Peace Breaks Out | Rev. T. J. FitzGerald | 12.10.23
Amid the conflicts in our lives and our world we consider how peace enters the world and how we can nurture it.
Sermon Transcript
What a blessing it is today to have such beautiful music, right? It’s good because I tell you, preaching is for the birds. If some historians had their way, that is what would be on Francis of Assisi’s tombstone. These are the jokes, friends. Preaching is for the birds because Francis was famous for deciding to sing his songs and to share his messages about God’s love with the animals and the plants wherever he found them. He’d had all about he wanted to have of people. He preferred to preach to the birds. When there’s a lot going on in the world, friends, I think of Francis preaching just to the animals around him and building his own little congregation of woodland creatures. This week I had the thought, could I have my own community in my backyard? A little monastery of holy creatures.
Observations from the Backyard Congregation
As I was thinking this, I watched a hoard of great-tailed grackles, a light into my yard, a charming, charming group. And I thought, here they are, a chance for conversion. No. My feathered congregation. I watched them amble around the way they do. They started to fight, started to fight over the fallen pecans, I’m sorry. Not pecans, I am told. The pecans, sorry. And then some of the group, some of the grackles chased a squirrel away. One of my squirrels. Not too long after that though, I had seen that the birds had gone, and I knew why. Stationed at the bottom of the great pecan tree was one of the neighborhood cats. And I saw it eyeing that scaredy squirrel coming back down the tree and I was worried. But before I could get outside to do my pastoral care to my growing congregation, the squirrel hit the ground and spotted the cat and then sprinted up the next tree, this young tree without much cover for the squirrel.
The cat gave chase up the tree and for an instant I worried about the tiny squirrel’s fate, this newest member of my backyard congregation. But the crafty, fluffy rodent made a turn at the top of the tree, defying gravity, then doubled back past the cat, right past it down to the ground and up the pecan tree as fast as the cat could even spot it and was safe. And so that striped feline, it’s quarry long gone, just sat up there. These flimsy branches and perched itself, like that’s what it meant to do all along. Salvaging its dignity is only cats can. And I thought maybe preaching isn’t for the birds, it’s for the cats.
The Appeal of Monastic Life
Sometimes I think people who enter the monastic life are really onto something. There are weeks when it seems like a really nice idea to withdraw from the world and its affairs right now is an attractive option.
We could ponder there the deep questions. What’s the meaning of existence? What’s the nature of suffering? How do you solve a problem like Maria? Am I alone? Anyone else ever get this idea? Anyone else wonder what would it be like to just escape life for a bit focus on tending to a small, little, cloistered community to live perhaps like a monk or a nun. Lately, I’ve been making my way through the book “How to Live Like a Monk” by Jay Shetty. He joined an ashram when he was young after a bit of a checkered past. But after three years, the leaders of the ashram suggested he leave and become a teacher to the outside world. I’ll let the world fill in the blanks there. So he left and became a very successful corporate coach and is now a social media darling and success and a bestselling author putting all that spirituality to work. That’s good. No judgment.
He thought joining an ashram would wall him off from the troubles of life. And in many ways, it did. But in some, it did not. When there is so little to worry about, you worry about what is so little. In one funny confession, Shetty explains that the monks got a little competitive and gossipy about who was more or less spiritual than the others. Who was falling asleep during meditation, who was better at cooking those meals for everyone, who was better at memorizing the sutras. Even there past the gates, over the walls of the ashram, these negative thoughts, these comparisons of others started to creep in. As we know, comparison is the thief of joy. Shetty says, “We have three core emotional needs, which I like to think of as peace, love, and understanding. Negativity in conversations, emotions, and actions often springs from a threat to one of these three needs. A fear that bad things are going to happen, a fear of not being loved or a fear of being disrespected. Peace, love, and understanding.”
Peace, he says, is elusive. Even in the monastic life, it does not grant you peace. In fact, focusing more on its achievement can make it seem harder to get and farther away. How to maintain peace at all times is like asking how do you hold the tides in balance all on your own or to put it another way, how do you keep a wave upon the sand? The contemplative life sounds great, but the more I learn about it, the more I wonder if it’s really an answer.
The Second Week of Advent: A Devotion to Peace
This is the second week of advent. Advent is the time when we wait for the arrival of something new in this world. The second week traditionally is devoted to peace. Even speaking the word into the world right now feels strange. It feels like peace right now is only the sparest hope of an end to the imminent threat to lives. And at times when I pray for peace, what I confess, I am praying for is the mere absence of active harm, threat or killing for just a period of time. The cat stuck in its tree and the squirrel long gone. But that is far from the ideal of peace. But it is the tree up which violence always chases peace. The thin hope for the absence of violence is all many ever know of peace. Because as it is chanted, as it is prayed, as it has been shouted by scores of millions over time, no justice, no peace. That’s right. Blaise Pascal, the 17th century scientist and thinkers credited with saying, “It is a person’s inability to sit quietly alone in a room that is the root of all human trouble.”
I think about that quote sometimes when I wish I could put say an attorney general or two in a quiet room somewhere all by themselves, then at least I might have a measure of more peace. But something like that would only alleviate for a time the imminent threat to peace, the imminent threat to justice because what’s coming next after that? And is that really the peace of advent? Is that the peace we’re waiting for? Is that the peace we are yearning for? Is that God’s peace? No justice, no peace.
Francis of Assisi: Reality vs. Fiction
In our reading, we hear about Francis of Assisi. Francis is someone many modeled their lives upon. Not only their backyard or barnyard congregations. The songs and prayers attributed to him are beautiful. They are the bedrock of many people’s faves. They’re in both of the hymnals we have ourselves. The only problem is he didn’t write those. They were published by people in his community using his name after he was dead.
The prevailing image of Francis today is the one we heard in the reading and the one I hope to recreate perhaps in my bathrobe, in my backyard, arms outstretched with birds on my shoulders and arms. Beckoning the deer who’ve come for the sermon, his sermons for the birds. The offer of our reading, Carl Dennis says he wanted his fellow creatures to taste the joy of singing the hymns he sang on waking, hymns of Thanksgiving that praised creation. If you sing when you wake in the morning, the praise of creation, there’s a good chance you’re waking up alone. That’s right. Preaching and singing for the birds, them moving and singing along, waking up in song, praising creation like the hills themselves are alive with The Sound of Music. But the idea of the world made of Francis is just fiction. And the poet explains how troublesome this image of the saint really can become when someone in his care is suffering.
The fullness of life and death is with us always even inside the cloistered walls or barriers, we put up to them. And it is a crisis of faith when we face it, but whose faith? And the poem, the poet doesn’t ask whether the nun or whether Francis is having a moment of weakness, a crisis of faith. We’re human. We all have those. No, the poet’s words again. And listen, all she can manage now is to hope for the will, not to abandon her God if he is her God in his hour of weakness. God’s weakness is what the nun is feeling there. For the inability to comfort her in her suffering or to save her from it. And much of the world is now asking, where’s God in this? Where’s the peace we were promised year after year, after year, right? Where’s God’s justice? Where’s God’s peace? No justice, no peace.
Current Events and a Call for Justice
Francis is credited with the saying, “Preach God’s message of love with all your heart. When necessary, use words.” So it should not be a mystery why I’ve been mapping the migratory patterns of great-tailed grackles or why I’ve been watching cats and squirrels up their trees. Anyone with a phone or friends or a subscription to a newspaper knows well what might make a soul rise to sing to the birds rather than hold the morning paper and look at the state of the world we share. Late Friday night, the highest court in Texas halted the already painful decision Kate Cox made to end her pregnancy. When Cox discovered that the fetus developed an almost certainly fatal syndrome, and she was suffering a real risk and still is to her health. No doctor she spoke with would give her care that she needed to end that pregnancy. The doctors feared the threats from the state, threats made publicly by the state’s highest ranking law officer.
The honorable Maya Guerra Gamble in Travis County ruled this on Thursday. Her words, “The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice.” And by Friday, the attorney general, who at times I wish would be in a quiet room somewhere perhaps with three hots and a cot and a walk once in a while in the yard for a day, amen, appealed the decision and obtained a temporary stay from the highest court in Texas of the order allowing Ms. Cox to recover medical care. To receive medical care that all her doctors agree she needs. So Ms. Cox waits for what a court and its employees will decide about her health. None of whom, to my knowledge, have a single medical degree among them. If that is justice, I would not wish it on the birds, not even on a cat. No justice, no peace.
And this is only in our own backyard this week, my friends. And so the thoughts come to me. Let’s go to the ashram. Let’s cloister ourselves and find peace for being behind the gates and shutting the world out might finally bring that, but we know there are questions thereto. The nuns in the abbey and The Sound of Music ask it in song over and over, how do you solve a problem like Maria? And the Maria is the name for who? Mary. And for millennia scholars of faith and religion and the Bible itself have been asking the nuns same question, how do you solve a problem like Mary? What does the virgin birth mean? What does she really do in the prophecies to be fulfilled? What does her lineage tell the followers of the teachings of her son and on and on? How do you solve a problem like Mary? That’s easy. More housing for migrants, universal healthcare, and universal basic income or a living wage. Her problems are solved.
With all of those, Mary would not have had any problems in the first place, and we may never have known about her son. I don’t mean to be doing a time travel sermon. But if she had all these things, there’d be no Christmas because there would have been plenty of room at the end. Baby clothes, a crib instead of a trough, a midwife. And family celebrating instead of cattle lowing as the baby’s trying to sleep and a boy showing up to perform a drum solo for Mary in the middle of the night. It’s hard to keep it going when your buddy over here is laughing though.
The Need for a Bold Faith
Listen guys, the world needs faith that is bold. The world needs a faith that is so bold, it’s willing to risk its challenge to those spare faiths, those lean hopes and those desperate prayers to make suffering actually stop.
If a faith does not pose an existential threat to ignorance, an insurmountable challenge to injustice and an overwhelming force against want, I dare say it is not a faith at all.
But rather a seat from which to watch violence chase peace continually up a tree. Is faith a refuge from the world? No. No, no, no, no. Is faith a refuge from the powerlessness interlocking systems of oppression want us to feel? Yes, yes, yes, 1,000 times, yes. Give me justice and I will show you peace. Give me a birthing person’s peace of mind in making decisions for their care and I’ll show you peace. Give me freedom from the cynical clinging to power by supposed public servants at the expense of people’s abject suffering and I’ll show you peace. Give me a time when religion does no harm and heals those it touches rather than hurt them and I’ll show you peace that will break out across the land.
When our faith is cracked by human horror, the mercy that flows out as compassion waters our ground of being. No one is more human than when they feel the suffering of another. So it is only by justice for others that we might know peace. Give me justice friends and I’ll show you peace. In the days of advent calling us on, look for those who are suffering and wage peace. Look for those in fear and want and wage peace. Look to nature, look to the stars, look wherever you find your way and wage peace unceasingly, so that we may sing a new song under the world from our own backyard through the streets of our city and out into this hurting world. So all hearts may be blessed with the music of justice whose tuned through all time will always be peace. That is how peace arrives. That is how peace is born again. That is how peace breaks out, may it ever be so blessed be and amen.
