Lions and Lambs and Kids - O My!
December 9, 2007
Advent II
Peggy Halsey

If someone had been watching my face earlier this week when I opened the e-mail from Donna asking me to take over preaching duty this morning, I am sure it would have resembled a deer caught in headlights. I like to preach – with six months lead time. Yet how do you say no to your battered and bruised, pain-ridden, doped-up minister? You don’t. But I calmed down a bit – I even experienced a little rush - when I went to the lectionary and found that one of the scripture passages for today is the one from Isaiah about the wolf lying down with the lamb. That passage has always intrigued me, and is, I believe, one of the more confounding in the Bible.

The words are poetic, the imagery is compelling and heart-warming – but if there was ever a passage easy to romanticize, this must be it. I have seen more than my share of lovely Christmas cards with lions and lambs – and I’ve even sent a few. But when you look at these images without the blinders of sentimentality, they just don’t make sense. A wolf and a lamb – a lion and a calf – a baby and a venomous viper… The verses in Isaiah have these powerful and dangerous creatures dwelling with, nestled up to, the small and the vulnerable and the powerless, with no aggression from the bad guys and no fear from the innocents. Oh, please!! Maybe somewhere in natural history there has been one lion with messed-up DNA who would sit still at least for the duration of the photo op, but I doubt it.

These images of power and powerlessness existing as a Peaceable Kingdom, as this passage is often referred to in Biblical studies, are less disturbing but no easier to swallow than the light-bedecked tank on our bulletin cover. That photograph was taken last week at the Harleyville, South Carolina, Christmas parade by my brother-in-law, who is minister of the United Methodist Church in that town. He sent it to me that evening, with the words “… and the strange thing is, no one seemed to think it was strange.” My reaction was, and to some extent still is, revulsion – and it was in that spirit that I showed it around the next day, to gratifying reactions of horror. But I was taken aback when one person, known to me as an anti-war activist, glanced at it and said, “How beautiful.” I was convinced she hadn’t recognized what it was, and urged her to look again. She said, “Yes, I know what it is – and it’s horrifying at one level. But look at the terrible beauty of a huge lethal weapon transformed by lights that symbolize peace.” I’m not convinced; as Phil reminded me when I called him to ask for permission to use the photo today and told him of Heidi’s reaction, that hopeful interpretation was not what the guys on the tank or the crowd on the sidewalk had in mind. But it was a good reminder for me that we have the right to turn metaphors on their heads – and to believe in the possibility that we can do that with the reality behind them as well.

Perhaps one of the reasons that metaphors and images are so powerful is precisely because they are so often counter-intuitive. It isn’t rational to think that the powerful, the fanged, the armed, will set aside, even give away, those advantages in order to live justly and peacefully. But what if they did? What if military leaders called for a 1914-type Christmas truce, that then turned into a New Years truce, then a Passover truce, then an Easter truce, then a Ramadan truce, and on and on and on? What if all the soldiers in all the tanks in Iraq wrapped them in holiday lights, not in the Harleyville spirit, but in the spirit of the Kent State students who put flowers in the gun barrels of the National Guard? Not gonna happen – but why not? What is keeping us and all our peace-hungry allies around the world from demanding it?

Isaiah’s haunting picture of a peaceful realm reminds us that behind the big issues of war and peace lie equally huge and complex questions of the powerful and the powerless, the big and the small, the rich and the poor. I have used this story before in a sermon here, but I think it fits. While visiting my mother in Florida several years ago, I took her car to the mechanic for its scheduled servicing. It took a while, and I forgot to take a book. The dismal waiting area was short on reading material – an old issue of Field and Stream and a tattered copy of a Florida State Department of Transportation manual. The magazine contained nothing that appealed to me; in desperation I began leafing through the manual. A chapter on boating rules caught my eye. I’m not a boater, but hey – you never know when a little information will come in handy. I began reading about the rules regarding traffic on the open seas. My eyes widened as I read that if a large craft, called a “privileged vessel,” approaches a small craft, called a “burdened vessel,” it is required, and I quote, “for the privileged vessel to give way to the burdened vessel in order for all to reach safe harbor.” “Wow,” I thought, “If the state of Florida (of all places) knows that the privileged must give way to the burdened in order to assure the well-being of all, how come so many of us, even in the church, seem to have a problem with the concept?”

At Judson, many of us – maybe most of us – have long thought about and prayed and worked for justice and peace in many arenas. So it is natural that we tend, when we hear stories like these, to identify with the victims. But let’s be honest. Those of us who are U.S. citizens may need to recognize ourselves as tanks as much as lights. Those of us who are financially secure may need to acknowledge that we are privileged, not burdened, vessels. And those of us who are white may need to try to picture ourselves as wolves and lions and vipers rather than lambs and calves and babies. It’s not the whole picture, and maybe not even the primary one, but it is the side of the picture that we are least comfortable with, and therefore probably the one we need to confront and come to terms with. My friend Marie Fortune often paraphrases Jesus’ familiar words about truth. She says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you flinch before it sets you free.”

About ten years ago, the national United Methodist staff that I was a part of was immersed in issues of multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion – that hugely important, bedrock agenda that communities of faith, from large denominations to small churches like Judson, must constantly struggle with if we expect to work authentically on local and global concerns like peace, racial justice, workers’ rights, and environmental responsibility. We turned for assistance to Eric Law, a Chinese-American Episcopal priest and writer, who worked with us as consultant and trainer for about a year. The book that brought him to our attention is entitled The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb: a Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community. In it, he uses this same Isaiah passage as a framework for exploring why certain cultures – most notably whites of Northern European origin – tend, consciously or unconsciously, to dominate in multicultural situations, driving those of other races and ethnic groups to silent rage or outright rebellion. It’s a rich and insightful book, and I cannot do it justice here, but I do want to share a couple of his ideas that I think are instructive as we struggle at Judson to continue and deepen our heritage of speaking out and acting on behalf of peace and justice.

Too often, Eric Law says, we think of peace as the lack of conflict and the assurance of protection. Sounds good – but this definition of peace allows those already in charge to exercise power and control behavior. Fear of being excluded or devoured becomes the operating principle that maintains the so-called “peace.” Isaiah’s vision of the Peaceable Kingdom uses not fear but equal distribution of power and privilege as the operating principle. True peace cannot be attained without justice, without redistribution of power – whether we are talking globally about nations or locally about families and neighborhoods and churches.

Eric Law describes cultures as icebergs, with a tiny proportion of the whole visible. This exposed, external part, he says, is comprised of obvious things like foods and music, and even values that we have consciously adopted. But the larger part of the iceberg, hidden below the surface, is the internal culture that governs the way we think, perceive and, behave. This is the instinctual part of our culture and contains myths, beliefs, and thought patterns that are so deeply ingrained that we seldom recognize them; they are enormously difficult to change. Law calls it the “wolf and lamb” scenario. When wolves are only around other wolves and lambs are only around other lambs, things seem safe and sound (seem being the operative word here). In order for wolves and lambs to coexist and thrive together, some very difficult and seemingly unnatural behaviors are called for. “Perhaps,” Law says, “we have to go against the ‘instinct’ of our cultures in order for us to stop replaying the fierce-devouring-the-small scenario of so many intercultural encounters. Perhaps, when all of us have learned how to do that, we may be able to regain our innocence like a child playing over the snake’s hole and not being afraid anymore.” Much easier said than done, of course. But unless we find a starting place, in our world, in our nation, in our city, in this church, Isaiah’s puzzling but compelling image of peace will be forever out of our reach.

At heart, one of the things I think I am is a planner – careful planning is my operating principle. The year between Advent 2007 and Advent 2008 is critical. The opportunity is before us to change national leadership, to bring troops home, to deal with our uses of power, globally and locally – and I want to plan every single second of it. But it seldom works that way. I think of a quote I have heard in several versions, usually attributed to Pope John XXIII. It says, in effect, that no matter how sure we are that we have all the bases covered, we should “always keep open an east window of the soul for the dawning of God’s surprise.” In other words, we have to be prepared to shift tactics, to move to Plan B, to improvise. My friend Ann’s four-year-old grandson Tristan has already learned the art of improvisation. He and his mother were telling Ann about the new church they had begun to attend. Apparently it’s the custom at this small urban church to have all the children come forward at the close of the service and sing “Let There be Peace on Earth” as the benediction. The Sunday before, which was only their second Sunday there, Tristan had been urged to join the other children for the song. Upon hearing that, Ann turned to her grandson and said, “Tristan, I didn’t know you knew that song.” Tristan responded, “Oh, didn’t know the words. So I just sang ‘Frosty the Snowman.’”

Sometimes you just gotta wing it. I am so grateful that we have this place, this season, and each other as we pray for peace, work for peace, plan for peace, even wing it for peace. Amen.