Lessons from a Farmer, A Pig, and an Abbot

The Bishop in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, shared a parable with me over lunch.

In great distress the farmer knocked incessantly on the door to the abbot’s cell. “Abbott, Abbott, you must help me,” he cried. “I’m at the end of my rope, I cannot take it anymore, I am thinking of suicide.”

            “What is the problem, my child?”, responded the abbot.

            “Our one-room farmhouse is just bedlam, what with my wife, her mother living with us, and the four screaming children. I will do anything if you can just solve my problem”, continued the anguished man.

            Calmly, and with the wisdom born of much study and prayer, the abbot answered, “Then go hence and buy a cow, a pig, and a rooster, and take them home to live with you, and come back in one week to see me.”

            “Are you crazy?”, the farmer shot back.

            “You said you would do anything . . . ,” the abbot serenely replied.

            The farmer did as he was told. On his return a week later he was greeted at the door of his cell by the abbot, who asked, “How are you, my son?”

            Furious, the farmer screamed at the abbot, “Horrible, just horrible! Your advice was no help at all. I did exactly as you said. The children are still screaming, my wife and her mother are still driving me nuts, and now there is the incredible noise and smell from all the animals as well.”

            His placid countenance undisturbed, the abbot replied, “Do as I say then. Go home, take the cow, the pig, and the rooster, and sell them, and then return to me in a week.”

            A week later the farmer returned, and again was greeted by the Abbot. “ How are you, my child?”

            A huge grin creased the farmer face as he replied, “Everything is just great! Now everything is so much quieter, cleaner, calmer, more spacious....”

            How often it is that we let our circumstances – or how we perceive them to be -- ruin our peace, and dictate our moods. If our plane departs on time, we are happy, but if it is delayed, we are in the dumps; if our favorite team wins the game, we are on cloud nine, but if it loses, we can’t get to sleep; if we have x dollars in the bank, we tell ourselves, then we will be secure, but if not, our future is uncertain. And on and on.

            Maybe we need to put on some new glasses. What if we saw the world, and everything in it, as made by a loving Creator, who is really in it right now, and who is at this very moment calling to us from the other side of every event and circumstance?

"And the peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Paul's Letter to the Philippians 4:7)

Billions and Billions of Stars...

            Teddy Roosevelt, our 26^th president, was said to have sought escape from the pressures of the position by getting out into the wilderness. One crystal clear, starry night, as the story goes, he chose to unroll his sleeping bag out in the open.  Far from civilization, far from any sort of industrial light pollution, the vast expanse of the heavens lay before him, stretching from horizon to horizon. After some time, and with a sigh, TR rolled over and said, “At last I feel small enough to go to sleep.” And he did.

            The other day I read about discoveries concerning the universe. Einstein originally believed that the universe was static – it was his biggest mistake, he later admitted. Physicists now tell us that the universe is expanding, and, what is even more remarkable, at ever increasing speeds. We tend to think of objects slowing down after they are launched – think, for example, of how a thrown baseball slows and eventually comes to a halt. But the universe is getting bigger faster and faster. So much so that if we lived long enough the night sky would be empty – the stars – those “billions and billions of stars”, as Carl Sagan famously put it -- would have sped away faster than the speed of light.

            Roosevelt found the humility that came with being reminded of his right size comforting.  In a time when he was the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, when so many depended on him, but also reminded him on a daily basis of his vast importance, being confronted with evidence of his comparative insignificance in the grand scheme of things grounded him and gave him peace.

            Perhaps a walk on a clear winter’s evening might do us all some good, as well.

     When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

       the moon and the stars that you have established;

     what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

       mortals that you care for them?  -- Psalm 8

           

“A Vision of Peace – or Just an Illusion?”

The political situation in Jerusalem some 700 years before the birth of Jesus is bleak. The Assyrians are at the gates, the invaders are ravaging the countryside. The economy is in ruins. Corruption in government is the rule of the day; judges are routinely swayed by bribes, leaders are blinded by partisan propaganda. In short, the dynasty of King David, the son of Jesse, once considered to be the carrier of God’s goodness and faithfulness in the world, is a mere stump compared to its glorious past; the family tree has been decimated by enemies foreign and domestic. Despair and resignation reign.

            Onto this scene strides a prophet, Isaiah by name, announcing that despite all appearances, God has new plans for Jerusalem and for the world….(Isaiah 11:1-11)

            I sometimes think that we like to believe that we are the first people to pick up the Bible, read passages like this one from Isaiah, and say, “What a crock.”

            That we are the first ones to say, “Who can believe any of this stuff about a day when the lamb will lie down with the lion, when the government will really be about serving the people, not feathering its own nest, when people will no longer make war upon each other, when all people will know not fear but security.

            Because we know, and people have always known, that this vision of Isaiah’s of the peaceable kingdom is not a vision, it is an illusion, that it is just not natural, that it is against the order of nature that we learned about in science class.

            Theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann echoes this almost universal inability to believe this sort of nonsense. He writes in his book, Peace, “Unheard of and unimaginable! All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal that they are not worth reflecting on.”

But then Brueggemann reconsiders.  He goes on, “But then I look again and notice something else. The poet means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect of the poem is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.”

            Isaiah’s contemporaries look around and what they see is a stump of the Dynasty of King David, and they can imagine nothing else, nothing greater. They know what is normal, and normal is corruption, normal is the strong oppressing the weaker, normal is the rich getting richer while the poor become increasingly impoverished, normal is monarchs pursuing war abroad to distract attention from problems at home.

            Isaiah tells them that they have been promised so much more, and that if they put on the eyeglasses that God so freely provides, they can see that what they have come to accept as normal is anything but.

            In this Advent season, our challenge is to hear these powerful words of promise for us, words we are tempted to dismiss as impossible, as not a vision of what will be but as a mere illusion.

            Like Isaiah’s contemporaries, we look around and see not a flourishing tree of life, but a mere stump, we see what we are told is normal, never mind that we have been promised so much better than this.

            The new normal is a relentless death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars approaching the longest armed conflicts we have ever been involved in, wars that last week we were told will extend until at least 2014; the new normal is an ever increasing gauntlet of security measures to board an airplane, now featuring full-body scans and pat downs; the new normal is seemingly endless corruption in our system of justice, as the scandals rocking the probation and sheriffs department once again evidence; the new normal is governmental restriction on benefits to the most in need, the threatened cutting off of unemployed benefits to two million American between now and Christmas, on the grounds that we cannot afford those benefits, while perversely we can afford tax cuts for those earning in excess of $250,000 per year; the new normal is politicians of all stripes putting private agenda ahead of common good.

            I think at times we are so used to getting beat down by all this stuff that we really start to believe that this is normal, that this is the way things are supposed to be and always will be, and that resistance is not only futile, it is foolish.

            But then we take another look at Isaiah’s vision, about the promise of a new creation, when the rightly governed world will be detoxified, where the world will be safe for our children, for the meek, for the most vulnerable, where those who rule will have the most important characteristic, the trait beyond compare, that any leaders could possess – the humility to know that they are not gods, and that they owe their allegiance to, and are responsible to, the one God who never ceases to defend the widow and the orphan, the weak and the poor.

            And then in this season of Advent we remember also the one who Israel longed for, but the one who came as well, the one who was full of power and yet brought us peace, the one who though filled with divine might was humble even so, the one who was a descendant of King David, a shoot from the stock of Jesse – the one named Jesus.  We remember the one who despite having all that power chose not to take on Rome’s legions, but instead humbly took the side of the poor, the marginalized, the sick, the oppressed, bringing healing, reconciliation, and new and abundant life. And we remember that his commitment to this impossible – so we say! – peaceable kingdom was such that it got him arrested, and tortured, and nailed to a cross, and how that was to be expected, was par for the course, was what everyone considered to be normal.

            And we remember that God took that old normal and stood it on its head, rolling away the stone from the tomb, raising Jesus to new life.

            Friends, in a world which tells us that what little we have is normal, and that to dream of or even expect anything more is just a crock, this is the Good News for us today, that God wills – and will one day bring about – justice and peace for this world, and for all its creatures.