The Poverty of Peace

Sermon

Three weeks ago, after some very broad hints that I really like Peacemaking Sunday (aka World Communion Sunday), I was invited to preach today. I chose 2 Timothy as my text, because it seemed like the cool kids this fall were preaching from the Timothys. Fast forward to Tuesday of this week and watch me hit the panic button. Tons of exegesis but nothing to say. When you’re married to another preacher, a preaching panic button is a valid topic of conversation often met with not only sympathy but maybe some resources as well. I told Scott I was most drawn to verses 5-7:

⁵I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. ⁶For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; ⁷for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

My favorite part, I told Scott, is the credit “Paul” gives Timothy’s mother and grandmother for nurturing his faith. I come from a long line of strong women—an Icelandic midwife, one named after an Egyptian goddess, another who helped start a construction business, and my own mother who overcame dyslexia to earn a master’s degree in education. But my personal admiration for these women isn’t really a sermon—their faith, energy, and grit notwithstanding.

What I did recall was that on the front hall desk in my grandmother’s house was a decorative wooden plaque with St Francis’ peace prayer. It’s his feast day tomorrow, by the way. As a little Baptist child, I knew nothing of St Francis, so I assumed it was my grandmother’s own prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…” You might remember that prayer, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith.” I suggest you ask Mr. Google for a copy of this prayer, which ends with the words, “For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Although I attempted that prayer in my childish way for myself, it didn’t occur to me that it might actually shape my life, so that one day the plaque would sit on my desk in the Franciscan Spiritual Center.

Nor did I suspect that the saint after whom my grandmother took her middle name—St. Clare of Assisi—would also influence me. In the years immediately following Francis’ death, Clare is the person primarily responsible for preserving his teachings since Francis himself was barely literate. Clare’s commitment to living a gospel life echoed Francis’ own. As with Francis, poverty was at the heart of gospel living for Clare. You may have read the recently published studies that show how homelessness isn’t about poverty but about wealth inequity. Clare would have understood that. Jesus would have made that into a parable, so again ask Mr. Google for the citations. For Clare and Francis, poverty isn’t about economics, it’s that “human life, from birth to death, hangs on the threads of God’s gracious love.” That understanding of poverty is the antidote to the human impulse to violence and domination—poverty for the sake of others. Clare taught that this kind of poverty—this gospel living—frees us from attachments. Very similar to what Buddhists teach about attachment, only Clare calls it the gospel.

This economy, this poverty, is how I see Peacemaking Sunday this year, through the lens of our Roman Catholic siblings who tell us we are smack dab in between two saint days—Francis of Assisi tomorrow, Therese of Lisieux yesterday. Therese lived a very short 19^th century life, expressing her almost-obsession with holiness in the most mundane, everyday, down-to-earth ways. I don’t know about you, but I would prefer my sainthood conferred for something more grandiose that being kind to people you don’t like and tolerating the annoying little habits of others, but those are the sorts of mundane things for which Therese is revered. Therese would never have rolled down her car window to say, “Nice turn signal, bub!” instead of offering up to God a prayer for her own patience. I would prefer a bigger-than-life holiness like that of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, who donated his company to combat climate change and advance conservation. “Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” he said. I’d like to be holy like that. Or like Bob Moore who gave his Red Mill enterprise to his employees. Either of those things would be the sort of “embrace of poverty” I can wrap my arms around. As soon as I get that kind of resources to give away.

This is the kind of concern that prompts our asking in spiritual direction, “Who are you, God?” and “Who am I?” This fall, as we’ve explored the Timothys in worship, we’ve asked Frederick Buechner to weigh in with something pithy. Buechner had a very meme-able writing style, and the quotation I’ve been sharing lately with my directees is this, “Where your feet take you, that is who you are.” As if to say, where you go and what you do reveals you to yourself.

The following story is what I believe Buechner means by that. My husband, Scott, heard Harvard-trained child psychologist Robert Coles speak at the Schnitz in 1992. Coles was telling stories from his own life and spoke of being part of what he called “the doctor draft” in 1960. He worked with children in iron lungs, with leukemia, kids in all sorts of trouble. One day, Coles received a call to meet with a six-year-old girl, the first Black student to attend an all-white school in Mississippi after the desegregation orders came through. This child had to walk a gauntlet of 700-800 jeering white adults every day just to learn to read. Ruby Bridges was her name. Every morning, Ruby was accompanied by soldiers who protected her from the rocks and death threats hurled at her. Several afternoons a week Robert Coles met with Ruby and her parents after her terrible walk. He said he was struck by this first-grader’s moral courage, how every day the mob would gather to taunt her, and every day she returned to learn.

One day, Dr. Coles got word from Ruby’s teacher that there had been an incident outside the school. She said that Ruby talked to the mob, which got very excited, so that the marshals had drawn their guns and forced Ruby inside. When Dr. Coles met with Ruby that afternoon, he asked what had happened. Ruby said nothing had happened, but as the befuddled Coles questioned her about the teacher’s account, Ruby admitted that she’d been talking that morning but not to the demonstrators. She’d been talking to God, as she often did. When Coles asked what she was talking to God about that morning, Ruby replied that she was praying for the mob. Why? She said she thought they needed to be prayed for. “Why should you be the one to pray for them?” Coles asked. “Because I’m the one who hears what they say,” she said. What she prayed for them, she said, was “always the same thing. I say, ‘God, please forgive these people because they don’t know what they’re doing.’” The prayer Jesus prayed on the cross. Ruby said her mother and her grandmother had taught that prayer to her, that it was the prayer her church prayed for the mob every week. Ruby Bridges could make that daily walk to learning because she was embedded in a church community. And they taught her how to pray.

Scott said when Coles finished talking about Jesus and Ruby, Coles said simply, “I don’t know what we can do to be worthy of that, but I think we ought to try.” Not many of us are called to the moral courage of Ruby Bridges. But we are all called to peacemaking in the spirit of St Francis’ prayer to “make me an instrument of your peace.” It’s to a mundane peacemaking, like that of Therese of Lisieux. Kindness to those community members who are not particularly easy to love. Tolerance for the annoying little habits of our colleagues and family. Patience with members of older generations who still pay for groceries with cash, and who don’t know how to register online or access their security codes. Forgiveness toward people whose opinions we find anathema. That type of peacemaking. The kind of peacemaking that “sows love instead of hatred, offers pardon instead of injury.” Because, “Where your feet take you, that is who you are.”

In a few minutes, our feet will take us to this table. We will again learn that “who we are” is beloved guests, nourished in bread and cup, sent out as instruments of peace, because we’ve been given all the courage we need.