Blessed are the Peacemakers
November 16, 2008
Matthew 5:3-9
On Wednesday morning, December 2, 1942, a group of scientists completed an experiment in a converted squash court in Chicago. It was a monumental achievement which would alter history forever. The scientists had discovered the ATOMIC BOMB and its destructive power. One person in that group was the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Arthur Compton. Years later, Dr. Compton explained, he felt a great sense of gratitude to God for another of God’s great gifts, but he knew this was a gift that could put a question mark over humanity’s future, and Dr. Compton said, “Man must now go the way of Jesus or perish.” The Day that Changed Your Life. Guideposts 17, No. 1, March 1962: 3.
There is no future in war, no future in hate, no future in revenge. Any attempt we make to destroy others will almost certainly lead to our destruction. Remember the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, and the words of Tevye the milkman. The year was 1905, and the Russians told the people in his little village, they had 3 days to vacate or the town would be destroyed. One of Tevye’s Jewish friends cried out in anger, “We should defend ourselves. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” To which Tevye said, “Very good, that way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” In our era, if we follow the same edict, we will find our world to be lifeless.
As we have seen in the other Beatitudes, it is easy to read the words of Jesus and gloss over them, thinking that they sound nice, but in reality, if we are willing, they take us much deeper into the life of faith. When we read the words of Jesus, we always want the second part before the first part. The 1st part of each Beatitude is much more difficult to accomplish because it requires action on our part. The 2nd part is always the blessing, the second is the frosting on the cake. Think about it ~
We want God to be merciful to us, but we don’t want to be merciful to others;
We want to see God, but we must be pure in heart to see God;
We want God’s comfort, but who wants to mourn;
We want to be filled by God, but do you hunger and thirst for righteousness?
Think about it, we want to be children of God, but who really wants to be a peacemaker. Yet we all want peace in our lives, but Jesus is saying something much bigger and unsettling to us, He is calling us to a difficult and even a heroic lifestyle when He tells us the peacemakers will be blessed. We think we are blessed and happy if we have peace, but Jesus is not talking about our peace, He is talking about you and I being peacemakers. There is a big difference in this.
The word PEACE comes from the Hebrew word most of us have heard of, “SHALOM.” It is a universal Hebrew greeting meaning, “Hello, goodbye, see you later and great to see you.” The deeper meaning of shalom is that we are stating we wish the best for our friend, we are really saying, “dear friend, may you be at peace, may you be completed in your soul.”
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So, when we think about peace, it is not just about the silencing of guns and no more war, as good as that may be, that is not what Jesus was talking about. Peace is a state of well-being, of being full in the heart, spirit and mind. George Buttrick once stated, “what we cal peace is usually not peace at all, but only smoldering grudges and exhausted hatreds.” {The Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1951) Vol. 7, 286.}
And there lies a big part of our problem, we bring an end to armed conflict but we leave a vacuum where possibly even greater conflicts can take root and grow. True peace is not a vacuum, but a fullness.
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So, what does it mean to be a peacemaker? To start with, we cannot be a peacemaker without a prerequisite step, that is being at peace with ourselves, in our inner lives. Even though this was not the point of what Jesus was saying, we cannot make peace, if we have no peace. After we have peace within ourselves about what we are called to do, then we can progress to the next level. It’s a more intimate level of peacemaking, one where we attempt to make peace with those who are closest to us ~
spouse to spouse
parent to child
sibling to sibling
friend to friend
neighbor to neighbor; and
Christ-follower to Christ-follower.
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Making peace should be a very happy business. After all, what occupation could be more satisfying than to invade situations of destruction and turn them into settings of beauty and fulfillment? Jesus said, “peacemakers shall be called children of God.” That is, they shall be called godly, partakers in the very nature of God. That’s really quite logical, because one must be very godlike to step into chaos and establish order.
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We must find peace with God and with ourselves. I would like to think that most of us realize we have conflicts within ourselves - anger, bitterness, grief, loss, mistrust, resentments, all sorts of fears. We must realize that these exist. Without this realization, without believing we are sinners, we have our faults, we cannot move beyond ourselves into the process of being a peacemaker. When we cannot move beyond our seeming perfection, we end up seeing the faults in everyone else. We want to change others, without regard to the deeper change which is raging within ourselves. Why do you think Jesus spoke about taking the log out of our eye before looking into someone else’s eye? We need to do some Christ-centered self examination.
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Within the church we have this amazing and great opportunity to be peacemakers. More often than not it comes through simple acts of kindness. We have so many opportunities to demonstrate that peace to others, but our hearts are filled with resentment, self-righteousness and self-centeredness that it becomes impossible to look beyond ourselves.
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Francis of Assisi’s great prayer “Make me an Instrument of Thy Peace” is nothing other than a quest for healing kindness to manifest itself in our everydayness of life.
Think about the words of Francis, he saw there was hatred in the world, so he prayed that he might show love where hatred currently reigned. Because he saw sadness in the world, he asked that he might bring joy in its place. He was a remarkable man, a holy dreamer, as he realized that being an instrument of God’s peace is a wide ranging assignment, covering all of life. If we try to follow Francis’ counsel in our time and place, we will discover that there are everyday opportunities to enlarge the borders of peace. If we see ourselves as peacemakers, we will dedicate the common stuff of our daily lives to being a peacemaker.
You see, each one of us has dozens and dozens of opportunities everyday to make peace in our world. What we need, most of all, is to be sensitive enough to see our opportunities, and to be close enough to God that we will then choose to use our energy, our personality, our money, and our influence to make a difference, to be a peace maker.
Peace goes beyond political systems, it goes beyond whether Obama or McCain or anyone else will bring peace to the Middle East, let alone in our own country. It goes beyond issues of wealth, culture and intellect. Ultimately, becoming a peacemaker is a matter of the heart. If we are to be called children of God, then our hearts must be focused on the one thing: God. When we focus on God, we are more willing to be a peacemaker, and I might add a happy and blessed peacemaker, because you will be called a child of God.
Our society is rife with rancor, and we view the guy down the block as a numskull because of the political sign in his yard. We have forgotten how to disagree. In a democracy, we ought to be able to disagree and not shoot each other. We can thrash through the issues, listen, learn, test our ideas, understand why other think as they do. Learning how to disagree sounds like making peace, and is also the secret of inching ever closer to the truth, without which we will never have any peace.
Peace is not passive, but aggressive, engaging in the far more arduous labor of making peace, of reconciling with the person who hates you, of sparing no effort to get inside the other’s skin and figuring out how to live together on this planet. But the dominant melody in the chorus of justice is one of care, of inclusion, of striving after shalom. Peacemaking requires people who work tirelessly for a just society that mirrors, however obliquely, the kingdom of God.
Peacemaking seems almost impossibly daunting – but largely because we do not think so much about making peace until war is raging. What if we thought about peacemaking less as a remedy, and more as a preventative? Haven’t we failed to work on peace when there is not conflict? To bring it up once we’re in the thick of war is like suggesting to an enraged married couple that they might work on tender communication but the pots and pans are already flying.
When it comes to peacemaking, the subtle topic we often seek to avoid is FORGIVENESS. Without forgiving one another, can we ever have true peace. It seems that we do a lot of pretending, we may “kiss and make up” in an effort to regain peace, but the anger and bitterness remain; and the relationship remains fractured. There is no peace, and sadly both parties know it. Yet they hide behind that thicket of the cordial and cold hug, or the handshake that meant nothing to either party. What is really needed is to dive in and seek to understand, to acknowledge one another, to listen, and ultimately to forgive. We may shrink back from forgiveness, from the peacemaking, not merely because it’s hard work, but because there can be something darkly delicious about an unhealed grievance. We think we have something over our brother or sister, when we are simple holding something against ourselves.
Frederick Buechner wrote ~
To lick our wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways, it is a feast for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the end of the feat is you. {Frederick Buechner Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 29.}
Forgiveness isn’t always a warm and fuzzy feeling. If you forgive me, it doesn’t mean you feel like showering me with hugs and kisses. Forgiveness is not a feeling, it is a decision, a commitment to look at me through God’s eyes. In broken families this may be a daunting challenge: you may forgive a parent, or a spouse, but this does not require one ounce of gushy emotion. Forgiveness is not just a word, not just a feeling, but a behavior, a practice, a new habit of behavior whose goal is nothing less than a fully restored relationship.
And here is the big secret. If we are going to be sensitive to the business of peacemaking, we will need to be persons of prayer. When we pray we wage peace at the most strategic level, because in prayer we deal with the hurt of the world at its essential core. But understand this: when we pray for peace, we have to pray without human prejudice. We cease to take sides. We pray for God’s will to be done, and we pray for the welfare of our enemies as well as our own. I’m not suggesting that both sides in an y conflict are equally right, although I would remind us that in most human conflicts it is exceedingly rare for one side to be 100% right, because we are all imperfect creations. So we pray with humility, with readiness to repent, and with concern for those who have wronged us, even as we seek to understand if perhaps we have wronged the other party.
Blessed are the peacemakers. They see other people through God’s eyes. And not just the people up close, across the dining room table. We mean all people.
When we are called children of God I see the image of boys and girls, men and women of all nationalities, of all levels of income of all colors, people with a predisposed hatred for one another coming together . . . holding hands, singing and celebrating the community of Jesus Christ, proclaiming to one another we are His children, we are brothers and sisters, we are family. We are the children of God.
