Emily Schaming
Today in the Word tells the story of former heavy-weight boxer James (Quick) Tillis, a cowboy from Oklahoma who fought out of Chicago in the early 1980s. He still remembers his first day in the Windy City after his arrival from Tulsa. "I got off the bus with two cardboard suitcases under my arms in downtown Chicago and stopped in front of the Sears Tower. I put my suitcases down, and I looked up at the Tower and I said to myself, 'I'm going to conquer Chicago.' "When I looked down, the suitcases were gone."
Learning humility is never easy. What would have happened if Jesus had said, "I'm going to conquer Rome!"? Something tells me that Jesus would have been jailed a lot earlier in his ministry if he'd made comments like that. Instead he lived among the poor, healed the sick and cared for people with love and humility. This Sunday we lit the advent candle of peace. Peace is one of God's gifts to us. John the Baptist was a prophet calling the people of Israel to repent, to find peace with God. But John had no pretensions to grandeur. He declared that he was not worthy to carry Jesus' sandals. These men through their examples showed that peace comes to humankind not through government treaties and troop deployment but through humble acts of love, kindness and prayer.
Humility
Abraham Lincoln did once try to legislate humility. He seems to have been fond of making proclamations. His most famous is probably the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves. Less well known, perhaps is his Proclamation of a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, which was to be held on April 30th, 1863. He wrote, "We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."
Although this national day was held in April nearly 150 years ago, I think it is a relevant, though not likely to be repeated, sentiment for Advent 2007. Lincoln urged everyone to take that day and spend it in their place of worship, praying together for humanity's corporate sins. His hope was that the result of this day would be that a nation that had been torn apart by war and dissent would be brought together in unity and peace by the humble prayers of its people.
Humility is a powerful force for peace. The images of peacemaking in today's reading from Isaiah are of a tender shoot, a small child, gentle animals. Humble images that we as Christians believe refer to the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, who arrived on earth in the most humble circumstances we can imagine.
Being humble is hard. We try for some humility in our lives, and then we're proud that it's really starting to work and…we're back to square one. But maybe it's not all about us. Maybe humility is looking around us and truly seeing other people. Making eye contact with people sitting on the street. Understanding that the person taking forever at the bank machine is not actually trying to annoy us, in fact they probably don't even know we're there. Maybe humility is realizing that we don't stand at the centre of a universe around which everything revolves. Maybe humility is knowing that we have at the centre of our lives something much greater and more incredible than we can ever be on our own.
Love and Prayer
When we know that God is in charge of our lives, our spontaneous responses are love, kindness toward others and prayer. As Peter wrote in 1 Peter 3, "All of you have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart and a humble mind…" and continues… "turn away from evil and do good;…seek peace and pursue it." Interesting that he associates all of these personal qualities, that we would call "feelings" with the pursuit of peace. In the Taizé book, Seeds of Trust, it says that, "Peace is fragile; it cannot be imposed…We need to be very attentive in order to keep walking in its steps. First of all, we have to seek the spirit of unity. This does not necessarily mean to have the same opinions about everything. Unanimity is something deeper. It means trusting that the Holy Spirit is doing the same work in others as in me, even if at times I can only believe this and not see any concrete signs of it. Mutual love is expressed through compassion and sympathy. Those who rejoice at the happiness of others and who know how to suffer with those in trouble become one heart and one soul."
We can continue this peace-building love and unity by praying for others. Jesus taught us to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us. The youth group seemed to feel a strong need to pray for persecutors in Bible study last year around exam time. Perhaps we could (and maybe have?) pray about others in a way that was not kind or understanding, but it is very difficult to pray for others with anger or bitterness. When we pray for other people we think of their struggles, their burdens, their families. We begin to build a silent relationship with them based on their needs instead of our own. We create a place for love, for compassion and for peace in our relationships.
Is it possible to build in ourselves this capacity for love and compassion and not act on it? When we focus on other people, the unexpected and incredible can happen.
Kindness
In her book, My Grandfather's Blessings, Dr. Rachel Remen tells of a plane ride she took about a week before Christmas one year. Her flight was full of eight year old Little League baseball players eating fast food and she was seated next to a woman who had decided to carry her two year old on her lap. Dr. Remen says, "Reading or any sort of work was impossible. Resigned, I started a conversation with my neighbour, asking her about the baseball league. She began to tell me about the time she spends with the team… ‘You can't just keep having kids,' she said, ‘You gotta keep them alive'. In her neighbourhood many boys were dead or locked away by twenty, victims of drugs or violence. The league was her life insurance for her kids. I looked at her with new respect. She had four, all under the age of ten.
She asked me about my own life, and I told her about my work with people with cancer. A sadness filled her eyes and she began to tell me about her neighbour, a woman like herself, a single mother with four little kids. Six months ago she had been diagnosed with cancer….
…She spoke of her neighbour's symptoms, her neighbours fears, the nightmares that awakened her almost every night… I began to wonder how she knew so many of the details of her neighbour's life, and so I asked her this question. Her answer stunned me. When tragedy had struck next door, she had simply moved her neighbour and all her children into her own home. They had been there for…five months. I looked at her closely. There was not the slightest air of martyrdom or self-congratulation about her, just this natural reaching out to a person whose life was next to her own.
After a while the lights were turned down…I took out my book, found some Christmas music on my headset, and began to read… After a while I glanced over at my seatmate. She had fallen asleep, her face beautiful and serene, her sleeping baby in her arms, clasped against her great belly. On his head was the gift the burger company had given all the children, a paper hat in the shape of a small golden crown."
Peace in the world only comes when there is truth, generosity, humility, and love between neighbours. A humble woman, doing her best for her children, a helping hand when it is not expected, a gift that goes beyond mere friendship and becomes love.
The season of Advent is a season of light, of gradual illumination and understanding until the true glory of Christ's birth is revealed to us. And we are the ones who can shed that light on our world. In the words of the hymn,
We have the ability to transform our world, to make straight what has been crooked, make the rough places plain. If we let our hearts be true and humble we can begin to be a part of God's reign on earth. I ask you in closing to bow your heads with me as I share the prayer of a humble man who is still an example to Christians today, St. Francis of Assisi.
Lord, make us instruments of your peace,
For it is in giving that we receive;
Amen
Where there is hatred, let us sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.