Waging Peace
“Waging Peace” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning. International Day of Peace comes around year after year, but September 21 is a day which often comes and goes without observance or comment — at least from me and in my worship planning at Creekside. This is not because I think peace is unimportant, either to me personally, to you as a congregation, or to the Church of the Brethren. Depending on who you are talking to, you may hear the Church of the Brethren described as an historic peace church, or as a living peace church. If you ask what that means, you may get a variety of responses. It is not my project this morning to get us all to agree on what the Bible says about peace and peacemaking — it is a complicated issue, and I’m not sure that fighting about the biblical definition of peace is in anyone’s best interest. But I do want to share some of my own perspective, which is informed both by the Bible and Brethren faith and practice.
Peace and its more robust Jewish cousin Shalom, which includes health, prosperity, and well-being are hard to not like. Who doesn’t want to be calm, centered, healthy and whole? A little sedate, perhaps, but certainly better than the alternatives of anxiety, stress, upheaval and poverty. We certainly want peace in our communities — they’re safer that way, and because we’re generous, peace in other people’s communities, too. And why stop there? Peace in our nation, and peace for other nations, too. Peace for everyone in the world! I can hear the angels in Luke singing now: peace on earth, goodwill to all. I’d like to think that’s what we all want — sincerely.
But how to get there — that is the question. We have some ideas about how to wage war–I haven’t studied it, but many smart people have. There’s history and strategy and rules — rules which you can break if you think it’s important enough, or if you’re too powerful to be held accountable. Waging war is a messy business, as you heard Eric share. There’s lots of collateral damage and the ethics can be fuzzy and although we may have started with a clear objective, that can shift over time.
But waging peace is a puzzle to most of us — myself included. We may be able to think of a few teachers and practitioners of nonviolence — we heard from two of the best-known, Mahatma Ghandi and his later admirer and student Martin Luther King, Jr., this morning. Even folks who admired these leaders and agreed with their objectives of independence for the country of India and civil rights for all Americans might be uncomfortable with efforts to wage peace as “too political.” Maybe it would be better if peace were just a warm, comforting feeling which we kept to ourselves or within our tight-knit community, and left the activism to other people.
We’re not sure who authored the letter to the Ephesians; probably a student of Paul’s, later than the letters which we know to have been written by Paul. Clearly this section from chapter 2 is addressing a division in the community; the division between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. It’s difficult for me to image how deep and wide this division was. For thousands of years, Jews had based their religious and cultural identity on being separate and being chosen by God. They marked this separateness in tangible, visible ways: the way they dressed, what they ate, their devotional and Sabbath practices. Not every mark of the covenant with God was so obvious; circumcision was irreversible, but not usually visible; it was a big deal, though. And Peter and Paul, citing their Jewish rabbi Jesus Christ, were saying that Gentiles — non-Jews, people whose families were not Jews, people who didn’t even know Jewish law were also saved by the blood of Christ. This was a division which went deeper than language, culture, ethnicity, or even religious practice. It was about basic issues of identity: who are we, and who can be part of our tribe. And here is a statement which is both simple and shocking, “Jesus is our peace. He reconciled both groups to God in one body through the cross.” Whaat? The cross, an instrument of torture from Roman culture is the way in which Jesus brings peace and reconciliation?
That should be a wake-up call for those who think peace is only a warm feeling, and for those who think peace should be apolitical; Jesus’ death was neither serene nor apolitical. Jesus had the courage to wage peace against the people who wanted him dead — Jewish leaders and Gentile officials. They killed him and he won. And Jesus’ victory was that through his sacrifice, Jews and Gentiles no longer had to be each others’ enemies. This is incredibly powerful stuff. No one since has had the power to do this like Jesus did — very few have had the courage to try.
I would never speak against being nice to people, or smiling at folks to make them feel comfortable. I know there are Christian traditions where people pass the peace of Christ, which is typically kind of an unstructured but low-key part of a service when we’re supposed to be friendly to each other. All I can say is, be careful what you wish for; peace as embodied by Jesus Christ is far more dangerous and way more powerful than politeness. Let me share the words of American author Annie Dillard, who said it more memorably than I can. She’s talking about opening ourselves to the work of God in our prayers and our actions at church.
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”We have some idea of how war can change people. Are we brave enough to let the peace of Christ take us to where we can never return? Consider that as we sing our final song, Go Now in Peace.