Advent I
In 1999, a book came out authored by Rabbi Edwin Friedman called “Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, and it’s recently been reissued for a fourth time. The continuing appeal of the book is in its relevance in addressing the social-cultural context of North America which Friedman characterized as being one of chronic anxiety.
Friedman was one of the pioneers in Family Systems theory and analytical practice, and he moved between family therapy and working with political, corporate, and social service leaders, helping leaders to self-differentiate within the complex systems that often work to subvert the very leadership they need.
Self-differentiation, in a nutshell, is about how to be person-in-right-relationship with one’s own self and others, maintaining healthy ‘self’ without collapsing either into individualism on the one hand or becoming a cog in a mindless groupthink on the other.
Chronic anxiety in a society and culture works against our health. Instead of helping us to grow to the sort of maturity that helps us to create community, a chronically anxious culture breeds reactivity, self-centredness, quickness to set barriers against others, and to blame others, – to create, in fact, multiple ‘others’ against whom we feel we need to be in competition – and to have varying degrees of addiction to anything that promises a quick fix. The atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being is charged with tension and feeds us on a steady drip of cortisol stimulant, the perfect conditions for sin to breed.
And here we are, on the New Years Day of the Church, and what do we hear from Jesus? Keep awake! Keep watch! There’s something coming! The Gospel story today, when received in a context of a chronically anxious culture, seems to reinforce what I’ve just said is a problem in that culture. How to receive this Gospel warning here today as pandemic lingers and on the heels of the various personal and community losses and traumas we’ve experienced just over the past year? My first thought on reviewing the readings for today, when I started with the Gospel, was to do a quick pulse-check to see which part of my fight-or-flight reaction had started queuing up for action.
The Holy One who speaks these words to us is the Prince of Peace, whose words are always Peace. A state of triggered alert is no place of peace.
The Prince of Peace spoke those words to a spiritually hungry, beleaguered and tired people worn down by poverty, living in a manufactured pseudo-peace of Roman occupation, a peace that was no true peace at all.
And this same Prince of Peace speaks these words today, to a spiritually hungry, beleaguered and tired people worn down by economic and healthcare crisis stress, and living in a manufactured pseudo-peace – at least in our little backyard of the world – in which we are so interconnected globally, though, that it is impossible to recognize the relative security in which we live here in KW as a true peace.
Look, Jesus says, ordinary people will be doing ordinary things when God’s judgment will come. Just like us here, as we do our ordinary things like caring for our neighbours and paying for the boiler and making our puddings and trying like mad to find a single affordable apartment for a refugee family.
As we go about these ordinary, holy, activities, we may not all be suffering from acute anxiety even as aspects of the work can be stressful. But as citizens of this particular part of the world, we breathe in the atmospheric pollution of a chronically anxious world that hurts people.
As much as we try to leave the car at home, eat less meat, reduce, recycle, reuse, we know that the way we live contributes to the suffering of others around the world. May the judgment of COP27 open our eyes more and more to this. As much as we deplore the actions of Russia and Saudi Arabia and Iran, and as much as we pray for peace in Ukraine, we’re caught up in systems that perpetuate those conflicts. The Canadian ecumenical, Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization Project Ploughshares, located here in Waterloo at Conrad Grebel College, keeps current in research on the arms trade, and especially on Canada’s involvement in the small arms trade. Businesses that contribute to the local economy here in South Western Ontario manufacture arms and vehicles that are approved by our Canadian Government for sale to Saudi Arabia who use them in their atrocious war in Yemen. May Project Ploughshares open our eyes more and more to this.
God’s judgment is coming. Be awake. Into the midst of doing our ordinary good things and our ordinary things that cause suffering, God is coming. This is fearful stuff.
The prophet Isaiah knew a lot about God’s judgement. He saw it in the vision of the dwelling place of God coming to be with us, a place so attractive that people are compelled to go up to it. In this dwelling with us, God “will judge the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; 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.”
Look at what God’s judgment does: it brings peace by so transforming the hearts and minds of people that they no longer need tools of war, that they willingly choose to be creative rather than destructive and that they break down the barriers that necessitated the lifting up of swords against each other and cultivate the soil together. Those barriers are legion: the hatred that comes from fear, the othering that comes from self-centredness, for starters. God’s judgment, when it comes, is consistent with God’s grace: it is an offer of love and of the capacity to repent and to turn and to get on a good path that is offered in the same breath as God brings down the judgment of sin.
What is peace but a part of the mystery of God’s grace, and a consequence of God’s grace, a grace that is both love and judgment. God’s grace first and foremost is about God reaching out to us in love to turn our hearts to reconcile with God and with one another. Peace, as a consequence of this grace, is the relational state where all things are in right relationship with each other. This is the place of true security, where all the anxious and fearful defenses fall away, and we let grace make a place in our hearts. This is the place of true security.
The Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, writing at the height of the Vietnam War, made this connection. “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorders in your own soul which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” In other words, examine your soul for what stands in the way of right relationship with God and with others. And it is in making this place for God and others to share their gifts with you that you discover, in a manner of speaking, right relationship with your own soul. Merton, again, “we are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”
To be at peace with God is to let God be God, including letting God be God of judgment over those powers in a chronically anxious culture that teach us the ways of war. In Isaiah’s vision the nations will “learn war no more” – think of all the ways in which we in our souls learn war: arrogance, greed, callousness, and above all, fear. We learn these things as it were by sleepwalking through life in our present worldly culture, and probably aren’t even aware of how truly anxious and unhealthy they are making us. They’re some of the ordinary things we go about learning and doing and reinforcing whilst God’s judgment looms daily on our personal horizons.
Now imagine Jesus sitting right there beside you, leaning over and saying, “wake up!” You don’t know when that judgement is coming might be another way of saying it’s always here. And what if the state of wakefulness and watchfulness that we’re called to isn’t the anxious alarm bell that triggers fearful defensiveness? What if Jesus wants us to wake up to the grace of loving judgement that God brings to us in each moment, in each encounter with others, and each deep journey within our selves? What if what God wants to produce in us is not a state of anxious aroused triggered fight and flight, but an invitation to honesty, forgiveness, and new life, with the promise that peace is found in each step along that way?
Just as Isaiah saw, the dwelling place of God has come to be with us, in Emmanuel. Jesus is God’s own dwelling place, living amongst us, so compelling a presence in our midst, so transforming a potential in our lives, that peace can be a reality right now.
Keep awake to this invitation and we might learn that all God wants us to do, like any parent, is for us to stop fighting, including fighting back at God: To not fight back with claims of unworthiness when God says you are loved, unconditionally; to not fight back shutting a door when God says, I’m here with you in your suffering and loneliness; to not fight back with unacceptance when God says, I forgive you. Keep awake to God’s invitation – which is another way of saying keep awake to grace – and, instead of breathing in the insidiously unhealthy particles of anxiety in the atmosphere around us, we might inhale deeply of that peace of God which passes all understanding. I pray this peace for us all, and for true peace throughout the world.
The Revd Dr Eileen Scully
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.