Isaiah 11, Matthew 3 and Aikido

God’s harmony is at hand. With the coming of the Christ is the beginning of a new day of harmony, when all God’s creatures set aside their differences and get along with one another, as Isaiah 11:1-3, 6-10 states. Isaiah tells us of a leader whose reign is unlike any we have seen, one whose decisions usher in a time of harmony and peace. This is the Advent picture we know and love—Christ comes, and all is well. Now let’s go back to the verses that hold these two parts of the passage together. Verses 4 and 5 show us how this harmonious reign will be accomplished—in the less comforting language of warfare and judgment. Somehow, striking and killing and judgment enter the strategy for implementing this reign of peace. Though peace may be the result, its beginning is not without conflict.

Perhaps this is why those who put together the lectionary placed these texts with Matthew 3:1-12, where notions of harmony seem to be absent. As John the baptizer announced the coming of the reign of heaven in his time, according to Matthew, there would be little about its arrival that could be described as harmonious. For all the green pastureland that may come of this new world, John lays out its entrance in clashing terms: trees with bad fruit? Goners.

Chaff? Out. Children of Abraham? Don’t be so cocky. Everyone is subject to the fire of this new one’s baptism, and only the wholesome wheat and the fruit-producing tree and the truest child of Abraham will make the cut. The rest will be cleared from the premises. Harmony may be the end result, but it is not central to the process of bringing to reality this Advent hope.

After reading all this, I was left wondering about harmony. From the Isaiah passage at least, we can see that it is a gift of the reign of heaven, a promise for us to reach toward, to count on for the future. But is it something we can hope for now in our lives? Or is it something that can come only when conflict ceases and peace reigns, when the way of the Lord is made straight?

With these questions raised by the Bible, I turned to the text of my life to sort out how I practice harmony in my life.

I am a black belt in Aikido, a Japanese defensive art. It’s a more recent martial art, created by its founder in response to the violence he witnessed as a child and the devastation of his country as a result of World War II. The founder was concerned that conflicts escalated inescapably toward destruction, from the smallest interpersonal clash to battles of international scale. He reoriented his martial expertise toward transforming conflicts into peaceful ends. Aikido, the art he created, translates into English as “the way of harmony.”

In Aikido, we learn to be centered and strong in the face of something frightening and uncertain. This is partially because we can see what is there. In a physical conflict, animosity becomes concrete. An attacker’s action shows his or her intent. Blocking, freezing, lashing out in return or running away can be harmful to me (or the attacker), but harmonizing with the movement can bring both the attacker and me to safety. Harmonizing in the midst of a conflict brings the situation to resolution, makes an opportunity to establish peace.

This differs from the way we typically think of harmony in church, which is why the Isaiah and Matthew passages were initially so dissonant for me. Mennonites, because we focus on community, on unity within the body of Christ and peacemaking with others, are susceptible to misunderstanding concepts such as harmony. We are pacifists because we long for peace, stability, calm, quiet, the harmonious reign of God. If we find that all is peaceful, stable, calm and quiet, we think harmony abounds. When conflicts, arguments, disagreements and unrest arise, harmony seems to disappear, and we think something is horribly wrong. We are shaken, uncomfortable, nervous, even afraid. In church, and in our other relationships, we find conflict distressing. We are afraid to enter it and face its consequences. So we opt for the appearance of harmony—the absence of conflict as long as we can maintain it—sometimes at the expense of honesty and always at the expense of growth as individuals and as a community. We prefer exterior calm to the truer, stronger harmony of a conflict seen through to its resolution. We keep the peace and say we are one step closer to the harmonious reign of God.

But these Scripture passages challenge us to think of harmony in a different way, not as passive and static but active and dynamic. Both Isaiah and Matthew put harmony and conflict hand in hand. Preparing the way of the Lord, ushering in the reign of heaven, cannot happen without conflict, without the cleansing of the Holy Spirit and fire. This is Advent, the breaking in of the reign of God into our everyday, our status quo. This is the coming of the Christ, disrupting our calm, interrupting our routines, shattering the appearance of harmony for the sake of building a lasting, eternal peace.

Through this lens, then, the conflicts we experience in our lives don’t have to be setbacks. They can be opportunities to experience dissonance and act on it, to move with it and ultimately to participate in the act of harmonizing what God is doing in the world. The reign of God is coming, moving in our world dynamically. We can choose to participate with it or resist it, engage it or ignore it. True harmony requires that we act, that we enter the fray and turn fights into dances.

It is in our willingness to engage one another when conflicts arise—in our families, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and churches—that we find our greatest hope for harmony. Until Christ returns to finally transform our battlefields into pastures, we bring harmony by being willing to take that step into conflict, into the fray—to see things as they are and blend with them, know a situation is difficult and move with it, understand that something is terribly wrong and use its energy to guide it toward the good.

This is our hope because it is precisely the kind of action from which our entire faith comes. In Advent, we celebrate a God who moved with us, who, rather than staying apart and avoiding the messiness of our conflict-ridden lives, chose to be one of us, to harmonize with our way of life and transform it from the inside. In the life of Christ, by harmonizing with our human nature, God showed us what humanity can be by meeting us where we are and guiding us toward where we should go. In the death of Christ, by harmonizing with humanity’s darkest side, God submitted fully to our inclination toward violence and resistance of God’s way of peace. In the resurrection of Christ, by harmonizing again with the good to come, God demonstrated that life and hope can be the winners in even our most vicious conflicts.

The Communion table is set in celebration of that life and that hope. As we come together to eat the bread and drink from the cup, let us remember God’s harmonization with us in Christ, even to the point of death on the cross. Let’s also share this meal together as a demonstration of our resurrection hope to harmonize with one another and become part of God’s harmonious reign in our time.

God has invited us to join together to live into Advent’s promise of harmony and peace. Brothers and sisters, in that hope let us come.

Julie Prey-Harbaugh is a shodan (first) level black belt in Aikido Kokikai and feels strong connections between her practice and her faith. She even preached using Aikido as an example once when preaching at her home church, West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship.