Blessed Are You When You Are A Peacemaker

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Gervase Davis
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1 -1- A sermon delivered by the Rev. Timothy C. Ahrens, Sr. Minister of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Columbus, Ohio, at Lakeside, Ohio, on Thursday, August 7, 2008, dedicated to the memory of the Rev. Dr. Bill Barndt and all those who are peacemakers, and always to the glory of God! Blessed Are You When You Are A Peacemaker Matthew 5, Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each one of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our salvation. Amen Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God. (Matthew 5:9) These sultry August days in Ohio cannot pass each year without pausing to pray. With the dates August 6 th and August 9 th in our sights, we cannot gloss over the what happened 63 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. I cannot think of a more appropriate week to host the 21 st Peace Week than this week. Three weeks ago, I received an from a friend with this story about August 9, It is written by Dr. Gary Kohls for Every Church a Peace Church ( I share it with you now. On the 9 th of August, 1945, an all-christian B-29 bomber

2 -2- crew took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the blessings of its Catholic and Protestant chaplains. In the plane s hold was the second of the only two nuclear bombs to ever be used against human targets in wartime. The primary target, Kokura, Japan, was clouded over, so the plane, named Bock s Car, headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki. St. Mary Cathedral, in the Urakami district of Nagasaki, a massive landmark that the bombardier had been briefed on for weeks before the bombing, was momentarily seen by the bombardier through the thin clouds and the pilot of the Bock s Car ordered the drop. St. Mary Urakami Cathedral was the oldest and largest Christian church in the Orient, and Nagasaki was the oldest and most influential Christian community in Japan, having been founded by St. Francis Xavier in The Nagasaki Christian community is legendary in the history of Oriental Christianity because it miraculously survived, living a catacomb-like existence during two centuries of horrible persecutions by the Imperial Japanese government including mass crucifixions of faithful Christians who refused to give up the faith. Despite the persecutions, and the fact that it was a capital crime to be a Christian for 250 years, Nagasaki Christianity survived and ultimately flourished until 11:02 a.m., August 9, What Imperial Japan could not do over two centuries of brutal persecution, fellow American Christians did in 9 seconds. The cathedral was destroyed by the plutonium bomb, thousands of Nagasaki Christians were killed, burned, carbonized and/or vaporized and the subsequent radiationinduced disease and deformities among the survivors and their progeny continues to this day as a gruesome testament to the horrors of nuclear war. The United States Army Air Force s 509 th Composite

3 -3- Group, whose responsibilities were to deliver the two infamous weapons of mass destruction that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had two Christian chaplains. The Catholic chaplain, George Zabelka, spoke of societal attitudes at the time: The whole structure of secular, religious and military society told me clearly that it was all right to let the Japs have it because God was on our side. Father Zabelka knew what the bomber crews under his spiritual guidance were doing to innocent people and their defenseless cities, and yet I said nothing. He regretted that silence for the rest of his life. Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a leading apostle of Christian nonviolence in America today, and the person most responsible for Zabelka s conversion to Christian pacifism, has dedicated his life and ministry to raising the consciousness of the church about the truths of the nonviolent teachings of Jesus. McCarthy says: Today, as for most of the last 1,700 years, most Christians continue to justify as consistent with the spirit of Christ those energies, understandings, and emotions that led inevitably to August 9. Today, most Christians still do not unequivocally teach what Jesus unequivocally taught on the subject of violence. Today, most Christians still refuse to proclaim that violence is not the Christian way, that violence is not the holy way, that violence is not the way of Jesus. Every summer, to call the Christian community to repent and to return to the truth that violence is not the way of Christ, Father McCarthy leads a fast from solid foods for 40 days, starting July 1 and ending August 9. It is hoped that peacemakers, whether secular or religious, and others rightfully appalled at the carnage of war remember all the victims of past August Ninths out of respect

4 -4- for the hundreds of millions of war dead, the additional hundreds of millions of physically and psychologically wounded survivors of war violence, and the billions of spiritually dying soldier-perpetrators, innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, and family members of all such victims of war, who continue to suffer from the poverty, starvation, homelessness, sickness, hopelessness and domestic abuse that follows every war. (Gary G. Kohls, M.D., Duluth, Minn., for the Community of the Third Way, an affiliate of Every Church A Peace Church). Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God. (Matthew 5:9) Why is it so hard for us, as Christians, to embrace Jesus way of nonviolence and peacemaking? He tells us, once you see God, you are ready to become peacemakers for God. The seventh lesson and step to achieve it is still steeper than the sixth one on the pathway to peace, on the stairway to heaven. Each week in my church, we pass the peace of Christ to one another. We share the love and peace of God with others as a sign of what God has given us through our Savior. It is a sacred sign of sharing love with one another. In a litigious society fast becoming phobic about touch, the passing of the peace is an important symbol of sharing and receiving Christ s love with one another. It comes to us out of the Gospel of John when Jesus says, Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:27) If only in giving and receiving Christ s peace ours hearts were untroubled and our spirits unafraid. But, receiving and passing peace is not what this passage is about. Here Jesus calls his disciples to make peace. Peacemakers renounce violence and tumult and

5 -5- advance the cause of peace through nonviolent means. Our God is the God of peace. Jesus is called the Prince of Peace by Gospel writers. Paul says of Christ, He is our peace. And who can forget the angels of glory praising God and singing the great good news of Jesus birth to the shepherds with, Peace on earth and good will to all God s people on earth. (Drawn from Clarence Jordan s The Sermon on the Mount, p. 34). But, what is peace? And how do we make it? Peace is most fully known in the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is a comprehensive concept that signifies a condition of perfect welfare, serenity, prosperity, happiness, joy, freedom, reconciliation, community, harmony, righteousness, truth, communication and humanity. Shalom is absolute wholeness. Shalom is a wholeness is which the political, social, and religious are no more to be separated than the body and soul, or nature and culture. (Pinchas Lapide, The Sermon on the Mount: Utopia or Program for Action?, Orbis Press, Maryknoll, New York, 1986, pp.34-35). I like to believe Jesus is calling us to be shalom-makers! As shalom-makers, we make (in Christ s name) conditions of perfect welfare, serenity, prosperity, happiness, joy, freedom, reconciliation, community, harmony, righteousness, truth, communication and humanity. I find shalom-makers in unlikely persons and places like the greatest football player of the 20 th Century, Mr. Bill Willis. Bill broke the color barrier in pro football in 1946, eight months before Jackie Robinson broke through in Major League Baseball. Bill was a member of my church and just last November he died. In a stately funeral, he was celebrated by the head of the NFL, Mike Brown, son of Bill s legendary coach, Paul Brown, other Pro Football Hall of Fame members, Mayor Coleman, Governor Strickland and others.

6 -6- Throughout his life, Bill was a peacemaker as a child growing up; at East High School in Columbus; at OSU; in the NFL; and beyond football as Ohio s head of Youth Services for many years. There s a great story he told me of those days. One day when visiting a Juvenile Detention Center, there were two young teens fighting on the floor. Bill broke up the fight when he entered the room. Reaching down with his huge hands, he lifted them off the floor. Years later, one of the young men remembers Bill quietly and gently saying to him, You don t have to be this way. That one moment changed this young man s life. Flash forward 35 years. Bill is on a radio station in Cincinnati. That same young man calls in, retells this story, then asks Bill, Do you remember that? Bill answers, Like it was yesterday. The young man, now in 50s tells Bill, That one moment turned my life around. I have dedicated my entire life to teaching teachers in prisons and the Juvenile Detention Centers as a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Thanks Mr. Willis. When telling me this story, Bill said, Tim, this one young man makes my whole life worthwhile. Similarly, God picks us up and says to us, You don t have to be that way. That s Shalom! Shalom is what God is. Peacemaking is what God does. Scripture shows God heaven-bent on one thing: the salvation of the world! There can be no salvation without shalom. Peacemaking and redeeming the world become one in the same. In the Greek New Testament, Eirene, is the word to describe God s ultimate blessing. Throughout the Gospel,

7 -7- Jesus confers peace upon his disciples. When a disciple enters someone s home, Jesus tells them to offer peace to their hosts (Luke 10:5). In his final discourse before his arrest, he offers peace to his disciples (John 14:27). After his resurrection, he greets his friends with Peace be with you. (Luke 24:26; John 20:19) The letters of the New Testament offer blessings of peace, first and foremost. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul offers to the young Corinthian Christians (I Corinthians 1:3). He does the same in Romans, Ephesians, Colossians and II Timothy. Throughout the New Testament, God s voice for peacemaking through the words of Jesus is an extension of the family business. The Father/Son business of saving the world and creating a peaceable kingdom reflects the fullness of the beloved community on earth. For Jesus, peacemaking is not only about stopping violence and war. It is about changing hearts and minds, too. Years ago, Dr. Howard Thurman visited Mahatma Gandhi in India. Dr. Thurman asked Gandhi why, during his campaign to end British rule, he withdrew for awhile. Gandhi answered that he withdrew because his people didn t have a wholesome enough sense of self to engage in sustained nonviolent revolution against the British. In other words, they didn t have the hearts of peacemakers. God s plan for peace is not merely about bringing an outward settlement between warring factions. God s plan for peace is to create men and women of good will. In civil and interreligious war now raging in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed since March War and hatred seem to be growing in the hearts and minds of the Sunni and Shiite Muslim forces. Our

8 -8- American military presence, even as we speak of it in our most supportive ways, will not be able to change the hearts and minds of those we have been sent to assist in making peace. In southern Lebanon, the 32-day war between Israel and Hezbollah rebels ended two years ago but it is not over. The recent release of Hezbollah fighters back into the care of Lebanon, shows that the 2-year-old cease-fire has not produced changed peace in the rhetoric and the hearts and minds on either side. Like schoolyard fighters broken up by the teachers at recess, we all know this battle will be reengaged off school grounds after the final bell has sounded. These wars of which I speak are not merely led by crazed leaders whose citizens are coerced to the field of battle. In the case of Iraq and the rebels of Hezbollah, these wars are led by true believers whose religious zeal seeks more blood and more destruction in the name of God. Through it all, the fighting saddens rather than gladdens the heart of God. Claimed as the God for both sides in the midst of holy wars, the God whose will is for peace, whose heart is for Shalom, can condone nothing of this that makes for war. As Abraham Lincoln once wrote, We both claim God is on our side. We cannot both be right. I pray that if I am right, I will be merciful. If my enemy is right, I pray his mercy upon me. True peacemaking or shalom-making takes a leap of faith. I have seen this leap of faith operative in none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. How many of you know that Mikhail Gorbachev was a baptized Christian the only man baptized into Christ who ever held a position of leadership in Communist Russia!? Clearly, the communists didn t know this about him. As a child, he was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church by his grandparents. In their farmhouse, there was a two-sided picture on the wall. On one side was Joseph Stalin and on the other side Jesus Christ!

9 -9- Most of the time, the picture of Jesus looked out on the family. When they heard communists coming down the gravel road to their house, they reversed the pictures. Gorbachev s grandfather was a member of the Communist Party so that he could maintain his farm and his family. One day when horses were heard on the road it was too late. The communists didn t like something his grandfather had said and young Mikhail saw him hauled off to the Gulag prison camps, never to return. When Gorbachev became president, he had a film made about the horrors of Stalin, purging from the consciousness of his people the name and horror of this torturer and destroyer of life. When the film ended, Gorbachev stood and applauded, repeating over and over again, Grandfather, this is for you! This is for you! Sister Rosemary Lynch, as a Franciscan nun, spent her entire life as a peacemaker. But, she chose not to call herself a peacemaker. Instead, she said she was in the service of peace. She says, None of us can make peace. Peace is God s gift. But we can serve God s peace. Sister Rosemary has worked in social service agencies with immigrants, and homeless men, women and children. She has also actively resisted nuclear testing and warfare throughout the world, especially in Nevada where she served God s peace for many years. She said of her time there: You cannot live in Nevada and not think about what nuclear war would mean. Thank God there has been no WWIII, but we have many victims of the preparations for WWIII. They are all around us. Some are people working at the testing site, where the cancer rate is much higher than the national average. Many employees have been radiated in nuclear accidents. In addition, there are soldiers who were

10 -10- close to ground zero when there were above ground tests. Many have died already and many have defective children the greatest sorrow. There are also the downwind victims who were in the path of the fallout clouds. (Jim Forrest, The Ladder of the Beatitudes, p. 123). As a woman in the service of God s peace, Sister Rosemary always focused on people, not weapons. If we are going to convert swords into plowshares, we must convert warriors into people in the service of God s peace. If bombs are exploding in our hearts we have little hope to understand or impact the world around us. Sister Rosemary has befriended many of the people who work at nuclear weapon sites. They call her late at night with family problems and the need to discuss what is happening in their personal lives. Sister Rosemary is a special agent of God s peace in this world. Can you see how one woman as a witness for peace can be a world changer? Like her colleague in ministry, Father Emmauel Charles McCarthy, Sister Rosemary Lynch has lived life as a child of God. To be a peacemaker in our times means that you are nothing less than a special agent of God s Kingdom of Heaven. In your home, in your relationships with others, in your words and deeds, always maintain a vision and action for peacemaking. I know how hard this is. I fail at it regularly. But, the world that continues to believe and practice an ethic of an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth will end up being a world filled with blind and toothless engaged people. It will be a world of stumbling, mumbling hate-filled humans. The hardship of living in peace is this: the way of the peacemaker too often leads to the cross. Jesus knew that to live and work for peace too often brings the wrath of warmakers upon you. The greatest sacrifice you might make as a peacemaker is to lay down your life for others. I say, consider

11 -11- the alternatives. Looking back on the 20 th Century, which was the bloodiest, deadliest and ugliest century of human history, I believe the only way forward can be through nonviolence and peace. Let us teach it to our children, live it in our lives and make it in the world in which we live. Violence and war can no longer be our choice because annihilation is the looming verdict for a world in pursuit of a growing spiral of violent vendettas. Ours must be the way of peace. In the words of Revelation 11:15, as makers of the peaceable kingdom, the kingdom of the world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. On this day, let us remember the people of St. Mary Urakami Cathedral, the Orient s largest church and the most influence Christian community in Japan a 400-year-old parish destroyed in nine seconds on August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m. What Imperial Japan could not do over two centuries of brutal persecution, fellow American Christians did in 9 seconds. Father forgive us especially when we know what we are doing. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God. (Matthew 5:9) Amen. Copyright 2008, First Congregational Church, UCC

Knights of Columbus. It s Time now for The. To Disarm.

Knights of Columbus. It s Time now for The. To Disarm. It s Time now for The Knights of Columbus To Disarm. The Lord has entrusted to the Church a mission to heal and to reveal the healing power of peace and nonviolence, as an integral part of her mission