No matter what, to preach a Peace Sunday sermon is of necessity to stride right into the middle of the debate about whether or not Peace is possible, or where or how it is possible. Doug and Jane gave us a glimpse of that debate.
Person A writes: “nonviolence”
Person B writes: “naive”
A: faithfulness
B: effectiveness
A: God’s peace
B: peace in the real world
A: God’s peace is real
B: But what about, ____________, life on the street? police brutality? Libya? Syria? violence against the land?
The list of painfully conflicted and non-peaceful situations in our lives and cities and world seems endless. In last year’s Peace Sunday’s sermon, Michele chose not to skirt around the realities of the lack of peace in our world by composing and delivering a powerful lament that revealed both the reality of violence in our world and our deep longing for Peace; real peace; God’s peace.
The task of peace-making, in a violent world, the nonviolent peace-making that we read about in the Sermon on the Mount, our primary text for today, may seem truly daunting.
It may even feel a bit like hand-rowing a boat across the Dardanelles.
Naïve? Impossible? The person rowing the tiny boat in this picture doesn’t think so. He’s got his boat and oars and he’s heading across the strait.
The focus for my sermon today is the boat and the oars that make non-violent peace-making in a violent world both imaginable and possible.
I’ll start with the boat. I contend that the boat that keeps us afloat in a non-peaceful world is the belief that an alternative world is at least imaginable and by the grace and power of God – possible.
In the Sermon on the Mount, we are being asked to imagine and live into just such an alternative world. Matthew helps us imagine the alternative world of Jesus’ words by placing this sermon and these words in a location that allowed for a vista of the real world within which Jesus’ first hearers lived.
Matthew has Jesus climbing a mountain, taking a seat, and as his disciples gathered round, beginning to teach them. In one of the only places where the possibility of this story makes sense in the current land of Israel/Palestine – not far from Capernaum, if one sits and faces the orator or teacher in the natural amphitheatre of the landscape there, one has a vista of the breadth and length of the Sea of Galilee. At this location one is facing south with the western shore of the sea on your right where in Jesus’ time the largest concentration of Jewish villages in this area could be found, with Tiberius, the seat of the Jewish Tetrarch – further down the shore. And on the eastern or your left hand side could be found the Roman cities of the Decapolis, and just down the hill at your feet on the north shore of the lake is Capernaum – a village close to the Roman road that passes just north of the sea with both a synagogue and a Roman garrison that housed centurions.
With this vista,
in fact directly on top of this picture of Roman Empire and oppression on the one hand,
and the religious struggle by the Pharisees and Sadducees for faithful responses to the problems of the Roman occupation on the other,
on top of all of this,
in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus paints another picture.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – for theirs is the empire of heaven, they will be comforted, they shall inherit the earth, and they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace-makers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for they will receive mercy, will see God, will be called children of God and theirs is the empire of heaven.
That’s how the sermon begins.
The Sermon on the Mount ends with a story about wise men and foolish men. The wise person is the one who hears these words of Jesus and acts on them. This is the person who builds his house on a rock. When the winds blow and the rains fall and the floods come, this house will stand firm. The foolish person is the one who hears these words of Jesus and does not act on them. It is as if this person has built his house on the sand so that when the wind and rains and floods come, this house will fall and great will be its fall.
So, in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount we have a picture of an upside down world where the least likely are Bless-ed and in the end we have a powerful exhortation to act on what we have heard.
In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, and in Middle Eastern oral tradition and culture the middle of many orations is the most important part, we find the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your empire come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven….
In the middle w
e have the only reason
the seemingly impossible becomes possible – by the power and grace of God.
This “Sermon on the Mount world” is the world we are invited to live into supported by daily prayer to the One whose peaceful empire we aspire to attain. It is an empire where we are called to love our enemies, pray for our persecutors, turn the other cheek, give to the one who asks for our cloak our undergarment also, and to go the second mile. We are also enjoined to give to everyone who begs from us and to not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from us. I’m not sure why we skip over this last part. I know I’m not as familiar with this last injunction as I am with the others; maybe because it’s about money. What we do with our money is possibly the most difficult injunction of all.
Be that as it may, if this image of the world, painted by the Sermon on the Mount is our boat, then the Lord’s prayer might be the ribs of the boat that hold it together. And the water upon which our boat floats is a world that is experiencing the rough waves of an economy that is faltering, increasing distance between rich and poor, and insidious slavery to a culture that constantly bombards us with messages that we never have enough and are inadequate if we don’t buy this or that.
Now, what about the oars? I said that my sermon would focus on the boat and the oars. If the boat is the image of the Empire we are called to imagine and strive to attain and prayer is like the ribs of the boat that hold it together, I think peace-making practices and disciplines are the oars that propel us forward.
Early in my thinking about this sermon, I knew that I would need some help coming up with peace-making practices and disciplines and so you might have received an email from me this week asking you for examples that I could use in this sermon. I suspected there were people among us who have given more time and attention to this matter than I have and I wanted to draw on our collective wisdom.
From among the thoughts and examples of peace-making practices I received from within our congregation, the oars if you will, feel free to grab onto any one of them.
You never know when you may need them and some boats allow for lots of rowing.
Also, rowing is something even children can do.
Speaking of children, Doug Pritchard told me about a book that he and Jane found very helpful when they were raising their young children. It was called, “Parenting for Peace and Justice.” The most valuable suggestion in the book they found was the suggestion for regular or weekly meetings where conflicts and/or tensions in the home could be discussed at a family meeting. Doug reports that this slowed them down as parents and allowed them to listen more carefully to the children. These meetings allowed the children to develop confidence that they would be heard fully and together the family could work together to solve tensions among them. I’m aware that other families take or try to take their tensions to the “table” or other gatherings among themselves to talk about them. Of course this is challenging if slightly older children begin to refuse to come to the table, either literally or figuratively. This has also become a challenge in a society where external pressures and commitments make time at the table over a family meal extremely limited. In the resource that Doug and Jane were using these family gatherings included games or dessert as well so they wouldn’t begin to feel, Doug tells me, like the Nuremburg trials. Other practices included taking the children to family friendly marches and demonstrations. Doug recalls a time when the family attended a film series on food justice. This provided opportunity for an ever-expanding discussion that now took place in the grocery store as well about the food they should or shouldn’t buy.
I received the following idea about practices for peace-making from Susie Guenther Loewen. She writes,
Something I try to do when I’m in situations of conflict with friends or family members is to set aside a time to speak with them privately – the sooner the better, but not in the heat of the moment. I try to plan out carefully what to say so that I will get my concerns across honestly without being hurtful or whiny, and I try to ask about and listen to their concerns as well. I remember a lot of these little talks were necessary with one of my roommates in university, to deal with all the little tensions that arise when living with another person in close quarters – tensions that can easily get out of hand.
In a way, it’s just the principle of the good communication needed to maintain any relationship. Depending on the issue at hand, though, and one’s relationship with the other person, it can take a lot of nerve, and there have been times when I haven’t had the courage to do something like this, when I let things go unsaid that I probably should’ve articulated (like apologies).
Finally, Shirley Sherk wrote in an email that the first things that came to her mind when I asked about practices and disciplines to prepare for peace making were the following:
Be sincere and honest. I don’t raise my voice and I look people in the eye.
Listen, listen, listen (ask questions).
Get to know the people and issues involved.
Peace-making is almost a lifestyle, a way of living.
That doesn’t work for one-time flash-point type conflict issues though. It depends on the situation.
And then Shirley told me the following story and I tell it in her words.
For instance, last week I, along with many others, were at the Bathurst Station, waiting for the streetcar to arrive. The wait for a 511 streetcar can sometimes be 25 minutes, so tempers often flare.
Behind me I heard a woman start to speak in a loud, confrontational voice. She had spotted a Canadian soldier, in full uniform, waiting with the rest of us. She began moving closer to him, shaking her finger at him, staring at him, asking if he was Somali and where was he from, and ranting about bastards and african wars and Germans and blacks and colonial dictators and Gadahfi, etc.. The soldier did not respond to her questions and he tried hard not to look at her. Others were becoming uncomfortable – no TTC supervisor was in sight. I casually and slowly walked between them, as though milling about with the crowd. This seemed to break her focus and she stopped talking and moved back a few steps. The streetcar arrived and about 30 people got on.
I noticed that the soldier went straight to the back, followed by a couple of other guys who were shaking their heads. The soldier sat down with an obvious sigh of relief – the woman was not on the streetcar. But just as the doors were closing she hopped on. When she saw the soldier she started ranting again and was headed his way. I got up from my seat and went to the back and sat beside him. We began chatting. The woman stopped and watched us for a bit. Then she turned the other way and got off at the next stop, much to everyone’s relief. (I’m not sure why the streetcar driver didn’t intervene…..).
The soldier told me that it was the first time something like this has happened to him since he joined six years ago, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. He said he couldn’t say anything to her because he’s in uniform. He figured that something about his uniform must have set her off, although she didn’t seem to be drunk or high or mentally unstable.
Anyway, I became involved in a non-threatening way, and I don’t think I put anyone in danger, myself included.
And that was Shirley’s story.
What I note as common to all three persons’ reflections is how peace-making practices and disciplines are about thinking about and treating the other with the same dignity and respect with which one expects to be treated. Did you know that our TUMC Discussion Guidelines and Covenant where we promise to respect each other, listen, allow for uninterrupted speaking, take ownership for our own thoughts and feelings, focus on the problem not the person, etcetera are prime examples of peace-making, peace-keeping practices?
Peace-making is both about refusing to dominate and refusing to be demeaned and dominated by acting in respectful ways towards both oneself and the other. In this way, “loving the enemy,” (the most difficult end of the spectrum of peace-making) is to refuse to let the enemy become less than human in our eyes. And these examples also make it clear that there are things we can do in ongoing ways that prepare us (getting back to my boat and oars metaphor) for the choppiest of waters.
In the Sermon on the Mount we catch a glimpse of God through Christ’s desire for a redeemed and reconciled world. It is both what we strive for in the here and now and where we are headed.
The picture in the Sermon on the Mount along with the daily prayer named at it’s core helps us to believe and imagine and act into a world where love is more powerful than fear or hate and a world where God is at work powerfully to do more than we can ask or imagine. We would be very wise to act on its words.
I would like to conclude my sermon with one more slide about the profound need for and power of peace-making in the Empire of heaven.
There are some among us who have known war. There are many among us who have not. It is unlikely that any of us here, at least in the near future, will be faced with the kind of choice that led this woman to walk towards these soldiers in this way. I don’t know her story. I know only that she is an Uyghur (ooy- goor) woman, of Turkic ethnicity. Many Uyghur people live in the People’s Republic of China. Chinese lettering on this armored truck makes that location probable.
I do not know how this story started or how it ends.
In this picture all I know is that this woman is refusing in her own mind and the world and faith that sustains her to allow either her enemy or herself to become less than human. Her action here demands the best from herself and invites the best from her apparent enemy. Her boat is strong and her oars are powerful. The Empire of heaven as envisioned in the Sermon on the Mount is at hand. Blessed are the peace-makers for they will be called Children of God.