Hilton Head Island, SC – May 27, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 55:6-13; Matthew 26:47-56
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. – Mt. 5:9 (RSV)
When Jesus came riding into Jerusalem on a donkey at the beginning of Holy Week, he came in peace. Symbolically, the animal he rode, a donkey, signified that. No sane person would go anywhere on a donkey, wanting to make it appear that he fiercely intended to wage war.
On that long-ago day, many in the crowd who welcomed Jesus apparently believed he was the Messiah. The twelve disciples may also have believed it. By the time Jesus was born, however, most Jews expected the Messiah to be a warrior. So as far as most of his contemporaries were concerned, Jesus could not possibly be the Messiah.
Jesus came to Jerusalem to wage peace, Christian people; he has always come only to wage peace. War was anathema to him, as it should be to us.
Indirectly, he said as much within days or at most a few weeks of the beginning of his public ministry near the lakeside in the northern part of Judea when he delivered the Beatitudes as the opening part of the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus, “for they shall be called the sons of God.” Was he hinting already that he was a son of God, or the Son of God? I don’t think so. He was telling all of us that if we want to be perceived as daughters or sons of God, we must seek to bring peace to the world. The children of God must be peacemakers.
In Hebrew the word for “peace” is shalom. Jerusalem is, in Hebrew, Yerushalayim. The word means “City of Peace.”
“Shalom Aleichem,” Peace be with you, Israel Jews say to Israeli Jews --- but they probably don’t say that to Israeli Arabs. “Salaam alikum,” say Israeli Arabs to Israeli Arabs --- but they probably don’t say that to Israeli Jews. The day the American Embassy in Israel was officially opened in Jerusalem, over sixty protesting Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli troops, and over twenty-seven hundred Gazans were injured. “Peace” seems forever elusive in the Middle East.
So, precisely what kind of peace are we talking about here? When Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God,” I think he was talking primarily about peace among individuals, not peace among nations or ethnic groups. Personal or
interpersonal peace is very important. Without it, life can be far too challenging and unproductive.
Nevertheless, it may not be any easier to create and sustain real peace among individuals than among nations. An example of that truth may be seen in Louis Auchincloss’s novel The Winthrop Covenant. It is about some fictional descendants of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Colony of Massachusetts. It was Winthrop who declared that America was to be a city set on a hill, using terminology of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. In some of the novel’s characters, there is a strongly moralistic streak, of which the author does not approve.
Toward the end of the novel, Louis Auchincloss tells about Danny Buck, who was the chaplain and right-hand-man to Titus Larsen, the headmaster of a private New England boys prep school called Farmington. Titus Larsen was something of a stiff-necked Puritan in the mid-20th century, and it was Danny’s unspoken assignment to be the buffer between the faculty and their moralistic headmaster. One day, after chapel, the headmaster threw the remainder of the communion wine out the window rather than having the two priests drinking all of it, as liturgical custom dictated. The cascading wine happened to fall on the head of one of the leading students of the school, who instantly let fly a string of colorful expletives. This the headmaster could not abide, even though it was he who initially was at fault. It happened that the student’s father had been a major donor to the school. Nonetheless, Titus Larsen decided to expel the miscreant explosive linguist. Knowing that would be disastrous for everyone, Danny went to the headmaster’s wife, asking her to intervene.
Perhaps you are wondering how it all turned out. I am not going to tell you. You’ll just have to read the novel for yourself. But the point is this: trying to make peace among squabbling individuals is a hard task. Those who succeed are surely children of God.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was 27 years old, he was a young pastor living in Montgomery, Alabama. One evening around midnight, the phone rang. The voice on the other end of the phone line said, “[Blank]” (I won’t say the word the caller used,) “we’re tired of you and your mess. If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.” Years later, Dr. King recalled his thoughts following that terrifying conversation to someone interviewing him. He said he remembered comparing the lovely smile of his newborn daughter with the prospect of someone killing her. He knew he couldn’t call on his parents to extricate him from his dilemma. Somehow he summoned the power that would help him find his way through it. He said, “I had to know God for myself. I bowed my head over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it. I prayed…and I discovered then that peace had to become real to me…. I could hear a voice saying, ‘Stand up for peace. Stand up for truth.’”
We need to do better than is our tendency for maintaining peace between ourselves and those around us from whom we have the greatest estrangement or rancor. You and I have known people like the man who made that menacing phone call. We need to be peacemakers with them and to make peace with our own personal adversaries. We can do it; all of us can. But shall we do it? Making peace takes courage. Making trouble may be the coward’s way out.
The Rev. Dr. James M. Lawson was one of Martin Luther King’s closest associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Council. He was the pastor of a church in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. With other Memphis church leaders, he asked Dr. King to come to Memphis on that historic April day to try to help convince the city council to increase the pay and benefits for sanitation workers, thus achieving peace and justice in a deeply divided city.
Recently James Lawson was interviewed by one of the editors of the Christian Century magazine. He was asked what inspired him to embrace the principle of nonviolent resistance. He said, “In fourth grade I had an exchange of blows with a boy who had used a racist slur. I told my mother about it. I remember that she had her back to me in the kitchen, working on the evening meal no doubt, and without turning to face me, she said, ‘Jimmy, what good would that do?’ She went on to talk about who we were and about the love of God and Jesus, and ended by saying, ‘There must be a better way.’
“Later, when I was in college,” said James Lawson, “I had a mystical experience, and part of that was hearing a voice also saying, ‘There must be a better way.’ By the time I was in high school, I knew I had to be a pastor. I knew the way of Jesus was the way for me.”
Interpersonal peace is what Jesus was likely referring to in the Beatitudes. But peace among individuals also has relevance for peace among nations. In fact, international peace begins with peace among individuals. Heads of state, diplomats, and statesmen need to learn to make peace with all the individuals in their lives before they can ever start to lay lasting foundations for peace among nations.
Oscar Wilde wrote his famous Letter from Reading Gaol after he had been arrested for the early twentieth-century British crime of being a gay man. This, of course, was before that term meant what it means now. In 1963 Martin Luther King wrote his even more-famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail after he and others had been arrested by Bull Connor for a peaceful, non-violent protest against unjust laws. Mr. Connor was the chief of police and the primary “keeper of the peace” in Birmingham, Alabama in the days when civil rights violations were rampant throughout the USA, especially in the South.
At the end of his long essay written behind bars, Dr. King said to those who had imprisoned him and his friends, “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocations. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, “My feets is tired, but my soul is refreshed.” They will be the young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and non-violently sitting-in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
Interpersonal peace is what the seventh Beatitude was about, but inter-ethnic or inter-religious or international peace is what the Garden of Gethsemane was about. Jesus did not come into Jerusalem intending to pick a fight with anyone. He did intend to proclaim the truth of God as he saw it, and he knew that would probably rub some people the wrong way when he did it. But he certainly did not mean to inflame or enrage anyone, particularly not the Romans, who held every political card in the deck. No Jews could legally attack or execute Jesus, and Jesus knew it. But if the Romans so decided, they could put him on a cross in a Jerusalem minute. And when they feared that things were rapidly getting out of hand, that is exactly what they did. It was in Gethsemane where Jesus encountered political power in its crudest and most elemental form.
By the time of the Last Supper, it was evident to Jesus that he had only a few more hours to live. After the Passover meal was finished, Jesus went with the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. It was while they were there that Jesus was arrested. The three Synoptic Gospels say that in an irrational act of defiance, one of the disciples cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave with a sword. None of them identified the disciple. Only John says it was Peter who raised the sword. Luke, but only Luke, says Jesus immediately restored the severed ear of the slave. However, all four Gospels have Jesus say these or similar words, “Put back your sword, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
The three greatest twentieth-century proponents of non-violent resistance were Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. All three were people of color. That should not surprise anyone. Two were assassinated, and one was imprisoned for decades until, at last, he was freed. Then Mr. Mandela led one of the most astonishing and peaceful transitions of power from the oppressors to the oppressed that the world has ever seen.
There has been a general pattern throughout the world for the past six centuries. It is this: wherever white people have either been in the majority in any nation or have held most of the political power, they have kept people of color in subjugation. It is mainly the result of European colonialism from the fifteenth century onward. Having conquered native peoples in various areas of the world, white Europeans held them in figurative or literal bondage for generations, until they finally recognized the folly of their policies. Then they gave the captured peoples their freedom.
There can be no genuine peace in situations of subjugation. Oppressed people all over the globe are yearning for the type of liberty that came when the American colonists threw off the yoke of the British monarch. It might have happened without bloodshed, but the British crown never for a moment considered such a reasoned resolution.
Peace must start by everyone getting along with all other individuals around them. That is what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. But from there it can grow into situations where North and South Koreans terminate an uneasy armistice of sixty-five years for a permanent peace treaty for the foreseeable future. Shiite Iran can learn to live in peace with its Sunni neighbors, as difficult as that may be for everyone. Afghanistan and Iraq can progress from being nations with growing armies and shrinking economies to becoming states of shrinking armies and growing economies. It is far more profitable to follow that policy in every sense of that word.
Most heads of state in most countries for most of history have been men. Why is it that men are far more likely to wage war than they are to wage peace? Are male hormones the greatest danger that the world has ever known? Might we better off if more women were the leaders of more countries? What woman, other than Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher, ever led a nation into a significant war? Of course there have still been very few females at the pinnacles of power, but of those who got there, how many started major armed conflicts?
There is always a price to be paid for peace. Nevertheless, the price of animosity or warfare is almost always much higher than the price of peace. Many people are fundamentally opposed to peace. They must become convinced of the principles of peace, and that is a very hard task to accomplish. In the long run, however, unprincipled peace, if there is such a thing, may be better than principled war - - - if there is such a thing.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God!