Dec 2, 2007 - Peace Through Nonviolence

Advent 1
December 2, 2007
W. Gregory Pope
LIVING IN THE LIGHT OF GOD:
PEACE THROUGH NONVIOLENCE
Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44

What do you believe our world needs more than anything?

Miss America beauty pageant contestants (other than teaching us geography lessons) usually give voice to the generic desire of most of us when she expresses the desire for world peace. Few are those who do not want to sit down with their families in peace, safe in their homes, allowing their children to play freely in the neighborhood, in a world where nations are at peace with one another.

World peace is a worthy desire and necessary aim, but it requires more than wishful dreaming. Martin Luther Kings said, “Many people cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.” World peace requires that we all learn the ways that make for peace.

Peacemaking today is the work of giving a future to humanity, making it possible to continue our life together on this planet.

If we continue to live without peace, ultimately moving toward the world’s annihilation, nothing else will matter, not even freedom or democracy, for no one will be alive to enjoy it.

We have to find a way to make the word “peace” as important as the word “freedom." (1)

The ways that make for peace are ways that can be learned and lived by those who do not even believe in God. But for those of us who do believe in God, we must learn to live in God’s light and lead the first steps toward peace so that others may follow.

Invitation to Pilgrimage

Isaiah invites us all to take those first steps toward peace by taking a pilgrimage to “the mountain of the Lord’s house,” Jerusalem.

The peace of Jerusalem is the passionate concern of Psalm 122. The name “Jerusalem” is built on the Hebrew word for peace, shalom. Ironically, the city sacred to all three of the world’s monotheistic religions, whose name symbolizes peace, has proven throughout history to be one of the most fought over cities in the world.

This psalm calls us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. As a congregation we are encouraging one another to read the Sunday scriptures during the preceding week. We read the psalm on Wednesday. Dorothy Spurr brought to my attention that this Wednesday as we read Psalm 122, calling us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, Israelis and Palestinians were meeting in Annapolis to begin peace talks. Yes, the psalms can still be prayed today.

We do pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and not because of some crazy end-time scenario, but as the holy land that it is, the beloved center of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And I wonder, as we move through Advent, if a significant part of our pilgrimage of peace would be a spiritual journey back to the center of the religious world as a place of meaning, back to the place where the Prince of Peace walked the earth, the place where on Christmas Eve we will bow our hearts before the manger.

Perhaps we will answer Isaiah’s call to go up to the mountain of the Lord, where God will teach us God’s ways and we will learn to walk more faithfully in God’s light.

In that pilgrimage our prayer will be that we will find the Prince of Peace walking among us in our own neighborhoods, at work, at school, at home, throughout our city and country, beginning in our own hearts.

This Advent season we are taking a pilgrimage of peace where we will seek to learn four crucial elements of peace: non-violence, justice, vision, and hope.

If our desires for peace are going to run deeper than the desires of Miss America hopefuls:

1) we have to agree not to harm one another and make a commitment to non-violence;

2) we have to acknowledge the root causes of violence such as poverty, greed, fear and injustice and make a commitment to justice;

3) we have to see a vision of what peace looks like and keep our eyes fixed on that vision;

4) and we have to root our hope in the way of Jesus, Immanuel, come to save us from our sinful warring madness.

These four elements - non-violence, justice, vision, and hope - will serve as markers of learning along our pilgrimage during these four Sundays of Advent.

So come, let’s heed Isaiah’s call and make this pilgrimage to the mountain of God. But let there be no mistake: “this is no sightseeing trip but a purposeful journey to a holy place”(2) to learn the ways of God and commit ourselves to live in God’s light so that we can live together as God dreamed we would.

The Way of Nonviolence

Today, the first lesson along the pilgrimage is Peace through Nonviolence.

In my son Ryan’s childcare classroom for two-year-olds, there’s a sign that says, “When we are angry we only use words.” With his tendency to throw things, I think they put it up just for him. He just needs to hurry up and learn to read! “When we are angry, we only use words.”

Perhaps that sign should hang in the office of every world leader. Because Isaiah’s vision is one of peace for all peoples. It is the same peace on earth announced by the angels to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth, an announcement we are preparing ourselves to hear on Christmas Eve.

Isaiah’s vision is that one day God will settle things fairly and make things right between peoples and nations and we won’t learn or practice war anymore. But God’s will is that nonviolence and justice rule in the here and now, not just in the sweet by and by.

And that requires our partnership with God. When you read Isaiah carefully you see that he says God will settle things fairly, but we must turn our swords into shovels and our spears into farming equipment. God will teach us but we must act, we must turn the purpose of fighter jets from bomb drops to food drops, and we must transform the barrels of our guns into pipes for fresh water. Nations not God destroy the weapons of war.

We must take part in the healing of our world by taking the money spent on instruments of war that kill and destroy and spend the money instead on instruments of farming and agriculture and health care that feed and give life. Isaiah says the way to peace is to turn instruments of war into tools that feed people.

It may be in the brokenness and evil of our world that sometimes the violence of others must be stopped by force. But rarely is that the true reason for war. Money, oil, control, our idolized way of life - this is what we are after. And it’s all because we are so afraid.

We classify our foes as enemies of peace and freedom. But the poet offers a cutting question when he asks: “Did you finish killing / everybody who was against peace?”(3)

Benjamin Franklin was right: There was never a good war or a bad peace.

Pleas have been made for our government to create a Department of Peace, only to be met with scorn and ridicule. Peace is weak. Strength is in force.

But Jesus said no to violence and pronounced God’s blessing on peacemakers.

We gather on God’s mountain to learn the way of peace.

Henri Nouwen says the way to peace is learned through prayer, resistance, and community (4).

Prayer

On God’s mountain we learn the way of peace as we pray.

Praying can sound so passive. It is often considered the opposite of action, but that is not the case. Prayer is the beginning, the source, the core, and the basis of all peacemaking. Prayer is living in the presence of God with an open heart ready to be shaped in the ways of God and illumined by the light of God.

When in our anger we want to use more than words, when world leaders feed on our fears and we seek revenge, and when Miss America no longer speaks for us in our desire for world peace, prayer can reshape our desire.

When the desires for money, oil, national security and the protection of our way of life are greater than the desire for peace, we pray that God would transform our hearts and change our desires.

To pray is to seek wisdom and guidance in the ways that make for peace. And to pray for peace in the name of the Christ is to seek to do so nonviolently, without retaliation.

Nouwen says: When we want to make peace we first of all have to move away (spiritually speaking) from the dwelling places of those who hate peace. To pray is to leave the house of fear and journey toward the house of love and peace. This entering into a new dwelling place is what prayer is all about. Prayer is a “radical interruption” of those dependencies that lead to violence and war and an entering into an entirely new dwelling place (5). It’s what happens when we go up to the mountain of the Lord’s house.

In a world as dangerous as ours, prayer doesn’t mean much if it is seen only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter or as a source of consolation. In face of the destruction we are capable of, prayer makes sense only when it is an act of stripping oneself of everything, even our own lives, so as to be totally free to belong to God and God alone. (6)

It happens in worship. The psalmist calls us to worship where we learn to desire and pray for peace. In worship through prayer and the reading of scripture we hear of God’s vision for the world and our desire for what God wants is given the opportunity to intensify and grow. We let Christ continue his work of salvation among us. We dress ourselves in Christ putting on the armor of light, which is the armor of peace not violence.

Resistance

Prayer leads us right into the world where we must take act and resist the violence and evil around us. Without returning evil for evil, we engage in what Gandhi and Martin Luther King practiced: nonviolent resistance.

Gandhi brought change to India through peaceful nonviolence over the British occupiers, teaching us along the way that an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Martin Luther King and his followers brought civil rights for African Americans through nonviolent resistance.

It cost both of them their lives.

Nonviolent peacemakers expose the violence of the violent who only know violence and so the violent silence the peacemakers.

King said that the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites - acquiescence and violence - while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both. The nonviolent resister agrees with the person who acquiesces that one should not be physically aggressive toward one’s opponent. The nonviolent resister agrees with the person of violence that evil must be resisted. With nonviolent resistance, no individual or group need to submit to any wrong, nor need anyone resort to violence in order to right a wrong.

Community

So let’s join the army and be all we can be, a peace army of nonviolent resisters. Let’s not learn war anymore. Let’s live and walk together in the light of God’s peace. Together in community.

All of our prayers and all of our resistance are rooted in community.

We resist violence as a community.

We see the world as one community.

Peacemakers are those whose hearts are so anchored in God that they do not need to evaluate, criticize or judge others. They can see their neighbors - whether they are Americans, Iraqis, French, African, Asian, or Vietnamese - as fellow human beings, fellows sinners, fellow saints, men and women who need to be listened to, looked at, and cared for with the love of God. And we need to recognize that we belong to the same human family.

Live in the Light of God

Nouwen says there is a “no” of resistance, resisting the forces of death all around us. But the “no” of resistance is only meaningful if we embrace the “yes” of resistance, affirming life. The desert fathers of the fourth century advised their disciples to focus on God’s light instead of paying so much attention to the world’s darkness. (7)

Have you ever noticed how there seems to be so little peace in the hearts of some who are called peacemakers. Peacemakers are sometimes seen as fearful angry people trying to convince others of the urgency of their protest. They have embraced the “no” of resistance but have not found the “yes” of affirming life and pointing others to God’s light.

Part of what Paul was saying to the Romans is that we need to recognize that Christ’s coming has already begun to make a difference in this conflict between light and darkness. Things may be dark but not as dark as they might have been otherwise. The light of Christ is already giving forth significant illumination and we are called to live in that light. (8)

Let us continue the pilgrimage to God’s mountain where God will teach us to live in God’s light. We don’t have to live in valleys of darkness where we hate and kill and act in cruelty. There’s a high mountain of truth thrusting itself into the sun, solid and splendid in the light. We have been summoned to the mountain to come with a teachable heart, to listen with eager ears, and live out what we learn there. (9)

__________________________

1. Henri Nouwen, Peacework, Orbis, 2005, 22.
2. Gene Tucker, “Isaiah 1-39,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VI, Abingdon, 2001, 67
3. Wendell Berry, “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer,” Collected Poems 1957-1982, North Point, 1985, 121
4. Nouwen, Peacework.
5. Ibid., 12, 26, 32.
6. Ibid., 41
7. Ibid., 68-69
8. Carl Holladay, Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year A, Trinity Press, 1992, 9
9. Eugene Peterson, Conversations, NavPress, 2007, 1033


"chbc blogger" pasted to this site the above sermon by Greg Pope. Subsequent comments by "chbc blogger" are not those of Greg Pope.