Peace-making through music: Advent One

NOTE: Worship notes for the first Sunday of Advent 2010, November 28th. This is the first in a four part series exploring ways to discover the birth of the Prince of Peace in some very unexpected places - much like Christ's first birth. If you can, join us for the fun at 10:30 am on Sunday.

“I want this Christmas to be different.” How many times have we heard this said? How many times have we said it ourselves? “I want this Christmas to be different?” More spiritual – less materialistic – grounded more in the grace of God or Christ’s comfort and joy than the busyness of these days, yes?

I am struck how Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, one of my favorite Christian Educators, puts it in her book To Dance with God: This year we want our Christmas to be different. We want to be touched this season – moved at a level that lies deep in us and is hungry and dark and groaning with a primal need. Like the receptive fields all around us, we lie fallow and wanting… willing and aching to receive the Spirit. (p. 60)

But here’s the thing: Christmas won’t be different if we aren’t different. Do you recall the classic definition of insanity? “Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results!” Our friends in AA get it precisely right when they tell us: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got!”

• Advent – and our gentle observation of it for the four weeks before Christmas – is God’s invitation to us to leave the madness behind or a season. It is a new way of living and praying through each day that allows the “Sacred to soak into our wanting humanity” just as the dew nourishes the soil. (Mueller-Nelson, p. 60)

• Walter Brueggemann, one of the finest Old Testament scholars in our tradition, writes: "Advent is an abrupt disruption in our 'ordinary time'…an utterly new year, new time, new life. Everything begins again… While the world around us wraps up another year hoping for increased consumer spending and waiting for annual reports on profits, the church has already stepped into a new time, to begin a season of hoping and waiting for something of much greater significance than profits or spending: for Advent invites us to awaken from our numbed endurance and our domesticated expectations and consider our life afresh in light of the new gifts that God is about to give."

Small wonder that the season often begins with the prophetic vision of shalom as recorded in these words of Isaiah.

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God… that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And God shall judge between the nations, and arbitrate for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

This is an invitation to reclaim God’s vision for our lives from the bottom line banality that infects us all. It’s like hearing Martin Luther King Jr. preach his “I Have a Dream” speech all over again. For you see the Advent challenge is really an invitation to “get this marvelous picture of peacemaking out of the realm of the imagination and into the realities of everyday life.” (James Limburg) It is a way to really make this Christmas different for the prophet is clear that what: “God wills for the world… is a center of justice and righteousness within and among us that will get our minds off our petty agendas and our penchant to protect our little investments.” (Brueggemann)

So, this Advent, I’ve sensed we need to do something new in worship: something that will give us eyes to see God’s mysterious birth in the most unlikely places – something that strengthens the Lord’s vision of shalom and moves the prophet’s “marvelous picture of peace-making out of the realm of the imagination and into the realities of our everyday lives” – something that is all about embracing the new heaven and new earth of Jesus Christ even as we “seek to live our lives right here, right now, in ways that are pleasing to God and utterly trusting in God's goodness.” (Kate Huey, www.ucc.org)

Barbara Brown Taylor says it so well: “(The spirituality of Advent is about waking up) every morning and deciding to live the life God has given you to live right now. Refuse to live yesterday over and over again. And resist the temptation to save your best self for tomorrow." Search for – and be awakened to – God’s peace that is already here but all too often hidden from our senses because we’re too busy with agendas that have nothing to do with shalom.

And here’s what I want you to do with me this Advent: see if you can discover Christ’s often hidden and always mysterious birth taking place within the peacemaking work of music. All over the world – including right here in Pittsfield – there are musicians dedicated to strengthening God’s peace through making music. They are committed to the values of shalom as articulated by both the prophet Isaiah and Martin Luther King, Jr. and all too often we miss God’s presence within the music because we aren’t used to discovering God in unexpected places.

• Our theological imaginations are under-developed – our sense of sacred aesthetics has become boring – and our awareness of where the presence of the Lord is being born in creation is both too narrow and parochial.

• Fortunately there are Christian thinkers like Eugene Peterson in the Reformed tradition and Hans Urs von Balthasar in the Roman Catholic realm who refuse to be limited by religious provincialism. In Peterson’s most recent work, Practice Resurrection, he writes:

Once Plato formulated what he named the “universals” of life as the True, the Good and the Beautiful. He held that if we are to live a whole and mature life, the three had to work together harmoniously in us. But the American church has deleted Beauty from that triad. We are vigorous in contending for the True, thinking rightly about God. We are energetic in insisting on the Good, behaving rightly before God. But Beauty, the forms by which the True and the Good take shape in human life, we pretty much ignore. We delegate Beauty to flower arrangements and interior decorators… when Truth, Goodness and Beauty are organically connected. And without Beauty, Truth and Goodness have no container, no form, no way of coming to expression in human life. Truth divorced from Beauty becomes abstract and bloodless. Goodness divorced from Beauty becomes loveless and graceless. Thus, we need to reclaim a theological aesthetics… (Peterson, p. 6)

And I’m going to play with this throughout Advent and see where it takes us. Because of one thing I am certain: if you always do what you’ve always done…

Now here’s one of those upside down, hidden and unexpected places where I sense Christ being born within and among us: group singing. Specifically, group singing that celebrates our highest values and aspirations. Call it the gospel music version of the prophet Isaiah’s vision – or the theological equivalent of a Pete Seeger or Arlo Guthrie concert – but something holy happens in this kind of music.

About 100 years ago – well actually May of 1984 – on my first trip to what was then the Soviet Union, our group was waiting for a train in a busy station in the former GDR. It was a massive place and about four tracks away from us – waiting for another train headed in the opposite direction – was a group of Young Pioneers.

• Do you know them? They are the Communist version of the Boy and Girl Scouts – ideological, dressed in uniforms and dedicated to the values of their regime – but also a whole lot like Boy and Girls Scouts everywhere: young, fun and very helpful.

• So our group of about 60 US peace-makers is waiting for our train and their group of about 100 Young Pioneers in East Germany is waiting for their train – when we notice one another. And after some waiving back and forth – and flashing peace signs – they start to sing.

• And it wasn’t accidental that the song they chose was an American folk song about Christmas: children, go where I send thee – how shall I send thee. (Do you know it?) It’s an old African American Christmas gospel song that tells the story of the Old and New Testament leading up to the birth of Jesus.

• Well, they sang that to us as an invitation; we didn’t speak the same language but wanted to connect. So these young Communists had the wisdom and presence to sing us one of our own songs. And I have to tell you as we all joined in – raising US voices with German Communists ones – for a moment that old train station became a cathedral of hope.

And when the song was over we didn’t want the shalom to stop so… we sang another old African American song: Oh Freedom. And guess what? Those German Communist kids KNEW it, too!

Oh freedom… oh freedom… oh freedom over me
And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free

I’m not saying that two songs sung in an East Berlin train station brought an end to the Cold War – that would be foolish and naïve – but we did experience something of Christ’s birth in that strange and unexpected place, ok? Same thing happened three years later on another trip to the Soviet Union: after spending the better part of a day talking with both religious and secular Soviet peace people, we were all waiting for our bus and there was no translator.

• At first it was awkward but then one of the Soviets started to sing a Christmas carol – I’m not kidding – she started to sing “Silent Night.” So we all joined in – each singing in our own languages – and it was like Pentecost: the spirit of God’s peace was palpable.

• So we sang “Joy to the World” – Christians and Communists in English and Russians – out on the streets of what was then Leningrad. And while it made our Communist tour guide leaders crazy – they wanted us to shut up – we kept singing. And in that moment discovered that we were much more alike in God’s eyes than different.

And I submit to you that something of the Baby Jesus was discovered in that moment, too. You see, singing together in a group about our highest values and God’s vision opens us to God’s presence in ways that defy reason – but are real. As we listen to one another – and blend and harmonize – we are practicing what Isaiah envisioned – and it changes us.

• Think of the role music played in the American Civil Rights movement. Dr. King understood group singing to be the sacred glue that held very different people together in pursuit of peace and justice.

• Do you know about the singing revolution in Estonia? The Estonians literally toppled their Communist oppressors through song – in the streets, taking over the national television station and surrounding the TV station with women singing when the generals tried to bring out the tanks.

No wonder that secular saint, Pete Seeger, has the following words stenciled onto the head of his banjo: this machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. Look, I am not telling you that ALL music opens us to Christ’s birth – that would be stupid and blind – because not every song strengthens our souls. But there is a form of music that not only feeds God’s vision within and among us, but strengthens us when we’re in the wilderness so that we can move peacemaking from the realm of the imagination into the realities of everyday living.

This Advent let me invite and encourage you to go beyond what you’ve always done so that you might experience more than you’ve always got at Christmas:

• This week let me ask you to check out an international foundation that has been using music to make peace throughout the world called: Playing for a Change. They unite musicians all over the world – Palestine and South Africans playing songs with musicians in New Orleans and Afghanistan – using contemporary technology to help us discover what we hold in common.

• What’s more, they work with local musicians and artists to create jobs and economic health in some of the poorest places on the planet. That’s what Isaiah was talking about – moving God’s vision beyond our imaginations into the realm of real life – and they are doing it.

I’ve prepared a small informational leaflet for you if you want to know more about this peacemaking through music project. It will bring you both joy and a sense of hope – and maybe you’ll be inspired to join in the song. After all, like the German mystic preacher, Meister Eckhart, said: 'What good is it that Christ was born 2,000 years ago if he is not born now in your heart?’

This is a small project - often unnoticed and considered foolish in the eyes of those with power and prestige - very much like Christ's first birth. Over the years I have become convinced that it is in these small, often hidden blessings that Christ is born within and among us. So I am less and less interested in the big, flashy projects and seek to give myself over to these small, Christ-sized projects that change the world person by person. I hope you will want to join me...

Welcome to Advent 2010… let the songs begin.