Discovering a
Beatitude Filled Life
“Blessed are the
peacemakers…”
By Rev Steven R
Mitchell
Mountain View
United Church, Aurora, CO 3/30/2014
Based on Matthew
5:9 & James 3:13-18
Each
week we close our service with a Benediction, which is a word of blessing as we
leave this time of worship, then we form a circle of sorts (the fact that it is
always a very peculiar looking circle holds a great deal of theological
reflection in its self) joining hands and we sing a little chorus with these
words: Wider and wider, our circle
expands. As to the world we reach out
our hands. Led by the Spirit, we’re
learning to bend. Loving, and growing,
and loving again. At the end of this
song we close with the words Shalom and Salaam! Shalom coming from the Jewish tradition and
Salaam from the Muslim greeting. The
reason that we say both is in keeping with one of our core values of
“inclusion.”
The
traditional body action used with Salaam is that of a low bow and the hand
placed on the forehead. This gesture
places the person giving the greeting in a submissive posture and elevates the
person being greeted. Both Salaam and
the Jewish Shalom are words for Peace, yet not in the same understanding that
we use “peace” in our language. These
two ancient Aramaic words translate into a description about the well being of God’s people, of all God’s people, from the
richest to the poorest, from the most agile to the lame, from the brilliant to
the slow of mind. Shalom is about
justice, living out the truth of God’s kingdom. The
Beatitudes for Today, by James C Howell So
when we say Shalom or Salaam, we are using the word peace, not in the sense of
absence of conflict (which is our modern day understanding) but rather in the
promotion of well being to those whom we say it to.
Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. For many people the idea of peace means no
fighting. Yet one can live in the
absence of fighting and not experience peace.
Think of a home where there is no equality between the spouses, where
one perceives themselves as being in authority over the other, there may be no
fight because the spouse of lower stature has kowtowed to the other, bringing
the appearance of peace because of no conflict, when in reality, there is the devaluing
of the one spouse.
A
common understanding of being a peacemaker means working at ending a war. I remember signing my first petition at age
14, protesting our military involvement in Vietnam. Yet to be a peacemaker by the definition that
Jesus speaks of in this seventh Beatitude, Pope Paul VI in 1972 highlighted saying,
“If
you want peace, work for justice.”
I
want to share a reflection by Anne Sutherland Howard, author of Claiming the
Beatitudes. She writes: It’s taken me decades to learn this (Pope
Paul VI’s remark about working for justice).
I used to think that peacemaking simply meant ending war. As one who came of age in the Vietnam War,
with my two brothers watching their draft lottery numbers, staying in school to
avoid the draft, and ultimately getting drafted and serving in the National
Guard, the war and the body count on the evening news was front and center in
my family’s daily life. My heroes were Father
Daniel Berrigan and his little brother Philip both being on the FBI top ten list
of most wanted because of their dramatic protests against the war. I saw peacemaking as stopping that war: “Blessed
are the peacemakers” meant “Blessed are the war protesters.” A decade or so later, with Vietnam over, the
Cold War was heating up with the massive weapons buildup of the early
1980’s. I was working for an interfaith
nuclear disarmament group, and I saw peacemaking as ending the nuclear arms
race: “Blessed are the weapons protesters.”
“But a rabbi’s question helped me see
that peacemaking is something more. I
went to talk with Rabbi Leonard Beerman one day in the early 1980’s when I was
discouraged, feeling that it was futile to protest the nuclear arms race when
the nuclear stockpiles rose higher each day, and every day our country sold
more and more weapons to more and more economically undeveloped countries. “Our efforts are so puny and nobody cares,
nobody listens, nobody can change anything.
Why do we bother to keep working for social and political change?” I asked him.
Rabbi Beerman listened, as he always
listened to my questions and complaints, and in his gentle, quiet way reached
into his desk and brought out a picture of his new grandson, Matthew
Benjamin. He asked to see a picture of
my new baby son, Benjamin Michael. He
told me to think about these two little boys who would graduate from high
school in the year 2000. He told me to
think about what we owed them. And then
he asked me, “if we cannot cultivate a passion for what one human being owes to
another, what are we?”
From that rabbi, and that question, I
began to learn about shalom, about what we human beings owe to one another as
children of God. As President Dwight
Eisenhower had said back in 1953, “Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money
alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Claiming the Beatitudes, pg 98-100
Once
the Christian Church became the legitimate state church by Roman Empire
Constantine, the church has dealt with
the ethical arguments for and against war based on either pacifism or “just
war” theory. The just war theory was
codified for the church by St Augustine at the beginning of the fifth century
in an attempt to answered the question, “When, if ever, is it justifiable for a
Christian to participate in war?” The
tenets of just war say that war can only be waged (1) as a last resort, (2) by
a legitimate authority, (3) to redress a grievous wrong, (4) with reasonable
assurance of success, (5) to establish peace, (6) with violence proportional to
the injury suffered, and (7) with weapons that discriminate between combatants
and civilians. These tenets were
challenged by Baptist Theologian, Glen Stassen’s 1992 book “Just Peacemaking:
Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace”, moving from “Should we go to
war?” or “Should we go to this war?” to “How can we prevent war?” Claiming the Beatitudes pg101
How
do we say “Yes to peace?” After the
attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, any attempt to ask this question was
labeled by our Government as being “unpatriotic” and “anti-American”. Yet as Christians we need to hear the call
from Jesus for transformative living.
Jesus challenged the accepted practice of “an eye for an eye” with “You
shall not kill”, because he saw that revenge only brings more revenge. In the Epistle of James we read: For where you have envy and selfish
ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. The lack of peace stems from basic human
nature of envy and selfish ambition. Out
of this nature we nurture fear, hatred, jealousy, revenge, dishonesty,
basically all the elements that lead to a non-peaceful existence.
Is
it actually possible to say “yes to peace?”
South African leaders determined
that the only way to move forward in the post-apartheid era would be to form a
“Truth and Reconciliation” commission.
All over South Africa, victims and perpetrators told their stories;
women faced policemen who had murdered their husbands and children and told of
their agony. Henchmen who carried out
vile orders admitted their guilt.
Justice was meted out, and yet the most astonishing moments of
reconciliation, which would strike many of us as implausible, happened –
because the truth simply had its day out in the open.
The Hebrew understanding of justice is not
about the good being rewarded and the bad being punished, nor is it about
fairness to the individual, but rather health to the community. (Mishpat) Justice occurs when the poorest in
a community are cared for. For those
who have questions about the “appropriateness” of our burrito breakfast
sandwiches that we give to the day labors once a month, we are doing justice,
we are caring for the poorest in our community, not questioning the legality of
their presence, but relating to these men as one child of God to another. In our walk of Harambee with Georgia and her
family in Greeley who suffered total loss of home in last Septembers flooding,
we are practicing peacemaking, for we are working out justice with a family who
became a part of the “least of these” in our extended community.
How
do we say “Yes to peace?” It starts with
what we do locally, by working for justice, which means bringing about health
to the community. As Rabbi Beerman
asked, “If we cannot cultivate a passion for what one human being owes to
another, what are we?” James end today’s
reading by saying: Peacemakers who sow
in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.
His brother Jesus tells us: Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Peacemaking isn’t about stopping war – it’s
about working for justice – the bringing about health to the community – to the
world community. Amen
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