Go Out into The World in Peace
Written by Gary E. Smith Saturday, 19 November 2005 19:00
I spent part of the month of August reading through old sermons of mine, pulling out readings I liked once, wondering aloud about what I possibly could have been thinking when I wrote this sermon or that, so weeding out sermons and remembering some lines out of the novel GILEAD by Marilynne Robinson, in which the preacher John Ames knows that there are hundreds of sermons in boxes in his attic, and who will remember but a phrase out of any of them. “My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock,” he writes, “whom I chose not to disillusion… I think every day about going through those old sermons of mine to see if there are one or two I might want… to read sometime, but there are so many, and I’m afraid, first of all, that most of them might seem foolish… It’s humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then have to find a way to dispose of it. There is not a word in any of those sermons I didn’t mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through fifty years of my innermost life.”
Before discarding the sermons, I did save a few of the stories I used, throwing into this folder ones I thought might get me started on this sermon today. I liked the week I preached on John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn that has the line, “the still, small voice of calm,” and our sound system was not working at all that week, and there was nothing still or small or calm about me in the hour between the two services when I had Doug and Margaret in my office downstairs, raving about why I bothered to write a sermon at all if it cannot be heard. Doug brought me the next morning a large, beautifully framed sketch of a monk, a monk screaming, and he told me that my face the day before had looked just like that. This monk hangs in my office at home, a reminder each day that I can choose instead to “go out into the world in peace.”
One more. I found a small notice in an order of service in which it was announced that “the Holiday Stress Group for Tuesday, November 30, has been cancelled,” cancelled that year due to former minister Beth Graham’s holiday stress. “Go out into the world in peace,” we say each week, the first line of our Benediction. And please notice how the phrases of our benediction are arranged. The first three are intended for our own selves, our own spirit, as in the Quaker greeting, “how is thy Spirit today?” “Go out into the world in peace. Have courage. Hold on to what is good.” These invitations, these admonitions, are about our own state of being, and, I would maintain, make the other instructions in the benediction possible. If I can go out into the world this morning in some state of peace, I might be able to help the suffering. If I can find courage somewhere within me today, I might be able to strengthen the fainthearted. If I can be reminded one more time to hold on to what is good, I might also remember to “return to no person evil for evil.”
In this series of sermons this fall on the benediction, we have come today to the first phrase, this “go[ing] out into the world in peace,” and I know when we say it, it can have many different meanings. It could mean simply go out and ACT peacefully, turn the other cheek, live a life of peace, make peace, out there in the world. Or it could mean what I intent it to mean today, namely go in peace, be at peace your self, be at peace WITHIN your self. What does it mean to be at peace, and how do we get there?
Here’s another story I found in my trip down memory lane through old sermons. I found the time during my first sabbatical leave in the spring of 1993, when I attended a weeklong workshop on clergy self-care, in the beautiful suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. There were thirty ministers there, of all ages, of all denominations, in varying degrees of stress and or burnout. One exercise we did the first afternoon was an adaptation of the Holmes Wetherbee Scale, a measurement of life changes and stresses that arbitrarily assigns points to events in your life that have occurred in the past six months: Death of Spouse – 100 points; Divorce – 75 points; Personal Injury or Illness – 55 points; Geographical Relocation – 45 points; and so on, listing dozens of life changes, big and small, from the loss of a job to spending the holidays with your family [12 points].
We self-assigned these points silently, totaled them, and then the workshop leader told us that the designers of this test were convinced that any total over 300 signaled a likelihood that we would soon be seeking out some therapeutic help to deal with it all. Because of this kind of change and stress, he said, these are the ones in our culture most prone to injury or illness. So, all those with 0-100 points, he said, please raise your hands; those with 100-200 points [the range in which I found myself that year, mellow enough], 200-300, and so on. At 500 points, he asked, not expecting an answer, anyone over 500? There were three. Two in the 500’s, over which we marveled, but still one young minister remained. “How many points,” he was asked. “740,” he responded, “but that’s not counting the house fire. I couldn’t find that on the scale.”
So, for a good part of our week together, we uptight ministers learned about self-care and meditation, yoga, chanting, how NOT to lose it when the sound system is not working. Chanting was not then and is not now in my arsenal of self-care methods. Closing my eyes and relaxing first one muscle and then another only makes me more tense. Listening to a recorded tape of running water, well, never mind. But, for that week, I tried it all. I knew my ministry with all of you needed something more. I needed to listen to the benediction I had taught you: “Go out into the world in peace.”
“Do you ever think there might be a fault line passing underneath your living room,” the poet asks, “an unseen seam of great plates that strain through time? And that your life, already spilling over the brim, could be invaded, sent off in a new direction, turned aside by forces you were warned about but not prepared for?” We are seldom aware of how precarious all of this is, and this poet’s language is as good as any, “a fault line passing underneath” us right now. Take a breath, and go out in peace. Have you ever had your “shelves spilled out, the level floor set at an angle in some seconds’ shaking”? Take a breath. Go in peace.
I know that many of you have done better than the rest of us with going and being in the world in a state of peace. You DO meditate. You practice yoga or tai’chi. You find a time for silence. You listen to the music here, and I see you close your eyes. Here in this room may be A or even THE moment of peace in your week. But if the dish fell from the counter this morning and broke, if your children were late and not wanting to be here at all, if the gas gauge on your car was beyond empty, if you fought with your spouse in the car turning onto Lexington Road, and with all these things you managed to run in here as the opening hymn ended, maybe, just maybe, the moment of peace is not coming as quickly as you’d like or thought it would, and so you could not possibly hear “the still, small voice of calm” if was sitting right next to you.
With this Sunday, we are staring right down the barrel of the holidays, six weeks from today is New Years Day, and, in between, we have many choices and many pressures and many opportunities for not-peace. There will be meals to prepare, parties to host and attend, gifts to purchase, cards to mail, marketing hype to endure, families to visit, trees to decorate, football games to watch, crowds to fight, traffic to navigate, feelings to soothe, expectations to fulfill, credit cards to melt down, deadlines to meet, tears to dry, carols to sing, candles to light, snow to shovel, presents to wrap, memories to deal with, slights to ignore, tears to shed, greetings to exchange. Thanksgiving, winter solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years Day.
Six weeks. It’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon. And one big chunk of these six weeks is what the Christian church calls Advent. Next Sunday, we will have here on this pulpit, not our chalice, but an Advent wreath. Four candles around the wreath, one for each Sunday leading to Christmas, and then, in the center on Christmas Eve, the Christmas candle itself. “Silent Night, Holy Night. Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Sleep in Heavenly Peace.” We light these candles, one at a time, spacing it out, growing the light, Advent from the Latin, meaning “coming,” a time in the Christian calendar from the sixth century, a time of waiting. The color on the altar is purple. The words of the Mass avoid celebration. Advent is a time of preparation.
Here on Thanksgiving Sunday, with forty-one days left in the year, I invite you into this season of peace, and I invite you to come into this season IN peace. Henri Nouwen said once that Advent is a time of emptying. Whatever our spiritual discipline, whatever we think about Christmas, whatever our needs are, whatever our condition is, whatever the points are for us on the Holmes-Wetherbee Scale, Nouwen says that all this clutter needs to be emptied, emptied to make room, remove all the other noises so that the “still, small voice of calm” can somehow be heard. Advent can be a time of emptying.
I meet the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday following Thanksgiving each year with a dozen other ministerial colleagues. We meet in Little Compton, Rhode Island, by the sea, and it so beautiful. It is as good a way as any for me to empty, to get my balance, to prepare for all the expectations of the holidays. Last year, our topic for reading and writing and discussion and worship was Advent itself, and one of my colleagues brought this poem, by Anne Weems:
Is it all sewn up – my life?
Is it at this point so predictable
So orderly, so neat, so arranged, so right,
That I don’t have time or space
For listening for the rustle of angels’ wings
Or running to stables to see a baby?
Could this be what he meant when he said
Listen, those who have ears to hear…
Look, those who have eyes to see?
O God, give me the humbleness of those shepherds
Who saw in the cold December darkness
The Coming of Light
The Advent of Love
“Go out into the world in peace,” we say to one another each week, which is such a blessing. Go out into the world, we say, let go of that worry, change those things we can, accept those things that cannot change, have the wisdom to know the difference. Put the burden down for a moment, put it down, put it down. Go in peace. “When the great plates slip,” writes Robbie Walsh, “and the earth shivers and the slaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most, look not to more solidity, to weighty slabs of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order.
“Trust more,” he says, “the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch to hold you in the web of life that’s often torn but always healing. There’s your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together.” Be at peace. Go in peace. Go out into the world in peace.