I Need to Hear the ‘A’ Note

Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6; Philippians 1:3-11
Second Sunday of Advent, 2006

Daniel Bagby once told a story of a young shepherd tending to a huge flock of sheep in a remote, windswept corner of Montana near the Canadian border. Each Saturday night, the young shepherd would tune in to a radio program broadcast from Bozeman. They played a variety of songs, broadcast some news of interest to sheep herders, and had some other compatible tids and bits. They also received requests by mail and would fulfill these requests on the air. One day, the programming changed. It wasn't a significant change, just the elimination of a short tone that always played at the end of the program's broadcast, a steady tone that indicated the end of the feed from the broadcast's origin at the University of Montana. The next week, a letter arrived from the isolated shepherd. "I love your program," he wrote, "and I like the changes you've brought in except for one thing: I need to hear the 'A' note. You see, I have a guitar, and when your program ends, I always pull it out and sing songs to the sheep but without that 'A' note, I can't tune my guitar, and last week the sheep heard no music. I need to hear the 'A' note."

Out in that windswept wilderness, music could sooth the savage beasts, but only if the guitar could be tuned to the correct pitch. Without the ‘A’ note, though, the music would soon become discordant.

The wilderness image recurs frequently in the scripture readings of the Advent season. Several OT prophets declare that the joyous voice of truth preparing the way for the coming Messiah will ring out “in the wilderness.” Out in the wilderness, rough places will be smoothed and crooked places will be made straight. Ditches will be filled in and bumps and mounds will be leveled off, and all of it in the wilderness.

Why in the wilderness? Nobody lives in the wilderness except unshaven religious freaks wearing uncured leather. Wouldn’t it make more sense to declare these things in the town square? Wouldn’t it be more effective to go straight to the center of the population concentrations and declare the coming of the Messiah? Why in a wilderness, which by definition is a place where no one goes. Why would you declare such important news to an empty field? Wouldn’t you rather have a full house?

Well, let’s consider the definition of wilderness. Webster’s dictionary calls wilderness “an uncultivated place uninhabited by human beings.” The Oxford dictionary adds this definition: “a place without path or sustenance, without the potential for nourishment where disorder and chaos rule.” By that second definition, “where disorder and chaos rule,” I-95 qualifies as a wilderness. It could also apply to the crowd at an English soccer match, or for that matter, FedEx stadium when the Redskins play AT football. “Where disorder and chaos rule. . .” This is our nation’s experience in Iraq. “Without nourishment. . .” This could be how many of our significant relationships begin to feel. “Without path or sustenance. . .” This could be how many of us feel about our prospects for the future of our careers, whether at work or in school. The fact of the matter is, we might not live in the Sahara, but sometimes Mechanicsville can feel mighty dry.

In the midst of our wilderness, we need to hear the ‘A’ note.

During the last week of December, 1914 and the first week of January, 1915, on the Western Front between France and Germany during World War I, both Allied and German commanders encountered a profound problem. At a multitude of points along the trenches facing no-man’s-land, soldiers were refusing the fire their weapons at the enemy. The reason?

It seems that a Scottish unit had been singing songs of home and playing their bagpipes when they heard a German tenor singing “Stille Nacht” in a strong and beautiful voice from the other side. They immediately recognized the tune of “Silent Night” and one of the Scots began playing accompaniment on his pipes. Soon both sides were exchanging carols. All along the front, groups of soldiers walked out into the killing ground between the trenches, shook hands in a host of informal cease-fires, exchanged brandy, candy, and addresses, and in a couple of cases even played soccer matches against one another.

When they returned to their trenches and December 26th came, orders came down from headquarters on both sides to resume combat operations. That’s when the commanders encountered the unwillingness to fire weapons at the enemy. When John McCutcheon penned lyrics to recount the event, he concluded this way,

“The walls they’d built between us to exact the cause of war,
Had been crumbled and were gone forever more.”
Indeed,
“The ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle, we’re the same.”

In Christian Carion’s film version of the event, a French lieutenant has been severely reprimanded by his commanding officer for allowing his soldiers to get to know Germans. “This is treason, punishable by death, only we can’t execute over 200 soldiers. That’s the only thing that saves you in the midst of your madness.”

The French lieutenant then responds, “Madness? Sir, I tell you, I feel closer to those Germans over there than I do to all those people sitting in their warm houses yelling out, ‘kill the scoundrels’ in front of their stuffed turkey.” Similarly, a Catholic bishop removes from the Scottish unit a chaplain that has conducted a mass for the Catholic soldiers from both sides. The bishop says, “You’ve gone astray, my son.”

From the comfortable distance that history has placed between our time and the events of WW I we can objectively sympathize with the soldiers. We know that when they heard each other singing one song in three different tongues and shook hands in no man’s land, that those soldiers had heard the ‘A’ note, that it was the soldiers who were sane, not the political frenzy that sent them there. Indeed, the propaganda that dehumanizes an enemy qualifies as true insanity, not the kindness that embraces a fellow human being. This we know. Would that we would apply this to our current enemies. Would that we would hear the ‘A’ note in regards to the killing fields we have created.

The ‘A’ note, of course, is the Advent message of Peace. It’s the message that the prophet called for in the wilderness. It’s the message that we followers of Christ must sound in the wilderness of our own culture, a culture that thinks that Christmas is about fighting crowds, buying people stuff they don’t need, and going into tremendous debt. It’s the message we need to sound in the wilderness of disappointment many persons descend into as the dark days of January and February close in on them and the holidays brought no cheer or joy or good will – and no peace.

You see, peace is not just the absence of conflict. Peace originates in the individual soul. External conflicts of all kinds – including the one absurdly called “The War on Terror” a stupid and misleading phrase – originate because the people involved don’t have an abiding internal sense of well being. We have external conflicts because we don’t really believe that God will take care of our every need, or that if we submit to the way of Christ and orient our lives on the kind of service he calls us to, that our worlds, our relationships, our sense of eternal peace will improve. Peace originates in the soul when we change the direction in which we look for happiness. Peace originates when we hear the ‘A’ note.

I had a little awakening in September, 2003. I had gone to Brazil with a team from Virginia to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Baptist work in the southern Brazilian state of Parana. You’ll recall that the war in Iraq was only a few months old at that point and was dominating the headlines, as it has for the last almost four years since. The first rumblings were emerging that the original rationale for the war – finding and ridding Iraq of Weapons of Mass Destruction – was erroneous. President Bush was going to address the nation.

While all that was going on, I sat in a worship service in the city of Paranaqua with about 1,000 other worshipers in First Baptist Church in that city. Not one word was said about the U.S. conflict in Iraq. In fact, the next day, I could find no article in any newspaper about it. No television station ran a report about Bush’s address. When I asked some of my Brazilian friends about where I could find news about the president’s address, they said, “Our president hasn’t made an address.”
I said, “No, I mean President Bush.”

They said, “Oh, did he have something to say?”

I said, “Of course! There’s a war in Iraq.”

“Oh,” my friend said. “We’ve heard about that war, but that’s your war. We in Brazil have other worries.”

That’s when it hit me: in the United States, we swim in a sea of media-built frenzy about our own concerns. It never occurs to us that several billion people in the world might be aware of our affairs, but in truth, we DON’T dominate their thinking. And amazingly, outside the conflicts in which we’re immersed, some great things are happening. Let me sound an ‘A’ note in the midst of our wilderness.

In 1993, in Rio de Janerio, a group of street children were massacred right in front of the Candelaria Church. It was a wake up call for the country to the widespread problem of neglected street children. A huge coalition of businessmen, politicians, citizens, artists, journalists, and researchers got together and organized Viva Rio with the mission of stemming urban violence.

They enjoyed broad public support and today, Viva Rio has 1,000 employees and 3,000 volunteers. It operates in 354 shanty towns and has over 300,000 participants in sports programs and tutors over 25,000 toward high school diplomas. They devised a computer system to match kids with jobs around the city and aids them in how to interview for jobs. They even set up a gun swap campaign in which over 100,000 weapons were turned in to the police and subsequently destroyed. All their problems have not been solved, and the drug culture still persists, but significant inroads have been made.

You just don’t hear about stuff like that in our media, do you? But in our Fox infested broadcast atmosphere, a story like that serves as an ‘A’ note.

Then I found out about this. In 1994 in the country of Mali, a civil war was raging between the Tuareg and the Songhai people. There had been a severe draught and the cattle and crops of the largely rural Tuareg people had almost completely died off. International attention was elsewhere (namely Bosnia and Somalia) and the government, dominated by the Songhai, hadn’t paid attention to the plight of the Tuareg.

The Tuareg rebelled and war broke out. That’s when a German couple named Barbara and Henner Papendieck decided that somebody had to practice some basic Christian principles. They had watched the growing conflict from Ghana, secured a commitment of aid from a German organization and went into Mali. With the promise of aid behind them, they set up dialogue groups between the factions and organized a counsel composed of members from every ethnic group.

They persisted over a period of ten years. Because the groups agreed to continue in their negotiations and dialogue, over 68 million dollars in money flowed in and 25 schools, 45 city halls, 7 health clinics, and two banks were built. They also conducted vaccination campaigns, dug 13 deep wells, and built 330 motorized water pump stations that irrigate 75 acres of desert apiece, each nourishing around 700 people.

That kind of work addressed the central anxiety of the people, addressed real issues of well being, opened up real relationships of respect between former enemies, and has calmed the brutality in a very large sub Saharan country. In other words, peace broke out! In the wilderness whistling around us, that’s an ‘A’ note!

Did you know that the principles Christ taught actually work? Most organizations and the people who run them don’t think so, but they do. As a matter of fact, the more people discover the practicality of Christ-principles, the more peace breaks out. Here’s some information which I wager will surprise you.

Just last year, a consortium of countries sponsored a study by the University of British Columbia which they called the Human Security Report. The countries included Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and Canada, countries you’d expect to be looking for reasons to sound an alarm. Look, however, at what the data indicate.

• The number of armed conflicts has declined by more than 40% since 1992. The deadliest conflicts (those with 1000 or more battle-deaths) dropped even more dramatically––by 80%.
• The number of international crises, often harbingers of war, fell by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001.
• Wars between countries are more rare than in previous eras and now constitute less than 5% of all armed conflicts.
• The number of military coups and attempted coups has declined by some 60% since 1963. In 1963, there were 25 coups or attempted coups; in 2004, there were 10. All failed.
• Most armed conflicts now take place in the poorest countries in the world, but as incomes rise the risk of war declines.
• The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval without wars between the major powers in hundreds of years.
• The UK and France, followed by the US and Russia/USSR have fought most international wars since 1946.
• Even in Africa where there are the most conflicts, there are signs of hope. A new dataset compiled for the Human Security Report finds that between 2002 and 2003 (the last year for which there is data) the number of armed conflicts in Africa dropped from 41 to 35.
• The drop in armed conflicts in the 1990s was associated with a worldwide decline in arms transfers, military spending and troop numbers. The Unites State alone accounts for half the world’s military spending.
• Wars have become dramatically less deadly over the past five decades. The average number of people reported killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000; in 2002 it was just 600––a decline of 98%.
• In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s by far the highest battle––death tolls in the world were in the wars in East and Southeast Asia. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the killing took place in the Middle East, Central and South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of the 1990s, more people were being killed in sub-Saharan Africa’s wars than the rest of the world put together.
• The new dataset created for the Report finds that between 2002 and 2003 the number of reported deaths from all forms of political violence fell by 62% in the Americas, 32% in Europe, 35% in Asia and 24 % in Africa.
• Not withstanding the horrors of Rwanda and Srebrenica, Bosnia, the number of genocides and other mass killings plummeted by 80% between the 1989 high point and 2001.
• International terrorism is the only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse. Some datasets have shown an overall decline in international terrorist incidents of all types since the early 1980s, but the most recent statistics suggest a dramatic increase in the number of high–casualty attacks since the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001. The annual death toll from international terrorist attacks is, however, only a tiny fraction of annual war death toll.

What has fueled these trends? Well, First, was the end of colonialism. From the early 1950s to the early 1980s, colonial wars made up 60–100% of all international conflicts depending on the year. Today there are no such wars. Second, was the end of the Cold War, which had driven approximately one-third of all conflicts in the post–World War II. This removed any residual threat of war between the major powers, and Washington and Moscow stopped fueling “proxy wars” in the developing world. Third, was the unprecedented upsurge of international activities designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones starting that took place in the wake of the Cold War.

For example, there has been a six-fold increase in UN preventive diplomacy missions (to stop wars starting), four-fold increase in UN peacemaking missions (to end ongoing conflicts), and a four-fold increase in UN peace operations (to reduce the risk of wars restarting). In addition to these, there have been literally thousands of efforts by organizations like Viva Rio, the Peace Corps, Bread for the World, Christian mission agencies of all denominations, and folks like the Papendiecks.

That’s the ‘A’ note. When the ways of Christ are implemented, the peace of Christ breaks out. Just because we live in the wilderness of Affluenza doesn’t mean that good things aren’t happening elsewhere. In fact, they are. It only takes us listening to the ‘A’ note, marching to that tune and not the insanity of the surrounding culture. Then we can find the courage to walk out into the wilderness areas of our world and bring peace.