The Way of Peace
With the sad and infuriating stories about Walter Reed Hospital in the news these past few days, the ongoing tragedy that is Iraq has been brought home once again.
The news certainly gets no better, and seems to get worse each day this war drags on. And yet, to speak out for peace is called naïve and unrealistic, and to do so from the pulpit is to open oneself to the always ready accusation of mixing church and politics – of mixing the ways of God with the ways of the world.
Isaiah famously reminds us that God’s ways are not our ways, but I wonder if sometimes that observation isn’t used to excuse a lack of faith on our part that our ways might, in fact, be transformed into something closer to the ways of God.
For example, we easily – too easily, in fact – separate the sacred from the secular, as if God’s grace ends at the door to sanctuary, or on the last page of hymnal, or with the final words of Revelation. It’s as if God needs the church’s permission to spread grace beyond the reach of the institution.
In the same way, we too easily separate the spiritual from the political and confuse the private with the personal. That is to say, we imagine that God’s designs for humankind are purely personal and do not touch on social structures. At the same time, we imagine that there is no connection between our personal lives and concerns and our public lives and concerns.
But Christian faith demands of us a certain conformity: conforming the way we live personally with the way we live publicly; and, moreover, conforming our ways to God’s ways. Our personal spiritual lives are not a private affair, but have real, discernable effects in the world.
Most of the time, separating the two – the religious from the political, for instance – serves the way of the powerful, not the way of God. For example, calls by the church to end Apartheid in South Africa were called, by the white power structure, an unholy mix of church and politics. In the same way in the United States, religious leaders calling for an end to the war in Vietnam were accused of overstepping their proper bounds. Or, as the archbishop of Sao Paulo said, “When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why are the poor hungry, they called me a communist.”
Fidelity in our personal lives demands fidelity in our public lives. Hope in our personal lives demands hope in our public lives. Love in our personal lives demands love in our public lives. Peace in our personal lives demands peace in our public lives.
A while back someone quoted this Isaiah passage to me about God’s ways and our ways. I was told that while I might not be able to imagine God condemning anyone to hell for not claiming an orthodox belief that Jesus is God’s only son and the only way to salvation, God’s ways are not our ways. In other words, frying a few unbelievers is God’s way of teaching the rest of us right belief.
I’m sure that the same person would take the reading from Luke and repeat the phrase: “unless you repent, you will perish” without wondering about the gardener, the manure or the fig tree and without asking “who are we in the tale?” And without noticing that the next story in Luke is about healing an unclean woman on the Sabbath to the dismay of the orthodox religious leaders of the day.
You can imagine how easily one can abuse an orthodoxy that preaches condemnation and punishment in the service of ambitions either personal or imperial. After all, if you’re going to hell anyway because you don’t repent of actions that the confessions call sin, how concerned should I be about your rights? After all, if you’re going to hell anyway because you don’t believe in Jesus, how worked up should I get over your suffering or death?
Guided by such convictions, my ways and God’s ways may not be identical, but my ways of domination support God’s ways of eternal damnation, and vice versa. It’s amazing how often religious orthodoxy serves to keep the powerful in power and to keep the marginalized outside where they belong be they women seeking equal voice, slaves seeking liberation, sexual minorities seeking justice, the poor seeking a place at the table.
However, when I actually read the Bible – especially the passage from Isaiah that reminds us of God’s distinctive ways and how they differ from our ways – when I actually read this text, I cannot help but think of that critique of my “liberal” theology and smile. For when are we reminded that God’s thoughts and ways are not ours? In a verse that comes immediately after a reminder of God’s mercy and pardon.
Yes, indeed. God’s ways are not our ways nor God’s thoughts our thoughts. For we are quick to judgment and over-eager to condemn. Our God, Isaiah reminds us, “will abundantly pardon.”
We are quick to put a price tag on everything and to deny access to this world’s goods to anyone who cannot pay the price. Our God, Isaiah reminds us, says “everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!”
We are quick to draw lines and borders and cut off relations with peoples and cultures we do not understand. Our God, Isaiah reminds us, says “nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God.”
Our ways are not God’s ways. And yet … and yet the poet/prophet author of Isaiah here casts a vision of a future otherwise and gives us a glimpse of another way – the way of God and of God’s anointed.
The journey of Lent can be for us a sojourn along this other way.
It is fitting and proper that we should read the words of Isaiah at this point in Lent. The various writings compiled in what we call “Isaiah” come from distinct parts of the exile experience. The opening chapters, commonly called First Isaiah, voice a prophetic warning and a call to repentance and reform. For Isaiah, the way of peace is clearly a way of justice. Just as clearly, the people are not following it, and the results will be disastrous, Isaiah warns.
Indeed, calamity strikes and the people find themselves exiles in Babylon. The second major section of Isaiah speaks to this experience of exile.
Much of the most powerful poetry in scripture comes from the exile experience. The psalmist weeps by the waters of Babylon, unable to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Jeremiah wonders, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Isaiah cries out,
‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’
Out of despair, Isaiah expresses the audacity of hope. And remember, even as that catchy phrase rings in your ears, truly audacious hope comes not from political leaders or presidential candidates. Truly audacious hope comes from the promises of God given voice in the words of prophets and poets speaking to people in peril.
Thus, in the midst of exile – where both the people and their God seem to have been silenced, to have been rendered voiceless by their captives, to have their very songs silenced – Isaiah gives voice to radical hope.
In the prophet’s words God speaks, and in that speech gives the people hope. As Walter Brueggemann put it, “Hope is created by speech, and before that speech Israel was always hopeless. Indeed, are we not all? Before we are addressed, we know no future and no possible newness. Where there is no speech we must live in despair.”[1]
Thus the question forces itself upon us: where can we hear such speech today? For if we cannot locate and listen to such speech then we, too, shall know no future and no possible newness.
Indeed, we shall die in the silence if we cannot hear such speech and amplify it in and through our own lives.
Whether the specific subject at hand is deeply personal or decidedly public, if we cannot hear the prophetic speech calling out of us our own prophetic voice we shall die in the silence of impoverished spiritual lives, broken personal relationships, cheapened and debased sexual lives, and myopic politics that cannot read the signs of the times much less give voice to a future otherwise.
Nothing is more urgently needed now than a vision of a future otherwise; a vision of the way of peace toward which God calls us.
If we cannot discern such a voice, then we are condemned to live out our days rich beyond belief in stuff but fatally impoverished in spirit, adrift in a sea awash in material goods but bereft of meaning.
If we cannot discern such a voice, then we are condemned to live out our days in relationships that have breadth but no depth, that are long on excitement but short on substance, that touch our bodies but not our souls.
If we cannot discern such a voice of hope, then we are condemned to live out our days in churches that provide surface happiness but lack depths of compassion, that seek certainty in place of faith, that practice charity but not justice.
If we cannot discern such a voice of hope, then we are condemned to live out our days in the heart of an empire that wages endless war as it seeks security at the cost of liberty.
Where is hope spoken today? Where do we turn to hear the voice that promises more than to fill our houses in response to the emptiness in our souls; to hear the voice that promises more than desperate housewives and American idols to fill our time in response to the emptiness in our spirits; to hear the voice that promises more than missiles and guns and war without end in response to rage and emptiness in the developing world?
“O God, you are my God,” the psalmist cries.
“I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
The voice of hope is still spoken here, and when faithful people amplify it through faithful living, that hope lives in the world.
Surely it is all too often a still, small voice – a whisper sometimes amidst the clutter of consumption and the cacophony of its culture; the sound of a falling tear and a comforting touch against the aching sadness of war; the sound of a quaking prayer against the roar of terror. Nevertheless, the voice of hope is still spoken here.
Yes it often feels as if we are exiles in a foreign land: a land where people mouth banalities of family values while fomenting the fear and bigotry that lead to violence and war; a land whose leaders cry “peace, peace” when not only is there no peace, but when, in fact, they have led us into war; a land that claims to be more religious than any other but whose megachurch leaders preach a gospel of prosperity but have forgotten compassion and justice and the calling to make peace.
But even when we feel like exiles – indeed, especially when we feel that way – the voice of the prophet to the exiles still rings clear and true. Hear, O peoples, the way of hope, the way of love, the way of peace:
If you remove the yoke from among you, the point of the finger, the speaking of evil
If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
Then your light shall rise in the darkness
And your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
And satisfy your needs in parched places,
And make your bones strong;
And you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
You shall be called the repairer of the breach,
The restorer of streets to live in.
May we hear this voice of hope, may we amplify it through our lives, and may we walk in the way of peace. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
1:40 PM
