August 27, 2006
Review of the Bob Dylan concert this past week. Reviewer of questionable fanhood...mentioned a long haired man dancing and holding a flower........takes me back......
Strong image for children of the sixties...........posters of police facing students who offer them flowers, or maybe even slip a daisy into the muzzle of of a national guardsman’s rifle.
For a brief time in our history the dream of peace....a kind of passionate hope for “peace in our time”--that was one of the catch phrases--surfaced in the culture and shaped the thinking of a generation. The peace movement of the sixties responded to a war whose purpose was unclear and whose casualties were all too well known. In that unprecedented age of freedom of thought and expression, young people around the world in a common voice asked a simple, and many would say simplistic question. They asked though with a simple, and sometimes even innocent passion that had an impact on the times. Can’t we just stop the fighting? Can’t we all just decide to choose peace? I still hear that voice speaking from time to time, but not with the anything like the simple, idealistic passions with which it rose in the sixties. So hearing about some guy dancing with a flower at a Bob Dylan concert kinda made me smile...I felt a pang for that decade when the music was great and the dream of peace was easy.
About the same time that the peace movement was cresting, a whole lot of folks rediscovered Jesus and began to look at him with new eyes. If peace is the goal and if we are called to embrace peace and turn away from battle, then surely this prince of peace is worth a look. Many people who got excited about Jesus in the late sixties and early seventies saw Christianity as the next step in the quest for peace. One of the problems with the peace movement was that it was hard to find a place to commit your life to the ideal. The peace community seemed at times a fleeting reality. Support for causes came and went, but Christianity had been around for a long time. Many of those who wanted to commit their lives to something better--to the cause of peace and more--found a home in the Church.
I mention all of this as preface to talking about what the writer of the letter to the Ephesians has to say this morning. It is still hard at times for this preacher to know what to make of words about Christians dressing themselves up like warriors to go out and do battle for the Lord.
It isn’t that I think battles are always unnecessary, or that I think all war is wrong.....I don’t. It is just that I came into the church through the door of wanting Jesus to be about peace, so I find some the language to be a bit confusing.
I have a friend, a priest of the same ilk, who was the associate at the church where I worked in Memphis. Virginia used to go off about all those awful “military hymns” we have in the hymnal, “Onward Christian soldiers”, “”Stand up stand up for Jesus”and the like. On Wednesday evenings, we had a Eucharist and a dinner, and when it was Virginia’s turn to preach and celebrate, I would bring my guitar and play a couple hymns. I wasn’t crazy about renewal music, so I worked out of the hymnal, and I just called the hymns when it was time to sing them. Once in a while, I would slip in one of the fighting hymns because it just seemed to fit the text so well, and of course, I had the fun of watching Virginia have to sing them. We were great friends.....
Of course, it isn’t just sixties-peace folks who have trouble with all the military metaphors used by first centuries preachers and writers to talk about the Christian life. Those metaphors have helped the faithful commit all sorts of atrocities down through the ages.
I met a woman from New Zealand once who when she found out I was an Episcopal priest said, “O yes, you’re an anglican. They are the ones who came to my country and killed the indigenous people who wouldn’t take on their religion”. Christianity’s history is full of stories like that, stories of times when Christians seemed intent on waging war on anyone who didn’t fall into line, who didn’t acknowledge the king--and now I’m not talking about God.
Christians have too often considered themselves at war with any other way of understanding God. Still, as hard as this language from Ephesians maybe for some, the truth is Christians are involved in a struggle. We’d better be involved in lots of struggles. Our writer today calls them cosmic struggles, and he also reminds us that the battlefields of our struggles extend not only into world around us but into our very hearts.
The writer of the letter to the Ephesians is clear that being involved in the struggle for peace means beginning with ourselves. Truth, righteousness, the mind of God.....these must begin in each of us if we are to make any dent against the spiritual forces working against the dream of God. The spiritual forces that work against God, forces like greed and apathy, resentment and hatred affect not just this group or that, but all of humanity. In order to take on such forces, we must immerse ourselves in God, clothe ourselves, pray, examine our own lives....put on the breastplate of righteousness says our writer. The Christians in Ephasis are told that being a Christian means doing the personal work necessary before taking on the powers of darkness.
Of course, people who take on causes, who become passionately committed to a vision of peace somewhere out there...(or somewhere in here)..can run into opposition from not just cosmic forces, but from their neighbors as well. The guy dancing with the flower in Frederick last week may have bee a remnant of what they used to call the counterculture. People who drew fire from the press and the powers that be for critiquing, and challenging, and trying to live at odds with many of the everyday practices of their times. Early in our history, all Christians were considered countercultural. That is something Christians forget from time to time. If you are going to follow Jesus, you might want to dress....to prepare yourself to receive flack from the people around you.
One of the things that happened to that sixties dream of m-1s sprouting daisies was that too many people in the peace movement thought reason and insight would be enough to bring people around. Speak the new truth and we can change the world. There is more to it than that. Those sentiments, that kind of passion, the less-jaded voice of the new generation will always be important. But that kind of raw belief in the basic goodness of humanity is hard to maintain in the face of what we see happening around us in the world each day. It is difficult to hold out that kind of hope for the human race without a strong ally at our side. Maybe that’s why the peace movement and the Jesus movement came together for so many people in the sixties and seventies..... in those heart-strong days when a tie-dyed tee shirt and a peace sign seemed like all the armor anyone would ever need.
Being a Christian does mean being deeply committed to a cause.....a cause with many fronts. Our cause, says the writer, is nothing less than proclaiming the gospel of peace.
Amen. JMB