any patch of land in Israel, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iraq that doesn't carry with it some history of violence, some embedded knowledge of the sins humankind is capable of exacting upon one another? I don't know about you but whenever I see the latest footage of Middle Eastern carnage, when cameras catch crowds of men with rage in their eyes and fists in the air, when I see wailing mothers clutching broken babies to their breasts, around them I also see their invisible ancestors, men and women going back for generations, women and men who were also victims of, perpetrators of, and witnesses to unspeakable acts of aggression and violence. When I see what is happening now, I see more than current events. I see the inheritance of memory. The memory of mad warring and inexhaustible hatred. The memory of dislocation and destruction. The memory of the need for refugee camps and needless funerals and the persistent naming of enemies. Memories that are brought forward and lived out all over again, leaving the newest generation with a legacy of conflict and ruin. When I see what is happening now, played out before the world's eyes, I see the inheritance of memory. I see the playing out of an old, old story, one with the same shameful of endings repeated endlessly, an unending ending really, one that that only creates more tears, more losses, more pain, more reason for war. When and how will the burdened, burning weight of memory's inheritance ever be transformed? When and how we turn from this sad and sorrowful heritage so as to gift our children with an inheritance of grace, an inheritance of peace, and inheritance of blessing? When? How? Is this even possible? My friends, it is not enough to grieve war's madness. Our faith calls us to something greater than grief. We must ask ourselves this: truly what is our inheritance and how will we choose to spend it? Is our inheritance a litany of offenses and fears, an inventory of losses and threats that arise because we have learned to see each other as adversaries? If this is our inheritance, if this is the gift we pass along, then we leave our children with nothing but a legacy of death and grief and new excuses for doing harm to one another. Why should you and I concern ourselves with what happens on the other side of the world? Is it only, as CNN suggested soon after missiles began flying, that further destabilization of the Middle East will mean the price of gasoline may rise beyond $4.00 a gallon here at home? Is this why we should be concerned? Do we care about what is transpiring in the Middle East merely because we don't want our children inheriting the economic liability of someone else's messy, messy war? There has to be another reason. One that speaks to the best in us, to the blessing we are called to be and to bring forward into a world so in need of it. Today's letter to the church in Ephesus reminds us that as God's adopted children, you and I are the inheritors of Christ's grace, an inheritance he gladly shares with whomever will receive it. Know this: our is an inheritance that is not meant to be safely locked away and allowed to grow as if it were silver or gold. Our inheritance is one that we are called to give away. Indeed, the Spirit empowers us to share it, to spend it on a world that has forgotten who and what it is. Tomorrow on the Pacific coast something truly remarkable will commence even if you'll not read about it in Time or Newsweek. Beginning tomorrow the rich inheritance that flows from Christ will be poured out and invested in the lives of eighty-five children who are gathering for Peace Village. Tomorrow our UCC sister church in Lincoln City, Oregon, will open its arms to a lively assortment of children ranging in age from six to thirteen - some who already know each other, some who come as strangers, all of them different one from the other - and with the help of some wise adults these children will create a week-long village of peace. I say they will create this peaceful village because true peace is never imposed. Like music, peace can only ever be composed, only welcomed in and sustained by those open to discovering and honing the habits of heart and mind that make for peace. And where do those habits start? They start in the same place war starts - within each one of us. "Even if we transported all the bombs to the moon," writes the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, "the roots of war and the reasons for bombs would still be here, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we would make new bombs." (Seeking Peace, Johann Christoph Arnold, p. xiii.) Now in its 11th year, Peace Village is the brain child of my mentor, Rev. Charles Busch, whose own commitment peace mirrors that of his nonviolent savior, Jesus the Christ. Recognizing that peace is founded not on the absence of conflict but on a consistent practice of heart and mind that refuses to regard anyone as an enemy, Charles has spent nearly a dozen years creating and coordinating an effort that aims to give children a way of being present to themselves and others that fosters peace. We cannot alter the past. We cannot change the present. But certainly, certainly we can invest in the future, which is always but a breath away. "Blessed are the peacemakers," taught the one who refused to regard his adversaries as enemies. Peacemakers are blessed not because they succeed (certainly Jesus didn't), but they are blessed because they strive to treat as "brother" the one who so easily could be reduced to "other." What are we to do, you and I who live so far from conflict's epicenter? What are we to do, you and I who are neither Jew nor Arab, neither Sunni nor Shiite Muslim, you and I who are neither the terrorist nor the terrified, you and I whose history is not riddled with generations of unresolved strife? How do we spend our inheritance of grace so that others are blessed with peace and all its life-giving possibilities? How do we spend our inheritance so that land and people now profaned by violence might once more, once more be revered and experienced as holy? As fresh warring breaks us open yet again, these
are the questions I invite you to pray over and
act upon.
As you do, remember who you are and whose you are:
the adopted, blessed children of Christ Jesus,
who has forgiven everything that we, too, might be
enabled
to forgive. For upon such grace is peace built
and sustained. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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