The Heart of the Gospel: #3 The Peacemakers A Sermon by Rev. Michael Scott The Dublin Community Church

July 5, 2015 Matthew 5:1-11

Today I conclude the three-part series based on the Beatitudes. I have been trying to encourage us all to consider what, if anything, you and I individually or collectively as a church are prepared to stand either for or against. We have been taking up some of the central themes of Jesus’s ministry as reflected in his “sermon on the mount”. Today I’d like to reflect on his words: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

Yesterday was Independence Day, when we celebrate the founding of our nation. At its best it is a time not simply to remember our history, but to reflect deeply on all our tomorrows, and how that future is informed by the principles that define us. And if there was one driving force behind the impulse to create this nation it is the dream of a people who live in freedom and equality. The founders of this great country had a vision in which all citizens could live together peacefully, sharing the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It might be said that, although America was founded through the bloody instrumentality of war, we are, at heart, a people who desire for ourselves and all people only peace. Unfortunately, that ideal has been frequently lost in the wilderness of unreasoned fear, political posturing, and narrowly defined national interests. Our souls are soaked in the pernicious human propensity toward violence. Rather than being the reviled and distasteful last resort of desperation, violence is often one of the first and most trusted tools in the box. Walter Wink pointed out that, “Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death. . . . this myth of redemptive violence undergirds American popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy, and . . . it lies coiled like an ancient serpent at the root of the system of domination that has characterized human existence since well before Babylon ruled supreme.”1

Wink’s analysis is insightful. And the pervasive violence of our society is not simply the overt kind of fisticuffs and warfare; our language, our social interactions, and our corporate strategies are all born and bred in a culture of aggression and ferocity. C. S. Lewis put it well. “I live in the Managerial Age,” he wrote, “in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”2

So, what are we to do, immersed as we are in this culture of both noisy and quiet

1 Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Fortress Press, 1992, p. 13.

2 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Annotated Edition, Harper One, 2013, Preface, xxxvii violence? Jesus said that the peacemakers are blessed because they are members of a larger family. So, perhaps the place to begin is with our allegiances. I love this country, and I am proud to be an American. But the greatness of America lies not in its foreign policies or its brilliant leadership. Our nation is only as great as the dream that inspires it. The idea that is America is an imperfect but serious attempt to make real that greater realm of which Jesus spoke and of which you and I are inheritors. And so, our allegiance must not be to the actions, decisions, and statements that emerge in any age from our leaders, it must be to that greater idea, that larger realm that tells us who we are at our best. In short, we must be those who strive in all ways to build a world in which all of God’s children can enjoy the fruits of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and live together in peace.

And so, making peace begins in one’s own heart. Did you ever notice how the true peacemakers in this world are generally the peacefinders and peaceholders? I think it’s difficult and may be impossible to make peace with others before making peace with one’s self. I was struck this week by comments I read delivered by the actor Denzel Washington who was commencement speaker at Dillard University in May. Addressing the graduates he said, “. . . I pray that you put your slippers way under the bed tonight, so that when you get up in the morning, you have to get on your knees to reach them . . . . And while you’re down there, say thank you. Thank you for grace, thank you for mercy, thank you for understanding, thank you for wisdom, thank you for parents, thank you for love, thank you for kindness, thank you for humility, thank you for peace, thank you for prosperity. Say thank you in advance for what’s already yours. . . . True desire in the heart for anything good is God’s proof to you to sent before hand to indicate that it’s yours already.”3 Honestly, I didn’t know that Denzel was a man of faith, but apparently he has considered going into the ministry on several occasions. At any rate, he makes a wonderful point. The best way to put your life together and make peace with yourself is to foster a deep and abiding gratitude. It is from such a heart of gratitude that peace radiates and can infect whole communities, and sometimes even nations. We have seen it writ large in people like Gandhi, and we see it closer to home in those precious souls who reflect a deeper, gentler, and more loving way of being, and who inspire us to want to be more than we are.

So, in a world and a culture that is virtually dripping with the blood of hateful speech and violent actions and in which sanity is defined by scoring victories through aggression and competition to win at the expense of others, perhaps we have to be a little “crazy” to be peacemakers.

In Mark Twain’s story, “The War Prayer,” a congregation is gathered on a Sunday morning when the town’s boys are being sent off to fight in the war. A long prayer was offered for the aid and comfort of the soldiers, for their courage in battle, and for the defeat of the enemy. When the prayer was over, an old man stepped forward and spoke up: “I come from the Throne bearing a message from Almighty God!” he declared. Then he reworded their prayer offering its deeper, unspoken implications: “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help

3 Christian News Network, May 11, 2015. us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst . . .” And on he went, relating the deeper meaning of their prayer. Twain concludes the story with one brief sentence: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”4

What will we stand for and what will we stand against? On this Independence Day weekend, I would choose to stand for the deepest ideals that drive the idea that is America. I would stand for freedom and justice for all people. And I want to stand for tolerance and against violence. I want to stand for peace and against war. Here is my prayer for us this morning: May we be numbered among the lunatics who believe that peace is not a pipedream, and not even a remote possibility, but is the ultimate destiny of humankind. May we be so off our rockers that we are bold enough to seek out peace in our own lives and model it for others, believing that one small flame can be the beginning of light for the world. May we be crazy enough to be counted among the peacemakers and silly enough to believe that we will be called children of God.

4 Mark Twain, “The War Prayer” in Mark Twain on Religion: What is Man, The War Prayer, Thou Shalt Not Kill, The Fly, Letters from the Earth, Forgotten Books, 2007, p. 345. Pastoral Prayer

O God, your Spirit constantly refreshes us with the reassurance of your love, expressed to us in the freedom that lives in our souls and beats in our hearts. We are filled with joy as we consider the blessings of this great land, and of all that we owe to those who have gone before us and helped to secure our liberty. Help us, we pray, to never take those blessings for granted nor to squander our freedom through carelessness and greed. We thank you for the abundance of our good earth and the fullness that such abundance brings to our lives. Help us, we pray, to neither horde your good gifts nor savor them mindless of all those who live in want. Give us thankful hearts, we pray. We treasure the rights that we hold dear as citizens of this nation, the principles that guide us and comprise a high and noble ideal. Help us, we pray, to not abuse those principles, nor to allow them to crumble to dust in our haste to serve lesser ends.

God of justice, show us the brighter path, the higher good, the better way. Lead us to fulfill the great promise that resides in the soul of America. And make each one of us ardent laborers in the timeless work of establishing not only a realm of our own design, but of working with our sisters and brothers of many lands and cultures to bring about your kingdom of justice and peace on this earth.

We pray this with fervent hearts, and lift up the prayer that Jesus taught us:

“Our father, who art in heaven . . .”