Several weeks ago, the Abundant Lifers, the Senior Adults of Royal Lane, and I met at the new Holocaust and Human Rights Museum downtown. As we slowly moved our way through the somber and horrific exhibits, we saw a map on the floor depicting Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, Spain, the UK and surrounding areas. Mike Jones told me of his time serving as a missionary in France and how you could still go out into the woods and find bits of the war left behind: rusty spoons, bullet casings, and sometimes even live grenades. It was a heavy and powerful and meaningful visit. Our time in the museum reminded me of a story I recently read.
During the Second World War, German paratroopers invaded the island of Crete. When they landed at Maleme, the islanders met them, bearing their crude weapons: kitchen knives and hay scythes. The consequences of resistance were devastating. The residents of entire villages were killed and captured.
Overlooking the airstrip there today is an institute for peace and understanding founded by a Greek man named Alexander Papaderos. Papaderos was just six-years-old when the war started. His home village of Lividas was destroyed and he was imprisoned in a concentration camp. When the war ended, he became convinced his people needed to let go of the hatred the war had unleashed. And to help the process, he founded an institute of peace and reconciliation at this place that embodied the atrocities of war.
One day, while taking questions at the end of a lecture, Papaderos was asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” There was nervous laughter in the room. It was such a weighty question. But Papaderos answered it. He opened his wallet, took out a small, round mirror and held it up for everyone to see. During the war he was just a small boy when he came across a motorcycle wreck. The motorcycle had belonged to German soldiers. Alexander saw pieces of broken mirrors from the motorcycle lying on the ground. He tried to put them together but couldn’t, so he took the largest piece and scratched it against a stone until its edges were smooth and it was round. He used it as a toy, fascinated by the way he could use it to shine light into holes and crevices.
He kept that mirror with him as he grew up, and over time it came to symbolize something very important. It became a metaphor for what he might do with his life.
Papaderos said, “I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world – into the [dark] places in the hearts of men – and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.”[1]
In this season of Advent, we have focused our lives and our hearts onto the work of Christmas. And today we are given the huge task of seeing how we can be mirrors of Christmas, the fragmented and shattered selves that we are, embodying the good news and reflecting the Christmas story. We have done the hard work of Christmas this Advent season because God beckons us to reveal Jesus, not just at Christmas time, but at all times and in every way. We have done the hard work of Christmas by focusing on Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman’s poem, “The Work of Christmas.” Today we focus on the second to last section of the poem which calls us to mirror Jesus in our lives by helping to build this nation into a presence of goodwill in the world and to find ways to bring peace to all people.
Dr. Thurman, in his widely-known work, Jesus and the Disinherited, helps the reader understand what has to occur for the nations to be rebuilt and for peace to happen for all people. He begins his book with a statement that has been echoed by black and liberation theologians, as well as used by civil rights and activist organizations. Thurman said, “The significance of the religion of Jesus to people who stand with their backs against the wall has always seemed to me to be crucial. It is one emphasis which has been lacking – except where it has been a part of a very unfortunate corruption of the missionary impulse, which is, in a sense, the very heartbeat of the Christian religion… Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin?” Thurman posits a very good question. What good is Christianity to those with their backs against the wall? How can Christmas be a time of peace if people are pinned down by the oppressive structures of the day? How can Christmas be a time of reorienting our world to the way of peace if people have their backs up against the wall?
Our multi-racial and multi-faith partner, Faith in Texas, uses some of this terminology and ideas in order to help city leaders understand the hurt, pain, and fear felt by oppressed peoples. Sandy Washington and I went to a Faith in Texas meeting recently where we were visioning with leadership, clergy, and staff in Dallas about how to bring meaningful and faithful change to our communities, rebuild Dallas and bring peace. The staff invited us to play an icebreaker-type game before we invested our energy and spirit into deep discussion about changing the systemic places of oppression and power in our communities.
The icebreaker leader, the Rev. Stacey Brown, asked all the participants to gather at the side of the room and stand in a group behind a rope lying on the floor. As we stood behind this line, Rev. Brown began asking questions that would cause us to move backwards. For instance, she asked us, “If you only have $300 in your bank account please take one step back. If you work 60 hours a week but still cannot pay your mortgage, please take another step back. If you have tried to use a voucher for housing and that voucher was not taken, take a step back. If you had to get a payday loan in order to pay medical bills and now you are swimming in debt, take another step back. If you, at one time or another, went to get a marriage license but were told that you couldn’t be married because of your sexuality, please take a step back. If you have been waiting to become a naturalized citizen but the line is 20 years long, take a step back.” These were questions asked of all of us attending this meeting, black, white, brown, English-speaking and Spanish-speaking, gay and straight and queer, Christian, Muslim and Jew, poor and rich… all of us. It was meant to show us how oppression worked, regardless of our background.
But what made this icebreaker different is that with every question asked, the staff members picked up the rope and moved it backwards too. It didn’t matter who was behind that rope, all of us were forced to take a step back, to keep getting shoved and pushed up against the wall of the room. And as we continued to take steps backwards and as the rope continued to push up against us, all of us ended up with our backs against the wall, literally. It was constricting and frustrating. I felt as if it was impossible for us to move forward, to find peace, to have a sense of freedom. At that moment, we were a people who had our backs against the wall, just as Thurman said.
And Thurman, describing those with their backs against the wall, said that they are tempted to give in to fear and hopelessness. When backs are against the wall it is impossible to rebuild anything or bring peace to anything. That is why Thurman argues that the work of Christmas is all year long, striving to make sure that peace and justice swell in our hearts and flow through our lives each and every day. In fact, Thurman argues that to do the work of Christmas is to identify with those who have their backs against the wall because, he says, Jesus of Nazareth lived in that same kind of situation.
One Christian ethicist writes, “Jesus’ commendation of truth and love, says Thurman, came out of his own identification with those who suffer. Jesus was not removed from the scene of violence, but he nevertheless taught that the hatred of the bigot is not to be returned with hatred and that the lies of the powerful are not to be met with further deceptions. It is those who have their backs against the wall – those with whom Jesus has identified – who can show the world the way out of violence.” Did you hear that? Those who are oppressed and those not living in peace, those with their backs against the wall, are the ones who will, indeed, show US the way. They will show us the way to peace and to build a nation of fairness, love, equality, and nonviolence. That is the way of Jesus and that is the work of Christmas.
As a mystic, Thurman believed that before any meaningful change could happen to reshape the nation and to bring peace to the world, that people of faith had to be transformed, they had to pray. They had to pray that the places inside them would encounter God, the beauty of a loving God, and that encounter would drive out the self-righteous and egoistic self. Thurman said, “The ego is thereby displaced from its throne, replaced by the desire for union with the beauty of God. Our false selves are undone, and we realize the dignity of every person.” Thurman didn’t just want to change political and societal systems. Thurman wanted to change hearts and transform souls. And that, too, is the work of Christmas. The work of Christmas is to bring peace not only to the world but to bring peace to our disturbed souls. Because if we encounter the presence of God and the realm of Christmas through the Christ Child, we have indeed rebuilt the nations and brought peace to all people.
Myles Werntz, Professor of Ethics and Theology at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, sheds light on this prayerful form of peace in the civil rights movement. He talks about how interracial groups of students introduced a new form of protest in 1964 when they started kneeling in prayer in front of the Presbyterian church in Memphis to protest those churches’ segregationist policies. This public liturgical action – the kneeling posture of prayer – constituted an ecumenical demonstration of divine judgment on unjust social structures. According to Werntz, “performing this liturgical act in a public setting was a way of expressing the universality of God.”
Werntz also noticed that this prayerful act of protest happened last year in Pittsburgh in the wake of the shootings at the Tree of Life Congregation. “Among the groups gathered to mourn the deaths and speak out against anti-Semitism was the Jewish advocacy organization IfNotNow. The organization offered people the opportunity to sit shiva – to mourn for those murdered at the synagogue and for other victims of white nationalism. Shiva is a period of mourning in the Jewish faith, and a family typically sits shiva at home for several days to grieve for a relative after he or she has died. Singing the mourner’s Kaddish and praying “Blessed is the Lord, Master of the universe, the True Judge,” the crowd – comprised of Jews and non-Jews – offered their public prayers as a condemnation of the violence that had taken place.” This was activism and change in the form of prayer.
And these prayers could not have happened unless people, who had their backs against the wall, encountered a God of freedom and knew that the slow work of peace had already come through a baby born in a manger. This baby in a manger changed the world. This baby in a manger sparked a light in the darkness that would spread to each of our hearts. And once we have the light in our hearts, we are to join with Jesus, with the oppressed, with all who have their backs against the wall, and be changed, be transformed ourselves. We must feel the coming of peace into Bethlehem deep down in our bones, deep down in our spirits and know that God is indeed using us, each one of us, to bring about a better and more equal world, a loving and freer world, a compassionate and caring world. Friends, THAT is the work of Christmas.
The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III has lectured, preached, and spoken about a marvelous story called “Punching Holes in the Darkness.” He told about a man named Samuel Billy Kyles from Memphis TN. He was a longtime civil rights activist and was present when Dr. King assassinated. Moss remembers Kyles telling this story:
A young boy was staring out in the darkness and his father said to him, “Son, you need to go to bed.” But the boy said, “Daddy, I can’t go to bed right now. I can’t stop looking at what this man is doing. He is punching holes in the darkness.” The father came into the room and said to the young man, “You need to go to sleep, but what are you looking at out this window.” And the father realized what the son was witnessing. There was a man in the distance who was lighting street lamps that lit up the dark city. And to the boy, it looked as if he was punching holes in the darkness. You see, lamplighters don’t simply light the path for their own sake, but for the sake of all people, for the sake of others.
And it might seem dark right now. But don’t curse the darkness. We need to light the lamps that are in our spirits. We can punch holes in the darkness. We can transform this world; we can rebuild the nations; we can bring peace to all people; if we recognize the power that God has given us. It is a dark day in this nation and in this world. But the question this morning is: Will we close our eyes to those whose backs are against the wall? Will we cover up the light of Christmas shining in our souls? Or will we use the spirit of good news that we have inside of us to punch holes in the darkness?
[1] Robert Fulgham, It Was On Fire When I Laid Down On It.