An Altogether Peace by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 1 December 2019
John 14:21-29 NRSV
John 14:21-29
They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.
”I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.
So Advent is probably my favorite season of the Christian year. Because it’s a time about anticipation and waiting and expectation. It’s not a time of the hustle and the bustle and the Black Friday deals and the Amazon shopping and what am I gonna get on cyber Monday. It is not about the waiting in line to get your gifts wrapped or wondering how you’re gonna pull yourself out of debt having extended yourself so much for some ideal about what Christmas is supposed to be like. Advent is not even necessarily supposed to be about really feeling that Christmas spirit. So if you haven’t started watching the myriad of Hallmark movies or the myriad of other Christmas movies that are all over the place. If you’ve not yet started that, it’s okay. In fact, it’s probably healthy.
I say I’ve now seen The Grinch I think maybe seventy times. It is okay if this season does not fill you with some box store commercial sense of hope and joy and peace. It is okay if this season makes you feel a little uneasy. Advent is not about the hope or the peace or the joy or the love that the world gives to us. It is about being able to experience what christ offers to us, which oftentimes is not jolly old Saint Nick and the elf on the shelf. Don’t forget to move him. It is not necessarily how many stocking stuffers can you collect. Advent is about remembering that when Christ breaks into the world, he does so in a way that leaves people uncomfortable.
The beginning of the Christmas narrative begins with Zechariah and Elizabeth. Alright, and if you remember your Sunday school lessons well, Elizabeth was really old. Okay, it says that in the Bible, really old. And she had wanted and wanted and wanted to be able to have children her whole life and she was not able. The expectation and the hope that she had for her life never came to pass. And for first century folks, much like women today, your worth was often based on who you married and how many children you’ve had. We’ve come a little bit further since then, but not much. So for Elizabeth you have to think like a first century person, if you do not have children your identity as a woman is null.
This is all Elizabeth wanted her whole life because what the world told her was your worth as a person is built on whether or not you can have a child. When the angel visits Elizabeth and says you are gonna have a baby, she laughs. Much like pretty much every female in the Bible who is well past their child bearing years who is visited by the sense of the Spirit and is told they are going to have a baby, they laugh. Remember Sarah and Abraham? Mmhmm. She laughs too. And Elizabeth in a time in which she felt like she had nothing, had not lived to the expectation of who she was and had made peace with that, had her world shaken.
Then you have Mary. Okay. Let’s think about the reality of Mary’s story. Mary is a very young girl. Again, in a time and an age in which babies out of wedlock could not happen. And if they did, women would get stoned. Again, King or a Queen, just saying, we’ve already got some feminism going on here. I’m a roll right into that. Right, and in biblical times the woman would be the one to get stoned if she was found to be pregnant outside of her marriage. And here is Mary who is visited by an angel, she is not yet married. And she is told you are going to become the bearer of God. In the Greek, the name we give to Mary is Theotokos. It means the God bearer. And here is this young woman afraid, worried, questioning what all of this is going to mean for her societal life, who becomes the God bearer.
If you read the stories of people throughout the Bible, what you learn is that when God comes to you and says you’re going to do something it sounds really great. Right, you get over the initial shock of the Spirit falling upon you or an angel appearing to you and telling you you’re gonna do something that you did not think you were going to do. And you have that overwhelming sense of Okay, God is leading me in this,’m going to be okay. And that lasts until you step out of the door and get into the real world, right. There’s a meme on Facebook right, of Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, you all have at least kind of know what that is and he is running from a group of cannibals. It’s a still from one of the movies. And the caption that goes with it says, “Be a pastor they said. It’ll be fun, they said.” And you’re running from cannibals. Some days that’s what ministry is like. Whether you’re in ordained ministry or not, whether you’re living your, when you are living your Christian life it sounds really easy when you get over the initial shock of God calling you to do something until you step foot in the real world and you go “oh, okay, this is a lot more difficult then I thought it was gonna be”.
So the images of Elizabeth and Mary that we get in the biblical narrative is Elizabeth has to go. Elizabeth says yes to Jesus, to God, to the Spirit, to this impossible thing she’s been waiting for and then what the text doesn’t necessarily give you, what all of us know to be true because we all share human experience, is it was too much the eyes, the whispers, the questioning, people talking about you behind your back, was too much. And so she went away to the country side. And Mary does the same thing, right. She goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth. So you have these two women who have had these profound experiences with angels who have now been told that they will bear importable children of God. Elizabeth is going to bear the one who will make way for the Messiah.
And Mary, the Theotokos, is literally going to give birth to the incarnate God. And it is so hard to exist in the public sphere that they both have to leave for a little while. And then they put 9 month Mary, 9 month pregnant Mary on a donkey and take her on a very long ride. Which has to be comfortable for nobody. But the difference between Elizabeth and Mary, even in their needing to leave, is that they received this deep sense of peace. A deep sense of peace that went beyond what the world was ever going to give them, went beyond what it meant to have to exist in society when you exist outside of the norms. And they received the peace of God. The peace that sits in the gut of who you are. Not just your fifteen minutes of zen, right when all of the kids have gone to bed and life has slowed down for just a moment and your put your feet up while you sit on the couch and you breathe deeply. But an altogether peace.
365 times in the Bible, God says to someone “do not be afraid”. “Do not be afraid for I am here.” It’s what is said to Elizabeth, it is what is said to Joseph, it is what is said to Mary. And countless other prophets and bearers of God’s word throughout our combined history. The narrative of who we are always begins with do not be afraid. And as Jesus ends his life and is preparing for the inevitable death and resurrection, he says to his beloved disciples, “this is what I leave you, my peace.” I do not give to you as the world gives but I give on behalf of my father.
Now we don’t live in a peaceful world, right. All you have to do is get in your car and drive anywhere to realize that the world is not at peace. All you had to do was look at some of the screenshots and video clips from Black Friday to understand that the world is definitely not at peace. Only in American do we go from Thanksgiving, where we all sit around the table and we are grateful to each other and for each other and for all things that we have and then at 5 o’clock on Thursday night we start punching each other over tvs. I’m just saying, there’s something really kind of messed up there. When Jesus says to us what I give to you is my peace, and I do not give to you as the world gives, what he is talking about is that altogether sense that no matter what happens in this world you are grounded in knowing who God is. So for Mary and Elizabeth, really think about what it must have been like to be a social pariah, because ultimately, that’s what happens.
And for all of you who have done something in your life, which we all have, that maybe is not perfect, right you all have done something in your life that maybe wasn’t perfect. Yeah. Or one of you is perfect in this base, in which case, let’s have a chat cause I’d like to get there. Right, we all have things in our lives that we carry with us that are shameful, that we have guilt about. Or something that is beautiful, something that is wonderful. Something that is God given that the rest of the world, who doesn’t understand the circumstances, who doesn’t understand the nuance of life, deems shameful or unacceptable. How many social stigmas do we have in the world today that are not given because people understand the whole story but are given because we only look at part of a narrative. How many times do we look at people who are struggling with addiction and cast judgement upon them because we know their life, or so we think. How many times do we judge people who are going through difficulties in their marriages or going through divorces and assume that we know what is happening and cast judgement. How many times do we look at people who are experience homelessness on the street and assume that we know the whole narrative of their story, when really we see only in part.
Mary and Elizabeth were cast out from their communities. Whether done so verbally and directly, definitely done so indirectly. The world may be a very different place in 2019 than it was in first century Israel. We have the technology to be able to broadcast and livestream, to have electric lights, to have indoor plumbing, to have computers in our hands, but people are still the same. Gossip, judgement, it’s all a part of the sin that we carry with us as human beings. What Christ offers to us is not that the world will be easy, and not that when you follow God that somehow all of the things will come into alignment and your life will always make sense and you will never be judged or persecuted or hurt. But in the midst of that what comes from within us is that we are not afraid. We are not afraid of what comes next.
We are not afraid to turn the page of the story because we know who has written it. We are not afraid of the judgement and the casting out of our communities for what we are doing as we follow God because we have this inner most peace. It is not the peace of the beautiful cresh scences that last for a fleeting moment. It is the peace that passes all understanding and roots itself deep in who we are. So that even in the midst of chaos and destruction, and the ups and downs of the roller coasters of life there is a sense of we know to whom we belong and who holds our future. So that when we are told do not be afraid, the anxiety and the fear and the worry slips away. To the point, the totality of who we are is not based on the ups and downs of this life, but is based on the God who loves and gives and saves.
The God who appears to us and says “do not be afraid.” And not only do not be afraid, but do not worry about what others will say about you for you Barr God within you. Do not be worried about what this season brings to us. Do not be worried about whether or not you are feeling the Christmas spirit. Do not be afraid if the thought of having to do your Christmas shopping or spending time with the relatives, we all have those relatives, is overwhelming to you. Do not be afraid or worried if that sense of magic and wonder that everyone else seems to be getting from Hallmark movies may not be manifesting in you. For we are a people of chaos, right. We are a people where when God shows up things get flipped upside down. We are a people where the Messiah, the savior of all human kind came to us from an unwed teenage mom in the poorest section of this country. And still, there’s peace. Not a peace that everything will be hunky dory perfect. But a peace in knowing no matter what this world throws at us, no matter what chaos we endure, we know at the end of the day where our judgement and our love and our safety comes from is the God who knows all things.
So if you find yourself this time or at any point in your life in a situation like Elizabeth or Mary, maybe it feels like the rest of the world is judging you for something or you don’t fit in in the way that you’re supposed to or somehow people think they understand the totality of your narrative and they have no idea. You cling to the peace that rests in who you are. The peace that Jesus Christ offers to us in the Holy Spirit. If your life is feeling topsy turvy and constantly up and down and there doesn’t seem to be a potential for evening out, may you rest in the peace that Christ offers to you. If it feels like the next thing that you can do is take one step because you have no idea what lies beneath or ahead of that, you can take that next step with peace. Do not be afraid for the Christ who has conquered all things resides in and within us today and every day. Amen.
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