Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 2, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Advent, that time on the church calendar set aside for preparing for the birth of Jesus Christ. In a few weeks we will celebrate his birth as good news of great joy for all people, and of course it is. It’s the best news that there ever was or ever could be. In Jesus God comes to us as one of us to bring us the good news of God’s unconditional grace. We call him Lord and Savior, and we call ourselves his disciples. We ascribe titles to him, and we claim the titles of Christian and disciples for ourselves. Both uses of titles, for him and for us, are appropriate, for the relationship between us and him is truly two-sided. He is our Lord, and we are his followers, his disciples. As I thought about this new Advent season and about what it might mean for us to prepare for the birth of our Lord and Savior, I found myself concentrating on our side of that dual relationship between Christ and us. We anticipate his birth, and the reason that we do is that we are his disciples. We celebrate his birth because of who he is but also because of who we are. So Advent is, I think, an appropriate time to consider more intentionally than we usually do what it means for us to call ourselves Christ’s disciples.

When we consider that question, we find that our commitment to be his disciples has consequences for how we live our lives. He offers us God’s grace, but he also makes demands on us. God’s grace is unconditional. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be grace. When we know that grace, however, we can’t help but respond with transformed lives, lives devoted to living as he would have us live, devoted to living as his disciples. We experience his grace as nothing less than a demand that we follow the ways he taught us. So on the Sundays of Advent this year—except December 16, when our children’s pageant will take up most of the service and I won’t preach—I want to consider what some of those demands are. Of course there is a whole lot more to being a disciple of Christ than I can cover in three brief sermons, so I will concentrate on three aspects of discipleship that are suggested by the Advent readings this year from the Prophet Isaiah, namely, that being a disciple of Christ means living lives committed to three values that Jesus taught us—peace, justice, and care of others. Today, peace.

That the way of Christ and of Christ’s disciples is the way of peace is, I suppose, fairly obvious. We call Jesus the Prince of Peace, and we know that he both taught and lived peace himself. Today we encounter our tradition’s great vision of the world at peace that he taught and incarnated in our reading from Isaiah. It is a vision of the weapons of war transformed into the implements of peace and prosperity: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” Isaiah 2:4 NRSV The words come Isaiah not Jesus, but Jesus stands squarely in the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and the other Hebrew prophets of peace and justice. Jesus grasped Isaiah’s vision, lived it, and taught it to his followers during his life and to us as his followers today.

In the other reading we heard this morning the Evangelist Luke has Zechariah, in Luke’s story the father of John the Baptist, conclude his hymn of praise upon the birth of John by saying not about John but about Jesus that with his coming “by the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” Luke 1:78-79 NRSV In Zechariah’s hymn, peace is the culmination of Christ’s work. Peace is that to which everything else leads. The lesson is clear: The way of Christ and therefore of Christ’s disciples is the way of peace.

If, then, we truly are Christ’s disciples, if we truly await and authentically celebrate the birth of the one we follow as our Lord, the one to whom we give our allegiance above all others—and that, after all, is what it means for us to call him Lord—we will in this Advent season recommit ourselves to being people of peace; and we will do that on a couple of levels. Zechariah’s hymn speaks of peace in the world to be sure, but it also speaks of our own inner, spiritual peace. The peace of which he sings comes to us when the light of Christ breaks into our spiritual darkness, when we sit in our personal darkness and our personal shadow of death. The light of Christ comes to us in the dark places of our lives and brings us peace in the sure knowledge of God’s love and grace for all people, and even for us, even for me. The peace of Christ is truly inner peace for our souls.

Yet we make a mistake if we thank of the peace that is the way of Christ and of Christ’s disciples only in personal, spiritual terms. The peace of Christ is also peace in the world, peace among peoples, peace among the nations. That is the peace of which Isaiah sings. In his hymn it isn’t individuals who will be converted to the way of peace, it is “peoples” and “nations.” Isaiah dreams: “Nation shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall they [i.e., the nations] learn war any more.” The commitment of Christ’s disciples is to worldly peace as well as to spiritual peace. It is nothing less than a commitment to the end of war, all war. It is commitment to Christ’s way of nonviolent resistance to evil. The way of Christ and of Christ’s disciples includes a commitment to peace so thorough and so fundamental that it includes the awareness that violence cannot bring peace. Violence only begets more violence. Christ’s disciples know that there is no way to peace. Peace is the way.

So as we move through Advent this year, let us pray for peace—peace in our souls and peace in the world. But let us do much more than that. Let us practice the spiritual disciplines that bring our souls the peace of Christ, prayer, meditation, and silence, every day. They allow the light of Christ into our hearts and minds and bring us that inner peace the Christ offers and so wants us to have. And let us renew or commitment to peace in the world. Let us resolve to support policies and politicians who, in our carefully and prayerfully considered opinions, truly stand for peace and for policies that give true hope of achieving it. Let us put our convictions into action as the Spirit leads us. Let us realize the hope of St. Francis’ great prayer: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” It is the way of Christ. It is the way of Christ’s disciples. It is, indeed, our way. Amen.