November 28, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Teachable Kingdom

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 122
Isaiah 2:1–5

I’m sure God knows what is happening. God’s got a lot to worry about, but there’s bad trouble here. God can’t help but notice. He may not do anything right now, but there will come a day, like they say in church, there will come a day. You can count on it.

Ruby Bridges

Each year I look forward to seeing what our Chicago Lights Tutoring students have drawn for the holiday cards we sell to benefit that program. One design I especially liked wasn’t chosen for reproduction because for technical reasons it wouldn’t reprint well. The student had depicted people from many different nations dressed in their native country’s costumes—with the Dutch boy’s distinctive wooden shoes and the Chinese girl’s braids turned up—all holding hands. The child who drew it can envision a world in which everyone gets along, even though she probably hears gunshots in her own neighborhood. She has the gift of imagination and hope.

That’s what we need, too, to take seriously the words of Isaiah: imagination and hope. Isaiah proclaims that the day shall come when swords will be turned into plowshares. We hear this in a week in which the tension between North and South Korea has intensified dangerously; the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan is now longer than the Soviet Union’s war there; a terrorist bombing is thwarted by the FBI in Portland, Oregon, where a young jihadist was determined to kill a huge mass of people; and our city has had its sixth policeman killed this year. We need a good imagination and the gift of hope to take to heart the words of the prophet Isaiah.

Some may say Isaiah—and peacemakers today—are naive, living in a bubble, not in touch with real danger. But Isaiah was well acquainted with a world filled with violence, threat of war, and oppression. In his day, Israel was conquered and occupied by the frightfully powerful Assyrian Empire. Nonetheless, God called Isaiah to proclaim a vision of a world in which nations lived in harmony.

After hearing this phrase in the last service, one of our parishioners told me the story of a child who came home from school and said, “I don’t like Martin Luther King.” “Why is that?” his parents asked. “Because he said we should all live in Harmony. And I don’t want to move.”

The special responsibility of using one’s imagination, of envisioning, is in large measure what the Bible is about. God’s people are the custodians of a dream. No matter how grim the immediate prospects appear, people in the Bible keep the faith and have hope in the future. Pastor and peacemaker William Sloan Coffin said Biblical people in every age have a “passion for the possible.” This is echoed by New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, “We look not at what can be seen but what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary and what cannot be seen is eternal. Faith does not know a different world from the one measured and calculated by science, but it knows the same world differently.”

The prophet Isaiah calls us to imagine one mountain that is higher than all the other mountains in the world, and that is God’s mountain. Now there are lots of mountains. There’s a mountain of “the bottom line of money,” a mountain of competition, a mountain of capitalism and another of socialism, there’s a mountain of democracy and another of dictatorship, a mountain for every world religion: Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and more; and mountains for every racial and cultural group: African, Japanese, Brazilian. All kinds of mountains we hike that proclaim, “This is where the truth is” and shape how we live. But the mountain that rises higher than all the rest is God’s mountain.

And to God’s mountain, Isaiah proclaims, all the peoples flow. All the nations go to that mountain just like rivers flow to the ocean. They cannot be stopped. What do they do when they go to that mountain? They learn God’s ways. God teaches them. They discover they don’t need weapons anymore. God teaches us how to settle our disputes without needing to defend ourselves or kill others. We learn how to live peacefully. The bombs we have built are not needed. They can be dismantled and recycled for farm machinery. Imagine: no more weapons factories; the federal defense budget reallocated for public education, housing, the arts, and cultural exchanges; engineers and scientists freed to do research for the prevention of disease and environmental protection; no more secret training grounds to teach people how to torture. No one will learn war anymore. Instead people will have learned how to walk away when a situation gets tense; to take a deep breath and count to ten instead of reacting in anger; to pray for our enemies; separate themselves from their own agenda and fears enough to see things from another’s perspective; to seek a third party for mediation; to learn the true essence of all religions that seek compassion among all peoples; to seek common ground; to be reconciled through forgiveness. Imagine!

We are given such a vision of the world to know how God wants us to live and know the direction of God’s Spirit moving in our midst. Both the ways of war and of peace are taught and learned. The church is called to teach and live God’s ways of peace.

Ruby Bridges took her church’s teachings to heart. Ruby was the six-year-old who was one of the first African-American children to integrate the New Orleans public schools. The struggle for integration went on for months. Every morning, the federal marshals escorted Ruby through the lines of angry parents hurling insults, racial slurs, and violent words. The same happened every afternoon when school let out, until finally every white family had withdrawn their children from the school. Ruby went to school all by herself for the majority of the term.

The situation caught the attention of Robert Coles, Harvard child psychologist. Coles went to New Orleans to interview and spend time with Ruby and her parents. He interviewed her teacher, asking how she thought Ruby could tolerate such continual adversity and abuse. The teacher said,

I was standing in the classroom looking out the window. I saw Ruby coming down the street with the federal marshals on both sides of her. The crowd was there shouting as usual. A woman spat at Ruby, but missed. Ruby smiled at her. A man shook his fist at her. Ruby smiled. And then she walked up the steps, and she stopped and turned around and smiled one more time. You know what she told one of those marshals? She told him she prays for those people, the ones in that mob. She prays for them every night before going to sleep.

The interview prompted Coles to speak directly to Ruby about her prayers. “Yes,” Ruby said, “I do pray for them.” Coles asked, “Why? Why would you pray for people who are so mean to you and say such bad things about you?” “Because Mama said I should.” Coles pressed. Ruby said, “I go to church. I go to church every Sunday, and we’re told to pray for people, even bad people. Mama says it’s true. My minister says the same thing. ‘We don’t have to worry,’ he says. He came to our house, and he say, ‘God is watching over us.’ He says if I forgive the people and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and he’ll protect us.” Coles asked if she thought the minister was on the right track. “Oh, yes,” Ruby said. And then in a way of explanation, “I’m sure God knows what is happening. God’s got a lot to worry about, but there’s bad trouble here. God can’t help but notice. He may not do anything right now, but there will come a day, like they say in church, there will come a day. You can count on it. That’s what they say in church” (as quoted by Dr. P.C. Eniss in the sermon “Peace Is More Than a Christmas Wish,” preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 9 December 2007).

There will come a day. Advent is a season marked by watching and waiting for the Christ child to be born anew in our hearts. Watching and waiting for the Prince of Peace to come and bless all of humankind with goodwill throughout the world. But our watching and waiting is not passive. The church is called to witness to God’s dream of reconciliation. This is attested to by Peter Storey, former Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa as well as the President of the South African Council of Churches. He wrote:

One of our important tasks in South Africa’s long struggle for liberation was to help people imagine what they found unimaginable: a South Africa where black and white lived together hand in hand and at peace. It was crucial for the church to incarnate that dream in the life of the Christian community so we could say to an unwilling nation, “There! That is what we mean when we talk about God’s future for South Africa! That is the new South Africa!”

Bishop Storey goes on:

Some of the most powerful moments in my life have been of Communion in places where people have been divided from one another. I once received a phone call in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my black clergy in a very racist town . . . had been arrested by the secret police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister, and then went looking for him. When we found the prison where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by a large white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. He had been pulled out of bed in the early hours of a freezing winter morning and dragged off like that.

I said to the guard, “We are going to have Communion,” and I took out of my pocket a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of Communion wine and some bread in a plastic sachet. I spread my pocket handkerchief on the bench between us and made the table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the Invitation, I said to the guard, “This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.” This must have touched some place in his religious self, because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike. because one always gives the Sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers or sisters—the ones that are hurting the most—and Ike ate and drank. Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips-touch a cup from which a black person had just drunk. The guard was in crisis: he would either have to overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took the cup and sipped from it, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took something of a liberty with the truth and said, “In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,” and very stiffly, the ward reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.”

. . . From that moment the power equation between that guard and Ike was changed forever. God’s shalom had broken through at that makeshift Table.” (Peter Storey, “Table Manners for Peacebuilders,” Conflict and Communion, pp. 61–62)

The Lord’s Table is a visible sign of God’s heavenly banquet. It is a foretaste of the reign of God on earth. Here we recall the Passover meal Jesus shared with his disciples, remembering that their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt but God delivered them from oppression. In the Eucharist we remember God’s liberating acts.

Through the Lord’s Supper we learn to forgive. Here we celebrate God’s unfathomable grace toward us in Jesus Christ, though we are undeserving of such love. Here we can be shaped by the power of the Spirit in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It is here that people who would not otherwise relate to each other share a meal. We do not create the guest list. Our host is Jesus Christ, who broke bread with both the “acceptable” and the outcast, with his believers and with his betrayers. Jesus’ scandalous table fellowship is open to all.

We celebrate Communion until Christ comes. The Eucharist, like the prophet Isaiah, looks forward to a society in God in which the last are first, the humble lifted high, and the powerful are repentant, as grace and peace forgive and unite all humanity. (Brian Wren, “Justice and Liberation in the Eucharist,” Christian Century, 1 October 1986.)

God’s kingdom is teachable. May we embody God’s dream this Advent as we break bread with friend and foe and drink the cup of the Prince of Peace.