Re-Gifting Christmas: The Paper Crane
December 4, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Isaiah 11:6-9, John 14:25-27
We are in our series on re-gifting. Last week we talked about re-gifting hope, how we receive hope from Christ as a gift, and then we pass it on to others. Today we’re going to talk about re-gifting peace.
Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Paul says, “Pursue – do the things that make for peace.” I wonder what that really means. What does it mean to be a peacemaker, “to pursue the things that make for peace?” What does it mean for you to do that?
We’re going to hear two Scriptures read: you can follow along in your bulletin. One is from the Gospel of John, part of the last conversation Jesus has with his disciples. The other is from the prophet Isaiah, the 11th chapter. It’s a Messianic prophecy, of what it will be like when the Messiah comes and the Messianic age is around us.
So please follow along as we hear the Scripture read today.
The wolf shall lie with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like an ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of theLord
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9 NRSV)
I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate,the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:25-27 NRSV)
Good morning! Welcome to St. Luke’s. We’re going to talk today about peace. Remember there are three principles that we’re following throughout, all about re-gifting. The first is that the most important things cannot be bought or sold because they can only be received as a gift. Last week we talked about hope, this week we’ll talk about peace, and next week we’ll talk about joy and then finally about love.
You can’t buy any of those things; they only can be received as a gift. “My peace I give to you,” Jesus says.
The second principle is that you can’t give something you haven’t received first. You can’t re-gift a gift if you haven’t received the gift. So we have to focus first on receiving before we can focus on giving.
Then finally when we receive a gift, those important ones, hope, peace, joy, love, they carry with them an expectation that they be re-gifted. That they be forwarded, that they be passed on. So with those three in mind I want us to begin with a prayer.
Let’s pray. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, God, open our hands that we might give. Amen.
Clifton Truman Daniel is the grandson of Harry S. Truman. A number of years ago he was at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri for an event. His mother had been speaking at the event. He will confess that up until that time he had not really taken a lot of involvement in his grandfather’s legacy. But his mother was ready to begin passing the torch to him. So he went to this event, and while he was there two veterans approached him with tears in their eyes.
They took hold of his two hands and they looked at him and said, “We just want to say thank you. If your grandfather had not had enough courage to drop the bomb we would not be alive today. We were both soldiers in the Pacific and we were both imprisoned, and had the bomb not been dropped, we would not be alive today.”
Daniel said that just created such an impact for him.
A number of years later his son brought home a book from elementary school and it was titled Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. You may know the story of Sadako and the paper cranes. She was two years old and living in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. She survived the blast but when she was nine years old she developed radiation-induced leukemia. There was a Japanese legend that if you made a thousand paper cranes – origami paper cranes – that you could be healed of diseases. So she set about the business of making those paper cranes.
Now there’s a dispute about how many paper cranes she made. The story says 650 something. Her family says she made 1500 paper cranes. Nonetheless, in October, 1955 she died of leukemia.
That image of those paper cranes has begun to mean a great deal and we have one of those here. We actually ordered them maybe six weeks ago. We ordered perhaps 2000 of them six weeks ago and they are in a port somewhere in the Far East today. So sometime in July, we will pass out paper cranes just for fun. Or maybe we’ll do something with them – I don’t know. We do have this marvelous large paper crane here.
Well, Clifton Daniel was so moved by his son’s experience of this book that he wrote a column about it. He’s a journalist and he wrote this column about it. The column began to circulate and sometime later he received a call from a man named Masahiro Sasaki. Now he lives in Japan and is Sadako’s older brother. He also survived the blast and did not end up with leukemia and now he’s very, very old.
Mr. Sasaki called to say, “I was in the blast at Hiroshima and I thank you for writing your column. I’d like to meet you sometime.”
Well, they did meet in 2010 when Masahiro came to New York to present a paper crane to the September 11th Memorial Museum that’s there. They met and when they met, Masahiro opened a little box and he gave it to Clifton Daniel. Inside was a tiny paper crane. He said, “This was the last paper crane that Sadako made. She gave it to me and I want to give it to you.”
That was so stunning, and then he said, “Would you come to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the memorial event?” Clifton Daniel, not thinking what it meant diplomatically and not thinking about any of those national interest things, just said, “Yes.”
So in 2012 he went to Japan for the event. He said as he was flying on the way over there that he was thinking, “What am I doing? The press has grown about me coming and I’m not representing the U.S. I’m not a diplomat I’m just a guy who’s going over there.”
He said that when he got off the plane there was this huge group of press there with all their microphones. He said he was terrified but thankfully Masahiro Sasaki came and threw his arms around him. He was a very old man now. He threw his arms around him and the symbolism of that was so powerful. The reporters began to interview him, and the translators would say, “Have you come to offer an apology?” And Daniel said, “I was stunned and I wasn’t prepared for that question. I should have been but I wasn’t prepared for that question. My host Masahiro said, ‘This isn’t about apologies, and that I didn’t have to answer the question. He answered: ‘This isn’t about apologies. If we were making apologies we would have to apologize about Pearl Harbor, too.’”
From then on no one else asked that question. They just traveled. Daniel said, “We traveled arm and arm and shoulder to shoulder throughout Japan and together we saw ourselves as a sign of peace.”
That’s a powerful picture. It recognizes that peace is not simple, that peace is not easy, but that peace is important.
So what we’re going to look at today is two different ways of understanding peace. The first one is how do we receive peace?
We think of two kinds of peace. There’s inner peace, that sense of calm and serenity and acceptance that’s inside us. We think of that as sort of internal. And then the other kind of peace is external peace, peace with neighbor. It’s world peace, peace with others. We kind of picture that those are different things. You can have inner peace without external peace and you can external peace without internal peace. But I want to suggest that for the Christian, inner peace – what we think of as inner peace – the peace we receive from God, is not inner peace at all. It’s relational peace, just like the other kinds of peace.
Jesus says, “My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. My peace I give to you.”
If you read the whole chapter of John 14 you realize that he’s talking about a relationship with God. He says, “I will prepare a place and come again and take you to myself. That where I am you may be also. I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will not see me but you will see me. I will give you the Holy Spirit who will be there to represent me in your life.” It’s all about a relationship.
When we as Christians talk about inner peace, what we’re talking about is peace with God through Jesus Christ. It is a relational peace nonetheless. And here’s what’s even more significant. That relational peace that we have with God, we didn’t initiate. We didn’t create that peace, God reached out to us. God initiated that relational peace. The wall of sin that separated us from God was broken down in Jesus Christ. We didn’t make peace with God, God made peace with us. You see the difference? Now we have to accept that peace.
I heard a story not long ago that a pastor told about a young woman who ran away from home when she was in high school. She had met a young man and they ran off together. He was not the kind of boy you want your girl hanging out with, let me put it that way. So off they went and the parents tried to reach her, they couldn’t find her. They ultimately hired a private detective who found them in Miami, Florida. They wouldn’t respond to any overtures so they began to write them letters every week. Every week the parents would write her a letter. And they would mail it. They would put a “return receipt requested” to make sure it had been delivered and that the girl had received the letter. No response. Never any response.
Ultimately both the boyfriend and the girl were arrested for dealing drugs out of their home in Miami, actually trafficking drugs. They went to prison for some period of time. And after they had been arrested the police finally came to the parents and gave to them a box of letters that were in the girl’s home. None of them opened. None of them opened.
The checks inside that they had sent were never cashed. Never even seen. Ultimately the young woman got out of jail, the relationship with the boyfriend had ended. She reconnected with her parents. They asked her, “Why didn’t you open any of our letters?” She said, “I didn’t want to hear your ‘I forgive you.’ Your self-righteous ‘I forgive you’ letter.”
When they opened the letters ultimately all of them just said “I love you. Just come home.”
God reaches out to us to make peace. But we have to accept that peace. It’s a gift given to us but we have to accept that gift. We have to receive it. “My peace I give to you,” Jesus said. Christ makes peace with us.
Now what do we do with that peace? Once God in Christ has reached across that chasm that we’ve created and said “I’m going to make every sacrifice. I’m going to accept you just as you are. I’m going to do everything including give my life so that we can restore that relationship.” What do we do with that?
I hope we pass that on. I hope we re-gift it. We just sang “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” It’s a great song except it’s wrong. Because the peace doesn’t begin with us. The peace begins with God. We are just a conduit of it to pass it on. If God is going to accept us as we are, if God is going to make peace with us, if God is going to make sacrifices to make peace with us, then what do we do? We pass that on. We become instruments of God’s peace. We make the same kind of sacrifices. We accept others as they are. We treat others in the way God in Christ has treated us. That’s what re-gifting is like.
So how do we do that? Our passage from Isaiah today is one of my favorites. It’s from Isaiah 11 and you’ll hear it almost every Advent. It’s one of the most famous Messianic prophecies. Sometimes called an oracle, a Messianic oracle in which God speaks through Isaiah. Now a little teaching. Isaiah was a prophet in the 8th century BC and probably responded to his call to ministry around 740. We know that because Isaiah 6 says, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord high and lifted up.” He talks about his call. So we kind of know what year King Uzziah died.
We know that he prophesied during a long time, many decades during the reign of King Uzziah, the reign of King Jotham who was kind of an “iffy” king, during the reign of King Ahaz who was a terrible king (Boo, King Ahaz!) and during the reign of King Hezekiah who tried to bring reform to Israel. And all of this was happening when Assyria, the power to the north, was ravaging Israel and approaching Judah which was the southern kingdom of Israel which ultimately held Judah in a siege for many years.
So isn’t it natural that Isaiah would say, “Hey, when the Messiah comes we’re going to have a time of peace. Not just righteousness but we’re going to have a time of peace.”
Isaiah 2 has these words: “And into plowshares they shall beat their swords. The nations shall study war no more.”
This passage that we read, I saw something about it for the first time this year. I want you to hear it again:
“The wolf shall lie with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together…and the lion shall eat straw like an ox.”
It seems so obvious. Don’t you find it interesting when there are things that are so obvious, like twenty years in, you see - lions don’t eat straw. They’re carnivores. And lambs don’t lie down with wolves. For this to happen the very nature of those creations will have to change. For this kind of peace to happen the very nature of those animals would have to change.
What he’s saying is that this peace which will cover the world will not happen, because we somehow find the right diplomatic solutions. This will happen because “… the earth shall be full of the knowledge of theLord, as the waters cover the sea” and every single human being’s very nature will be transformed. That inner peace that we receive in Jesus Christ creates a transformation in us that changes the way we deal with everyone around us. So we re-gift that peace.
Now how do we do that? I’ve really been praying a lot about this sermon because once or twice a year I deal with this theme and as I’ve listened to my sermons again, I realize that here’s what I’m saying to you. I’m saying, “You have a broken relationship with a brother or a sister or a mother or a father or a friend or a child or somebody – now go fix it! You pick up the phone, you make that call, and you make it right.” And afterwards everyone walks out gloomy.
I don’t want to go that way. So it is true that it is very sad when I see people reach the end of their lives and they haven’t created restoration. I’m reminded of this powerful part of 2 Timothy. Paul is near the very end of his life and he’s writing to Timothy and he says this one little line, one little verse that if you didn’t understand the context you wouldn’t get it. He says, “Get Mark and bring him with you.” Well, Paul and John Mark had a falling-out. A big falling-out that caused them to separate on their journeys and Paul ended up in Europe and John Mark stayed in Asia along with Barnabas. It was like a huge split in that early church.
For Paul to say, “Get Mark and bring him with you” it’s as if he were saying, “I’m near the end of my life and I want to fix this.”
So it may be that that’s percolating inside your soul. But this year I want to just ask you to do it a little differently. I want you to imagine, “What would it be like if the peace that Christ has offered you was poured out into everyone around you? In every situation and in every setting? At work, at your Christmas dinner table, with your friends, when you meet with your family. That the peace that’s been given you will be offered to those around you.
You’re probably familiar with this poem. It’s probably one of the best, this prayer. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there’s doubt, faith. Where there’s despair, hope. Where there’s darkness, light. Where there’s sadness, joy.”
Let me sow the seeds of peace in every relationship, every situation, and every place I go. Don’t think about it as saying, “Oh, I’ve got to pick up the phone and make that call.” I’m saying in every place you go, in every situation, consider how you might be a catalyst, an instrument of God’s peace. That you might offer to them the same acceptance, the same forgiveness, the same love that God has offered to you.
Last year I had a conversation with a woman at a cocktail party at Christmas time. I asked her, “What do you do for a living?” We were just making conversation. “I’m an attorney,” she said. I said, “Oh, what kind of law do you practice?” And she said, “I’m a divorce lawyer.” Actually she said, “A family attorney.” And I said, “Wills and stuff?” And she said, “No, I’m a divorce lawyer.”
I said, “Oh….” Now that was really a shame the way I responded. I said, “That’s got to be so hard with all that animosity and everything.” She said, “Well, my job’s not that different from yours.” I thought and actually said, “Well, actually it is. Mine’s very different.”
Then she went on to say something very profound. She said, “You know, my job is not to get the most money for my client. My job is for me to get an agreement for my client that they can be at peace with, that what will benefit them in the long run more than anything is a positive peaceful relationship with their ex-spouse. So we’re trying to reach an agreement that keeps that afloat. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
That’s an “instrument of thy peace.” That’s a catalyst to try to create peace among others.
Just one other thing then – how do we do that? I think there are lots of ways but I think the number one most significant way is to learn to listen to people. To actually listen and try and understand, not evaluate, not judge…
I heard Gil Rendle, who’s a consultant for the church, who’s retiring say in a retirement video, “I have learned that I must understand before I can evaluate.” I thought, “Boy, I need to learn that.” I am quick to evaluate everything that comes at me, I assign a value to it, and I determine if it’s right or wrong, good or bad, yes or no, before I even understand it.
What if this Christmas you decided to re-gift understanding? To just sit and listen to someone. To just listen until you really understand who they are, what they do, what their feelings are, to “walk a mile in their moccasins” as they say. That is just a little seed of peace.
Let me close with this. In a conversation with Clifton Daniel, here’s what he said. “One of the survivors of Nagasaki Sakue Shimohira, said this: ‘I think the basic idea of peace is to have some understanding of someone else’s pain.’ She only asked that I would sit and listen to all their stories. Listen to them and tell their stories. That’s why I’m here today.”
Just give the gift of listening and see if it might sow a seed of peace.
Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you so much that you have broken down the wall that separates us from you. That in Christ you have offered us peace with you. We pray then that we would take that same peace and let us be instruments of that peace with others. In the name of Christ. Amen.