A
Reflection for Advent II All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
December 6, 2015 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Baruch
5:1-9 Canticle 16 (Luke 1: 68-79):
Philippians 1:3-11 Luke
3:1-6
Searching for
Advent Peace
The
Book of Baruch is part of the Apocrypha, a collection of books that
were used in many synagogues to help the community hold on to its
faith. When some of the community started following Jesus, they still
attended synagogues for religious purposes. Following Jesus was a way
of looking at the world and going to synagogue was a way of claiming
the heritage of your family’s faith. Usually when a member of the
congregation had a book that they found helpful, they would recommend
the book and read it or donate it to the congregation. The problem
was that when the followers of the Rabbi Jesus started to use their
writings to influence the congregation to follow Jesus - who the
followers kept referring to as the Messiah - the congregation got
into an internal fight. In an effort to have some order to their
services, they decided to limit the number of writings that they
would use. The Rabbis gathered together over a series of many years
and came up with an approved series of books. They formed a Canon
(from the Greek word for “measuring stick”) of books that
measured up to their criteria, such as those originally written in
Hebrew and not after the time of Ezra. The books of the Apocrypha are
some of those books that did not measure up.
When
the Christians and Jewish went their different ways, the Christians
kept all of the Jewish Canon and what we now call the Apocrypha as
part of their collections of books and added books that had Christian
themes. The names of some of those books are well known to many of
you: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul’s letters, and so on. However,
there were other books like the Shepherd
of Hermes,
the Didache,
the Protoevangelium
of James,
the Gospel
of Nicodemus,
and many others that were weeded out as the Christians formed their
own Canon. When Jerome translated the Christian Canon into Latin, he
made some notes that some of these books in the Canon had been
excluded by the Rabbis, and he suggested that were seen as less
inspired. By the 4th
Century, the church had made a decision that they were to be
included. However, when the Protestant Reformation came along, the
reformers went back to Jerome and used his notes to urge creation of
a new Canon excluding the Books of Apocrypha. The Protestant
Reformation has a technological component with the invention of the
printing press, and the Protestants wanted every person to have
access to a Bible to decide their relationship to God. The Catholics
disagreed and doubled down on the inclusion of those books and urged
their followers to leave the matter of interpretation to the
hierarchy. Since most of the printers were Protestant, their copies
of the Bible were printed without the Apocrypha. The Church of
England split the difference and printed their Bibles with a separate
section for the Apocrypha and urged that, while it might be part of
the worship lectionary, it would not be used for purposes of
doctrine.
The
Book of Baruch is named after the scribe of Jeremiah who, tradition
said, had been carried into Egypt with Jeremiah at the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Babylonians and later made his way to Babylon to
comfort the exiles. However, the Book was probably written at least
four centuries later as a way to speak to the Jewish people in Israel
in their time of brief independence a century before Jesus. For a
short period, they were free from their enemies and had a choice of
peace. If the words sound somewhat familiar, it is because the writer
used lots of phrases from Daniel, Job, and Isaiah.
Today’s lesson
from the 5th
chapter is a song about the exiles returning from Babylon to
Jerusalem, free from their enemies, to begin a new life in God’s
peace. He sings that God will give them a new name, “Righteous
Peace, Godly Glory”. The understanding was that the name given you
by God is a guide for one’s character; Righteous Peace means the
Shalom of God, being in a right relationship with God and neighbor.
It
is a song of new beginnings much like the Song of Zechariah which we
sang as today’s Psalm from the Book of Luke, a song of celebration
at the birth of Zechariah’s son and to ask God’s help to “guide
our feet into the way of peace.” Zechariah, in a break with family
tradition, gives his son the name of John, which in Hebrew means
“graced by God”. In the Gospel lesson for today, John calls for a
baptism to leave the old way behind and live into who we are really
called to be, “graced by God for peace, the Shalom of God, being in
a right relationship with God and neighbor.”
Peace
is not about the cessation of conflict after a war but is instead a
choice that is made each day regardless of what the enemy does. All a
war accomplishes is to set up the next war. Every war America has
fought in the 21st
century had its beginnings centuries before there was a United States
and we were ever created as a nation; we just came late to those
particular parties of hate as we blindly followed the pattern of
putting our trust in war as a way to bring about peace. One
definition of insanity is to do the same old thing over and over
again in the same old way and expect a different outcome.
We
love war; it seems as if it is part of our very DNA for we are always
of looking for ways to win. Weapons may change, but the process of
demonizing our enemies continues as we celebrate new ways to win.
Dostoevsky, in the Brother
Karamazov, reflects
“In every (one), of course, a beast lies hidden – the beast of
rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured
victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain, the beast of
diseases that follow on. . . ” William James in in the early 20th
century concluded “We are all ready to be savage in some cause”,
and he called for a moral equivalent to war. We have experimented
with moral equivalents to war such as football or free market
capitalism or today’s experiments in party politics, debates, and
confrontational governments, but they have turned into modern day
gladiatorial contests to serve the blood lust of our baser nature.
The media knows what sells, and the shills for these contests, be
they Wall Street analysts, political pundits, sports commentators, or
battlefield correspondents, all speak the same jargon of violence,
giving us what we want.
Peace
does not begin with our enemies; it begins with us when we choose
each day to answer the call for repentance of feeding the beast
inside each of us, repenting so that we might live into the new name
which God gives us as we look forward the coming of the Prince of
Peace of whom Zachariah sings:
To
give God’s people knowledge of salvation *
by
the forgiveness of their sins.
In
the tender compassion of our God *
the
dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To
shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, *
and
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Searching
for Advent Peace (poem)
“Wounded”,
“Murdered”, “Died”, “Destroyed”
how
easy the words of commentators’ quips
through
their lips when they judge the trips
to
the enemy’s woodshed as a slip of Freud
of
the violence for which we long in a heart
turned
away from songs of peace by saviors,
baptizers
and scribes, to hate our neighbors
by
wishing wars not ending but again to start,
over
and over again as entertainment for lust
of
blood, real or imagined, between the teams
or
candidates or armies or marketing schemes,
whatever
is there for dreams of leaving in dust.
Turn
my steps to YOU that I might accept peace
that
passes understanding and never will cease.
No comments:
Post a Comment