The Way of Peace: A Community Conversation
Psalm 146; Micah 4:1-5
September
17, 2017
This
Thursday is the International Day of Peace, and our readings today are actually
the ones that are intended for that occasion.
The day
was designated by the United Nations in 1981. I seriously doubt whether most
folks know about it. I only learned of it about ten years ago when a friend who
worked for On Earth Peace, a faith-based nonprofit peacemaking group, asked me
to write a prayer for something they were doing to mark the day.
It isn’t
really a Hallmark holiday. After all, what’s the appropriate gift for the day?
Does anybody really need one more plowshare or another pruning hook?
But what
if the International Day of Peace was a Hallmark holiday – you know, one of
those days for which there are standard greeting cards? What would such cards
say? What pithy advice might they offer?
I
started down this line of thinking pretty much for the laugh lines, but it got
me to thinking about some deeper questions that I want to set out and talk
together about.
So,
instead of “pithy advice,” what small bits of wisdom might such cards offer to
a world that is weary of violence?
I have a
poster of Dr. King in my study, and he looks out over my desk when I’m writing.
So I’ll offer his well-known definition of peace, inscribed on that poster, as
a starting place: “true peace is not the absence of tension, it is the presence
of justice.”
If that
is what we’re aiming for – true peace, the presence of justice, the beloved
community – then what are the ways to peace? What are the practices that move
us in that direction?
·
Let’s
start at a hyper-local level, and frame the question this way: what makes for
peace within a family?
·
Let’s
move out to a slightly larger field: what makes for peace in a neighborhood?
·
Widening
the lens even further: what makes for peace in a city?
·
How
about at a national level?
·
At the
widest level, what makes for peace internationally?
·
What did
you notice about our responses? Are there common themes about what makes for
peace across various levels of human relationships?
I’m
going to close our conversation this morning giving the final word to the late
Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic priest and spiritual writer who served in the
Dutch army as a young man, and wrestled throughout his life with Christian
peacemaking convictions ranging from Just War Theory advocacy to Christian
pacifism. In an essay that he wrote in the context of Cold War tensions in the
1980s, Nouwen articulated a challenge to the church that continues to ring with
power and resonance in our time:
“[…]
peacemaking can no longer be regarded as peripheral to being a Christian. It is
not something like joining the parish choir. [You can be a follower of Jesus
without singing in the choir, although we welcome every voice!] Nobody can be a
Christian without being a peacemaker. The issue is not that we have the
occasional obligation to give some of our attention to war prevention, or even
that we should be willing to give some of our free time to activities in the
service of peace. What we are called to is a life of peacemaking in which all that we do, say, think, or dream
is part of our concern to bring peace to this world. Just as Jesus’ command to
love one another cannot be seen as a part-time obligation, but requires our
total investment and dedication, so too Jesus’ call to peacemaking is
unconditional, unlimited, and uncompromising. None of us is excused!”[1]
What
would our families, our neighborhoods, our city, our nation, our world look
like if every follower of Jesus lived into this called day by day?
Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
8:18 AM
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