Two Voices, One Kiss

 Texts:  Psalm 85: 8-11; Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

At least two voices are crying out from holy scripture this evening.  From the Gospel of Mark booms the voice of John the baptizer, that roughneck prophet shouting “repent” across the wilderness.  John’s righteous voice is so irritating it will cost him his head, which will be severed just about at his voice box, at King Herod’s command.  Yet John’s voice still resounds today.

 

In contrast, the Old Testament today transmits the voice of Isaiah, that Hebrew prophet whose heart is breaking for his deported people, exiled during the Babylonian conquest of 587 BCE. Isaiah’s tender voice is so affecting that all four Gospels will quote his poetry half a millennium later. 

I’m glad the lectionary offers a harmonious duet today. This Advent song, after all, is one part peace and one part justice—or as the Bible’s songbook, the Psalms, puts it:  “Righteous and peace kiss each other.” Righteousness (justice) and peace belong together.  In our personal and communal relationships we must speak for justice while speaking with kindness.  We work for the right—while being in right relationship.  We need to hear both Prophet Isaiah’s consolation and Prophet John’s challenge—if we are to experience personal peace and political peace.

This is the Sunday in Advent in which we annually pray for peace.  Though it may be wishful thinking, faint signs of peace brighten the horizon.  After all, this is the year and this is the month in which the remaining 39,000 US troops in Iraq will withdraw from that conflict and return home—so it has been promised.  Ironically, it was ancient Iraq—then known as Babylon—that had attacked Isaiah’s people and forced many into captivity.  Our reading today from Isaiah 40 was composed after the exiled Jews were at last permitted to return to their homeland.  To a defeated and demoralized people, Isaiah’s God urges the prophet to speak comfort.  “Comfort, comfort my people. . . Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” says the God of Compassion.  This is not the wrathful God some expect to find in the Old Testament. Isaiah’s God is a shepherd who gathers lambs in his arm and carries them against his bosom. 

John the Baptist, in contrast, spoke for a God who asked people to take a hard look at their individual and collective lives and turn away from all that would harm themselves and others.  Sometimes we need the God who comforts with his arms; sometimes we need a God who confronts us with the truth about our world and ourselves.  The Bible can comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable, as someone once said.  So take your own spiritual temperature right now before deciding which piece of this sermon you need to take home with you.

For those needing consolation, drink in Isaiah’s poetry and dwell in that loving image.  Feel how deeply you are loved, nestled safely against the shepherd’s breast.  Believe how precious you are.  God’s tone of voice is, for you who are hurting today, so very tender. 

That tender tone is one you and I may not only need to hear but to adopt.  After all, we can remain gentle with one another without sacrificing our convictions and rights.

A friend emailed me this past week after she felt “verbally assaulted” by a co-worker.  This friend described the hurtful exchange—and then asked me if she had responded rightly.  I sidestepped the role of judge.  She didn’t really want an objective evaluation.  Besides, even if I’d wanted to, I could not have judged her words because her email could not capture the tone she’d used with her colleague.  How we speak to one another is surely as important as any principle we’re upholding or any point we are making. That’s why our mothers used to tell us, “Watch your tone.”  

Tone is how you reveal your heart without intending to. Compassion is the tone we want to hear from God—but sometimes find it hard to extend to others.  If my friend has pressed me, I’d have said she responded rightly to her colleague if she found a place of compassion for him in her heart before she spoke.

For those who can handle a challenging tone today, ask the shepherd to put you back down on the grassy ground for some truth telling.  And get ready for a kick in the lamb shank.  Challenge is not devoid of compassion, but Advent reflection is not easy if you and I honestly examine our own inner lives and our outer world.  Isaiah and John call out in stereo across the centuries to us:  “Make way for your God.  Clear a path for God’s justice and peace.”  In response to this challenging tone, we ask ourselves:  “How do I prepare for God’s just and peaceful activity in my life?  What do I need to remove from the path I’m taking in order for God’s ways to emerge in and through my life?  What am I doing to obstruct God’s appearance?” 

John the Baptist uses that uncomfortable old word “repent.”  Now don’t be alarmed: it simply means to turn around.  To stop doing what is defeating you and try a new way.  We do the same thing over and over until it seems our habits of thought and action are the only possibilities and the rut is so deep in our lives we think we can’t climb out. But to prepare for the emergence of God in our lives, we have to clear the path and make way for something new.

What’s true for our individual lives is true for our common life together.  The very topography of our society can be altered!  Listen to the metaphors of the poet/prophet Isaiah.  We are called to level the uneven places in our world.  The powerful mountains can be made low and the valleys exalted.  Cut those mountains down to size.  Lift up the little valley.  God’s peace can reign in our world, the Spirit of Comfort can blow through our land, when there is genuine equality and justice.  We don’t need to turn the mountains into valleys.  The mighty do not need to lose all power—but the powerless need to be empowered.  Then “the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain” (Isaiah 40:4b).  That is a picture of a just world.

Ironically, during this season when we pray for peace on earth, we can bring out our most belligerent tones.  You may have already received some forwarded emails and Facebook postings renewing the annual debate over whether or not we should greet strangers with the phrase “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.” People are sniping at each other in cyberspace:

         “Merry Christmas, all you heathens!” 

         “Happy Holidays, you crazy religious freaks!”

It’s not that the topic isn’t a fair one for discussion: in fact, it’s the topic of our next Open Table Discussion at Satori Coffee house.  It’s just that the emails I’m receiving are not discussing the topic; they are raging about it. 

Of course, we will not, on the night of our next Open Table Discussion, use tones that are disrespectful or dismissive.  We’ll not take on tones that are smug, sarcastic, or self-righteous.  We will consider HOW to express our opinions—not apologetically but respectfully. And even if we think no one else in that friendly circle disagrees with a particular position, let’s not assume that. Let’s imagine in our midst a dear friend who holds the opposite point of view.  Let’s be clear and forthright and confident but humble.  I say this not because we’ve ever used inappropriate tones in our Open Table Discussion series, but because I think it’s possible this seemingly minor issue will generate heat—and we want our words to produce light.  I say this because sometimes in our own discussions here among our church family, we make assumptions that we all share the same political views and social values.  That’s not true.  Thank God.  And we can’t welcome everyone to Open Table unless we make emotional space for all.  I don’t intend to hold back my passion, but I will try to consider how my tone might be heard by someone else.  That's hard to do.

One of the chief beauties of being in a community of faith is that we come to realize that the tone of comfort and the tone of challenge are not mutually exclusive.  We can speak our truth in love.  We can have healthy conflicts.  We can disagree without being disagreeable.  Those clichés really can be true for us.

And when we fail one another we can, to use John the Baptist’s word, “repent.”  We can repent of using an unloving tone, or being too sensitive, or retreating from conflict instead of engaging it in healthy ways. 

Repentance, as one author defines it, is owning responsibility for our part in unsatisfactory behavior and choosing, for instance, to relate to a person in a gentler way in the future.  “Repentance is . . . not a matter of punishing ourselves for past mistakes, hating ourselves for past failures, and depressing ourselves with feelings of worthlessness.  Repentance is becoming aware of where my responsibility begins and ends . . . and choosing to live in new ways that will not repeat old unsatisfactory situations. . . . The capacity to repent determines our capability to love and forgive and our ability to receive love and accept forgiveness.  It is the growing person who can honestly say, ‘I have done wrong. I own it.  I am choosing to end that way of behaving.  I am choosing to live in a new way.  I choose to live in open, honest vulnerability before both God and community and in responsibility to God and community’” (101-104).[i]  In Christian community we can speak with both compassion and challenge.

The two voices of Isaiah and John introduced this sermon.  The two voices of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks will close it.  Maybe you remember this scene in the movie You’ve Got Mail. Meg Ryan plays a usually gentle soul who envies the Tom Hanks character for his sharp comebacks that he later regrets saying.  This is part of an email conversation between them before they know one another’s true identity:

Tom Hanks: “Do you ever feel you've become the worst version of yourself? That a Pandora's box of all the secret, hateful parts - your arrogance, your spite, your condescension - has sprung open? Someone upsets you and instead of smiling and moving on, you zing them? "Hello, it's Mr Nasty." I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Meg Ryan: “ No, I know what you mean, and I'm completely jealous. What happens to me when I'm provoked is that I get tongue-tied and my mind goes blank. Then, then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said. What should I have said, for example, to a bottom dweller who recently belittled my existence? [She pauses.] Nothing. Even now, days later, I can't figure it out.

Tom Hanks: Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could pass all my zingers to you? And then I would never behave badly and you could behave badly all the time, and we'd both be happy. But then, on the other hand, I must warn you that when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say at the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows.”

In true Hollywood fashion, the movie ends as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan kiss in a garden.  Confrontation and Compassion kiss each other?  The kiss of peace? A peace based on the ability to confront with compassion?

What if the Jesus way of responding to minor personal slights and monumental injustice requires neither our timid silence nor our angry outbursts?  What if we can bring our concern for goals and concern for relationships together?  What if we can learn to speak truthfully and lovingly?   What if Isaiah’s vision of peace comes to pass as we turn our clever email quips into honest, extended, healing conversation? As we exchange our rehearsals of debate points for open, gentle listening? 

I do not mean we should forsake courageous convictions for compromises, or our prophetic outrage at injustice for acquiescence.  We should not naively assume no one means us harm.  Nor should we put our emotional health at risk by absorbing belligerence.  I mean that I cannot wage peace if I have enmity in my heart.  I mean that I cannot expect someone to hear me unless I am willing to listen to him or her.  I do get angry and afraid for the world when some people talk might-makes-right politics with chests puffed out and arms flexed—but I am even more afraid of the person I will become if I respond in kind.  We live in a world, a nation, families—in which political, cultural, and theological fissures are deepening.  We struggle to find ways to see that across that widening gulf there are people who are our brothers and sisters.    I must give up my fantasy of victory over another and seek instead a vision of peace with my brother or sister.  Maybe when we repent and resolve to do that together, we collectively, dear church, become the next voice crying in the wilderness—and we clear the path for the Spirit of Peace.

---

[i][i] Augsburger, David.  Caring Enough to Confront.  Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1973.