An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Peace and Justice Kiss

A sermon on Psalm 85:10-11 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the painful struggles in life for many of us is always seeming to have to sacrifice one good for another. It is not that we are necessarily greedy and unrealistically wanting it all, its just that often it seems that we have to compromise our ideals and settle for things that are not as good as they should be. We want a world of peace and an end to militarisation, but there are terrorists burning hotels in Mumbai and pirates attacking ships off Somalia and there seems no way to reconcile our desire for peace with our need for justice and security. We want to find a pathway of forgiveness and reconciliation every time there is a hurt, but sometimes there is no willingness to change and someone has to be shut out in order to protect the vulnerable. We want to keep the fires of passion glowing in faithful exclusive marriages, but sometimes it seems like the promiscuous and the adulterous are having all the fun and monogamy is feeling all a bit ho-hum.

There is a promise of hope about all this in the psalm Jenny led us in earlier. I don’t very often preach from the text of the Psalms. I have nothing against them, I just don’t often do it. In our worship they are used more to give voice to our response to God rather than as the vehicle of God’s word to us, and that probably means that by default I steer more towards the other readings for preaching material. But today I want to pick up an image from our psalm, because it contains a promise of hope and one of my favourite image in all the Psalms:

Love and fidelity embrace,
peace and justice kiss.
Fidelity sprouts from the earth,
justice leans down from heaven.

Can you hear that? Love and fidelity embrace, peace and justice kiss. The things we so often seem to have to set up against each other and choose between are to be reconciled. They will embrace. They will kiss. They will be as one, and the painful compromises where we have to choose one over the other will be no more, for to choose one will be to choose both and to realise both.

This is what this season of Advent is about: anticipating the coming of the Lord, the coming of the kingdom, the coming of the day when love and fidelity embrace, peace and justice kiss, and all will be fulfilled. This is the time when we stand on tippy toes and crane our necks to peer over the horizon and catch a glimpse of the glorious day of the Lord coming towards us. But we don’t do this as some sort of escapism. It is not just a wistful dreaming of pie in the sky when we die to take the edge off the gnawing hunger of the here and now and get us through. Such escapist spiritualities have always existed, and they are always promoted by those who profit from the status quo because if they can get all expectations of justice deferred to some unspecified future, then they can continue their exploitative profiteering unhindered. The gospel that John heralded and Jesus proclaimed and we are baptised into does not give credence or comfort to such vested interests.

Rather, we take this time each year to focus our attention on the promised future of God so that we might let its call ring out loudly among us and shape the way we live in the here and now. We immerse ourselves in the vision again and again so that we might anticipate it more and more fully in our present day to day lives, leaning into it, living into it, willing it into existence by our embrace of its realities here and now. I don’t mean that we can make it come by our own efforts. God and God alone will bring it forth and bring it to completion, but we are part of the means that God uses to hasten the day when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, so for the coming of that day on this, we continue to work and pray.

And so John comes, as the voice crying in the wilderness foretold by the prophet Isaiah, calling us to repentance that we might prepare the way of the Lord and make straight the path. And as the gospel reading reminded us, he proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and the people came to him confessing their sins. But what we are talking about there is not little lists of offences: I thought a bad thought yesterday; I talked rudely to the silly lady in the shop; I ate too much chocolate. What we are talking about is repentance. The Greek word means literally a “change of thinking” or a “U-turn of the mind”. It is a letting go of the tired old ways of the status quo and an embrace of the ways of the coming kingdom, an intentional commitment to beginning to live them out now.

Isaiah elaborates on the image of making a straight road by saying, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” This is not to be literalised into some image of environmental devastation. Rather it is another metaphor like the one from our psalm: “love and fidelity embrace, peace and justice kiss.” No longer will we ride the moral roller coaster of unreconcileable ideals. No longer will we veer violently between the highs and lows of seeking peace and seeking justice, seeking forgiveness and seeking safety, seeking passion and seeking faithfulness. The low places will be raised up and the high places will be levelled, the extremes will be reconciled, and all will be one, and one good will not compromise or cancel out another.

We can’t entirely reconcile these things yet, and yet many times our failure to get closer is a failure of imagination or courage rather than proof of an impossibility. And so we are called to continue the quest, to take every step we can into the fullness of the vision. And when we are left still with painful and frustrating compromises, our Advent vision calls us not to despair or to give up, but to lament and to pray. Our heartfelt lament over the unreachableness of true justice and mercy and peace and love is itself the prophetic witness of a people who know that it can and will be otherwise. It is part of our identification of ourselves with the one who will bring all things together so that all might be one. It is a loud refusal to be beaten, to be resigned to the way things are.

So in the face of all that is crass and trivial and exploitative and loveless this Advent season, let us continue to work and pray for the day when love and fidelity embrace, peace and justice kiss, to the glory of God and for the salvation of all. Amen!

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