Dear Friends,
After taking some time away to see some beautiful sights(Lake Tahoe and Ashland, Oregon), I am looking forward to my “return engagement” with you in our Sunday morning worship this week. I will be concluding my sermon series on the radical teachings that we know asthe Beatitudes. I trust that you will agree that these teachings are truly “counter-cultural” in the sense that they directly challenge our conventional wisdom and contemporary assumptions. Used as a measuring stick, they serve to remind us of the fact that those who choose to follow Jesus and his teaching are not likely to fit comfortably in a culture that often holds a very different opinion concerning the “good life” and what it looks like.
Take, for example, the matter of making peace, which is our concluding focus for this coming Sunday. Jesus teaches, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” This beatitude suggests that those who make peace will discover the joyful blessing of being a child of God. But what does it actually mean to make peace?
Some will insist that, as strange as it may sound, peace issomething that is made through conflict. They believe that war can serve as a prelude to peace. I am inclined,however, to think that this is merely wishful thinking. War, I believe, serves only as a prelude to more war.
The famous “Pax Romana” (the Roman peace that existedroughly between 27 BC and 192 AD) was ushered in by Roman violence and threat (imperial power). Although there was a noted lack of conflict during the Pax Romana, it did nothing to resolve the issues and the tensions that existed with the people who were most directly impacted by the influence of Rome. Those tensions were still there, simmering and threatening to boil over at the nextopportunity. Roman peace managed, for a while, to keep a lid on the tensions that would one day explode into violence once more. In other words, the Roman Peace was not really peace—at least as Jesus chose to define it.
The peace that Jesus was referring to had to do with morethan merely the absence of conflict and war. The Hebrew understanding of peace (shalom) is one that advocates theidea of wholeness—restoring wholeness to relationships that have been broken and damaged. True peace, then, is made only when broken relationships have been healed and restored. It is something that takes time and effort. It takes a willingness to see the other as a human being, worthy of respect and, ideally, love.
When understood in this light, we can begin to see just how radical this Beatitude about peace really is. It suggests that peace can NEVER be attained through violence, but only through non-violent commitment to heal and restore the relationship that has been broken.
I can’t help but wonder about what such an approach would look like in our world today and the current circumstances in which we find ourselves. What would it require of us? Are we willing to set aside our inclinations to believe that violence will solve the problem? Are we willing to be vulnerable enough to take the risk of being in relationship with those that we don’t understand or,perhaps, don’t want to understand?
That, of course, is difficult for us to imagine. It’s much easier to press a button to launch a missile and rely upon the destruction that violence brings. The only problem is that violence will inevitably bring more violence, and we will find ourselves in a never-ending cycle of madness. As Mahatma Gandhi once observed, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
As you reflect upon the radical nature of Jesus’ teachingabout the blessing of choosing to make peace, I invite you to focus your attention upon the ways, large and small, that you might choose to roll up your sleeves and be about the essential work of making peace in your life, in yourrelationships with others and in your role as a citizen of our planet. In what specific ways might you choose tomake peace in our world?
Shalom,
Ron
Rev. Ron Dunn