Into The Way of Peace

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Advent 2C

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Warsaw, VA

Luke 1:68-79

⁶⁸“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. ⁶⁹He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, ⁷⁰as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, ⁷¹that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. ⁷²Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, ⁷³the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us ⁷⁴that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, ⁷⁵in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. ⁷⁶And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, ⁷⁷to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. ⁷⁸By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, ⁷⁹to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Matthew Hensley, a member of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Virginia’s Coordinating Council traveled to South Africa recently on a mission trip with a group from Haymarket Baptist Church, and he came back with this reflection:

Reverend Colin Jooste was arrested from the pulpit of the Zion Congregational Church in King William Town, South Africa in 1985. The charge: treason. The cause: organizing groups of Christians and concerned citizens in a feeding scheme that would provide people in the local black township with necessary food.

Colin did not organize this initiative from the comforts of privileged South Africa. He and his congregation also lived behind fences, in a township categorized as “coloured.” Their coming and going was monitored and their ability to work was limited to what the government considered acceptable for their “race.”

The old apartheid system of South Africa is too convoluted and detailed to easily describe. Suffice it to say it was an arbitrary and elaborate system that rested power in the hands of a privileged few while pitting the majority against one another by placing them in different categories of race and ability. Those categorized as “coloured” were given a few more “privileges” than the black South Africans creating a divide between the two contrived groups. So instead of the oppressed majority rising up together against the oppressor, the system of apartheid pitted coloured against black.

So Colin stood in his congregation’s pulpit each week and exposed the evils of apartheid while preaching the hope found in the life of Jesus Christ and in his gospel message. In Jesus’ worldview, the weak, the marginalized, and the poor were the privileged. And in God’s coming kingdom, the playing field would become level and all people would stand as equals with one another as they do before almighty God. Under apartheid, what was playing out before his congregation was far from such a kingdom.

Colin believed that God calls people to reflect God’s coming kingdom – to provide a tangible example of what such a kingdom will be when God returns to reign over creation. To sit back and watch their brothers and sisters suffer from starvation and disease when they could help was not taking such a call to be light in a dark world seriously.

So Colin, with the help of pastors in the black townships, began to collect food and money to send to the people on the other side of town, kept in their own area. This initiative, which began in King William Town, started to take hold in other areas of South Africa. Many black townships began to receive aid from coloured townships – the oppressed caring for the even more oppressed.

But if one aspect of apartheid was to separate and pit the races against one another, then surely what Colin had started was meant to undermine the government. And so he was arrested from his pulpit one Sunday and taken to a nearby prison where he was kept with other political prisoners where they were beaten and mistreated. The memory of a young girl’s cry held in a cell down the hall from his still haunts him.

Colin, luckily, was released after six months due to his work with the World Council of Churches and given 24 hours to leave the country. He and his family were sponsored to come to the United States where they lived for seven years. While in the US, he never stopped working, even though churches wanted to provide for his families needs while in exile. He worked as a carpenter and painter, spoke to many churches, and later served as a professor, after studying at Yale University.

But his home country and extended family were enough reason to not stay permanently in the United States. His whole family returned to South Africa in 1992 when the apartheid government fell.

Colin now works for the new South African government. He remained a pastor in a local congregation until recently. His family now lives in a part of King William Town that less than twenty years ago was meant for whites only. Many days, on his way to work, he drives past the prison where he was held. The experience is still painful.

I find Colin’s story compelling on a number of levels – on a personal level, his courage in speaking the truth of the Gospel of Christ into the presence of human suffering – especially suffering caused by other humans – calls me to a more courageous stand of my own. His efforts to provide for the basic needs of his neighbors despite an officially sanctioned systematized injustice that made it at best difficult and at worst nearly impossible to carry out calls me to do more, be more, SPEAK more about what Jesus had to say about those injustices that existed in first-century Palestine and that still haunt us today.

As for our passage this morning, we are walking through the approach – the advent – of the coming of the Christ child.

Just to recap – Zechariah, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth’s husband, who was a member of the priestly order of Abijah, was most likely well into his seventies when the angel Gabriel appeared to him as he was performing his priestly duties, and announced that he and Elizabeth, who had up until that time not been able to have children, were going to be parents of a little boy. Gabriel didn’t stop there, but went on to tell Zechariah something of what his son would do after he grew up – that he would be great in the sight of the Lord, that he would turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God, parents to their children, the disobedient to the wisdom of righteousness, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord … all in all quite an earful for a man who had led a long and faithful life serving God and his fellow Israelites in the temple.

The twist to the story is that Gabriel also told Zechariah that for the next nine months more or less he would be without a voice. He would not be able to speak a word through the whole of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Can you imagine the degree of frustration that would cause? I know what a hurdle it was to be able to communicate with Irene Hinson as well as Helen Coates when neither one of them were able to speak clearly during their illnesses.

Ask yourself: what must it have been like for Zechariah to be unable to speak for those nearly forty weeks? What insight do you think he may have drawn during that time? When you are required to be silent, you are better able to enter into ‘observer’ mode in relation to the world around you.

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in Domestic Relations Court with one of our Hispanic friends, and while we waited for her hearing to begin, we sat through another case, which involved two women who had gotten into an altercation – one behind the wheel of a car and the other standing outside the car and being struck by it – all apparently over the fact that the woman in the car, who was coming to the house to see the father of the baby she is expecting, believed the woman outside the car was in a romantic relationship with that same man. The questioning and the back and forth in the courtroom was both sad and intriguing. Sad, because it was obvious that the lack of conscience of someone had brought these two women to that courtroom dealing with a situation and potential penalties and fines and even jail time for what one had done to the other. Intriguing in that the person without the conscience seemed to be completely absent from the proceedings: the man over which the one woman struck the other.

Greg Boyd, Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, summarizes what Christ’s call to his followers is when it comes to being in conflict: simply put, if they have flesh, they are not our true enemy. God’s radical, revolutionary, transformative love is one that calls us to pray for our enemies, lay down our lives for them, to serve our neighbors, our relatives, a stranger on the street; it doesn’t matter what they’ve done, or what they look like or smell like or are wearing, we are to love them unconditionally and live peace into our shared existence. Jesus told his disciples over and over again that our fight is with the princes and rulers of the air – the spirit realm… it is those same spirits that would cause us to turn against each other, that insinuate themselves into our egos and our consciences and inflate our pride and convince us that our reputations are more important than maintaining a relationship with someone who is supposed to be our brother or our sister – who also calls Jesus Lord.

Our passage this morning is, in the liturgical tradition, referred to as the ‘Benedictus’ – it refers to the first word of this song “Blessed” – that Zechariah sings when he regains his voice after the birth of his son John.

John took his task seriously. He carried it out until the day he was executed.

So did Colin Jooste.

So have countless others through the centuries.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

This evening we will remember the life of one who gave HER life in that same task – Lottie Moon served her Lord by serving the people of China for over 30 years… just like reverend Jooste in South Africa, she organized food drives and solicited funds to help in that effort to feed the people in her region during a famine, and even more than that, she gave of her own stores, her own food, to the point that she was so weakened that she ended up succumbing to disease – actually starving to death for the sake of making the Gospel real to the people God had called her to serve.

May we be found so faithful.

Let’s pray.