In a few days the leaders of two great nations will sit down for a summit conference, designed to promote the cause of peace. One of those nations is passing through unprecedented trials. A year ago who would have predicted that the Soviet Union would look shaky and might even break apart? Six months ago few would have expected that its president might, in fact, be presiding over the dissolution of a bankrupt ideology and a useless military system. President Gorbachev comes to the summit, some would think, in real trouble, anxious to protect himself, hoping to keep his empire from further disintegration.
Many Americans felt they had reason to cheer over these past months. It looks a whole lot like peace is breaking out all over. It looks as though the days of the evil empire nay be numbered. But is it to be peace? Are we to have a time of peace without threats and interruptions?
Who knows what Mr. Gorbachev may be willing to pay as a price for a secure peace?
At the same time the leader of our nation comes with troubles on his hands, too. While there may be no question of the dissolution of the United States, there are questions about our national priorities. While there may be no serious threat from outside to our political stability, many of us wonder whether we will not rot from the inside out, gorging ourselves on drugs, indulging ourselves with the symbols of consumption, and seeming to make war on the most vulnerable parts of our society – the unborn, the young, the poor, the elderly, the diseased. And so while we may not be openly at war with another nation, we seem to be at war with ourselves.
On the eve of the summit and on this Memorial Day, I cannot help but wonder, do we really want peace? And will we too be willing to pay some kind of price for a secure peace? What does President Bush understand the cost of peace to be, and what do we as Americans, as Christian Americans, expect to pay as the price of a secure peace?
If, as Jefferson put it, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"; if, in the words of Lincoln, "these honored dead shall not have died in vain", what is the responsibility you and I will have to shoulder in these days to secure the peace?
There is, you know, such a thing as a false peace. There is an illusory peace. And the Bible instructs us about that. The Scripture teaches us to be on the lookout for peace too easily achieved, peace not yet paid for, peace that is no peace at all.
Travel with me in your mind’s eye to the little Kingdom of Judah in the seventh century before Christ. These are momentous days in that little Kingdom. For many years Judah had kept itself together only by paying homage to the greatest of the great powers of that day -- to the Assyrians. It was Assyrian power that kept the Egyptians contained to the south; it was Assyrian wealth that paid for the trade routes and the merchant caravans and all the other trappings of business that brought prosperity to some of Judah’s leading citizens.
But just beneath the surface there was something else … it was Assyrian muscle that intruded false religion and pagan gods into the life of Judah. The only way in which Judah could have a degree of peace was to pay a high, high price -- the price of her integrity. And so Judah, in order to keep Assyria happy, tolerated the worship of idols right alongside the worship of her God.
Now toward the last couple of decades of this seventh century before Christ things took a different turn. A new king in Judah, named Josiah, became convicted about the need to revive authentic faith. Josiah set out first to repair the Temple. And in the Temple Josiah’s workmen found parts of the Scripture which had been lost for a long, long time. When Josiah read that word from the Lord, Josiah repented and began to rebuild the nation on the basis of God’s law. All very commendable. But King Josiah was to discover that he would have to pay a very dear price to lift up the truth.
As Assyria grew weak, Egypt to the south grew strong, and when Egypt marched toward Judah, King Josiah resisted and fell dead at the Battle of Megiddo. The Egyptians installed a weak puppet king, Jehoiakim, and everything that Josiah had accomplished melted away. At first the people were ecstatic: peace had come, the war was over! But the prophet Jeremiah saw that it was a false peace, an illusory peace, and Jeremiah cried out a warning.
"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ’Peace, peace’ when there is no peace." (Repeat)
And this great prophet, so seldom heard, so little appreciated by his contemporaries, offered some warnings and some insights about the nature of secure peace. I believe these warnings will speak to us today. On this Memorial Day we recall the supreme sacrifices made on our behalf by thousands of men and women. And as we approach a day when the Cold War seems to be just about over, we need to hear Jeremiah’s word about peace.
Jeremiah’s description of the price of a secure peace can be boiled down to three words: repentance, realism, and righteousness. If you and I would help lead this nation and this world to enjoy authentic peace, then we are going to have to pay a price, and that price will be repentance, realism, and righteousness.
I
First, repentance. Repentance. We are going to have to learn to read our history in a new way. We are going to have to understand that there are some things in our national character that will have to change if we truly want peace.
Jeremiah complained that the people of Judah couldn’t repent and stick to it. They kept getting off on the wrong direction, they would repent for a little while and then would go right back to the old ways.
"Thus says the Lord, ’When men fall, do they not rise again? If one turns away, does he not return? Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? ... .No man repents of his wickedness, saying, "What have I done?"’"
The reason we will not have peace unless we have a national repentance is that we have given ourselves to some myths, some myths of national pride and purity, and they are not true. We have read ourselves a warped version of our history, and until we admit the flaws in our national character, we will not have peace.
Many of you were taught, as I was, that the United States had never lost a war and that we had not lost because we were fighting for truth, justice, the American way, apple pie and motherhood. I do not mean to play fast and loose with your feelings. I do not mean to sound flip about things that matter to you, but I do want us to recognize that this is a warped version of our history. And there is another part of our history about which we ought to do some mighty powerful repenting.
You see, we have not always fought for freedom. Sometimes we have fought to take land away from other people, American Indians or Mexicans or others. Sometimes we have fought to protect the property rights of slaveholders. Sometimes we have made war or at least prepared for war because those industrialists who stood to make money out of it urged us on. And sometimes, in our zeal to rally a nation around an unpopular war with unclear aims, we have even repressed and threatened our own people; we put Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, we drove young officers to inflate the daily body count by wiping out whole villages in Vietnam.
We need to repent. We need to read our history again and to repent. We need to know that once a nation begins to rely on military muscle to achieve its purposes, the end is in sight. There will not only be the loss of thousands of our young people in some far-off jungle, but there will also be the loss of our soul in the senseless slaughter of human beings.
I don’t know whether the name Clarence Jordan means anything to you. Clarence Jordan became a well-known Baptist preacher, the founder of Koinonia Farms in Georgia ... influential in founding Habitat for Humanity, part of the spiritual influences on former President Jimmy Carter. Clarence Jordan, however, as a young man trained for battle in the infantry, and saw duty during the Second World War. As much as he knew that that conflict had to be fought and had to be won, still, he says, he knew the instant that they trained him to run a bayonet through a straw and cloth dummy that something down inside him would like this too much and could destroy him.
I am saying this morning that war is not glory, war is not claiming brave victories, war is not the rush of adrenalin because our team is winning ... war is none of these things. General Sherman was right: war is hell, for there is something about battle that brings out the worst, the most fiendish in us. And unless we continually repent and turn away from it, in every way that we can, we will not have a secure peace.
Someone has pointed out that the danger of having all those weapons stockpiled is that somebody will want to use them. That’s what I’m talking about – that deep, dark yearning within the human heart that wants to reach out and destroy. That demon is unleashed when nations fight, and the only way to stop it is to read our history and weep and repent.
Hear again the prophet Jeremiah: "Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They refuse to return. ... No man repents of his wickedness, saying, ’What have I done?’" Repentance, a profound sorrow for our sin, is the first price we must pay for a secure peace.
II
The second price to be paid is realism. Realism. The ability to face where we are and who we are as a people. The ability to listen to the unpopular prophet who tells it like it is, even if he’s off the wall and strange and abrasive. Realism, facing the real truth about what motivates us and what we are doing to each other, that’s part of the price of a secure peace.
Says Jeremiah, "How can you say, ’We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’? But behold, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie … From prophet to priest every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ’Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace."
Jeremiah is telling us that a whole bunch of us want to see the world through rose-colored glasses... we don’t want to acknowledge that things are in bad shape ... and so we sing out wistfully and hopefully, "Peace, peace", when there is no peace. A whole bunch of us just do not want to see the issues that are out there to be dealt with, and end up chanting sentimentalities about how everything will be all right and every cloud has a silver lining and God’ s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.
But it’s not. All is not right with the world. And a part of the price you and I have to pay on this Memorial Day is the price of being realistic.
Back in the 50’s and 60’s, when I was a young college and seminary student, young and naive, I was very much caught up in the cause of racial justice. I saw segregation as the supreme moral issue of my time, and I thought of myself as a progressive person where race relations were concerned. Now the only trouble with that was that until I got to college I probably had not spoken to or dealt with more than a half-dozen black folks in my whole life. I went to a segregated school in a city just south of the Mason-Dixon line, and I lived in a neighborhood where, if you spoke about diversity, that meant that some of us were Jewish and lots of us were Anglo-Saxon and I think there was one Italian family on the block.
But that lack of experience did not keep me from having plenty of opinions about black folk! That superficial, shallow experience was just enough for me to announce that I had this race relations thing solved ... that, as liberal white folks put it in the 50’ s, they are "just as good as we are."
But do you know what? Living in the real world, in a world where you want real peace to be secure, means being realistic. It means discovering that there are some problems in working and dealing with people across cultural lines. It means that not only are black folks just as good as white folks are, but that we admit that black folks and white folks and all kind of folks are just as sinful and wrong and vicious as they can be ... and that the world’s ills will not be cured by sentimentality but by realism.
I’m trying to say this morning that as much as I would love to see a world at peace, without armaments and without armies, realism teaches me better. I’m trying to say this morning that as much as we might like, just as the people of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did, to declare the Cold War over and to proclaim, "Peace, peace", it cannot be done. We do not yet have peace. Peace is not yet secured. The price has not yet been paid.
And peace will be secured only when we really find out who the enemy is ... the real enemy is not Russia. The real enemy is not China. The real enemy is not some nation or some ideology ... the real enemy is that awesome selfishness down in the human heart. That is realism. And learning to see the world realistically and not just sentimentally is part of the price we have to pay to secure peace.
III
But, finally, now, peace is secured by paying the price of righteousness ... righteousness.
Repentance first, recognizing that we are sinners and that our nation has all too often brought unworthy motives on to the battlefield. Realism next, recognizing that the world is full of terrible things, and that the hatred and the anger of the human heart is to be underestimated. Repentance, realism, but then righteousness ... peace is secured by righteousness.
Hear the prophet Jeremiah one more time: "When I would gather them, says the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them."
In other words, God’s people are too often not productive. And if we are not productive, then there will be no peace. If we do not produce fruit, righteousness, then the peace problem is not yet solved.
Let me talk with you for a moment about the kind of righteousness I see. Let me speak with you about the kinds of grapes on the vine and figs on the fig tree I believe God wants from us.
I believe that the greatest force for peace that you can exert is your personal witness. If I am right in anything that I have said this morning, if I am right in saying that the root and core of the violence problem is the sin problem in the human heart, then it ought to be clear that if you want to secure peace, you make Christians. To secure the peace, pay the price of offering your witness. Bear fruit for Christ, and when you make someone into a brother or a sister in Christ, he will no longer be somebody you’ll have to fear.
A friend of mine says that if the hundreds of churches in the city of Washington had been doing their job, there would be no murder problem and no drug problem on our streets today. I’m sure that’s true. We have been unproductive. We have not borne the fruit of righteousness. And every Sunday that goes by in this room without someone professing faith in Christ is another Sunday lost to Satan. If you would secure the peace of the city, then pay the price of offering a witness.
Do you want to go beyond the city to the world? If we would see peace in the world, then I believe we will have to pay the price of supporting missions. I see the work of Christian missions as crucial to a peaceful and just world. It is Christian missions which has sown the seeds of righteousness and of justice in a thousand otherwise God-forsaken places around this world. And if we want to do something to promote peace, then I would a million times rather put a thousand dollars in the collection plate to buy Bibles than to put thousands upon thousands of tax dollars out to buy weapons.
We say "Amen" to that, but I do have to wonder how much we believe it. Do you know that the average Baptist gave only about $5.00 to the annual foreign mission offering last year? Five dollars to secure the peace? No wonder, says the Lord, "When I would gather them, there are no grapes on the vine nor figs on the fig tree". And here in our church, if you add up everybody whose name is on the roll, we did even worse than that, giving only about $3.00 each for foreign missions last year! What are we thinking of? Do we really imagine that by keeping our resources in our own pockets we will produce anything? Seeds have to be sown before they can be productive; grapes have to be planted before they can produce a vine; and money and sweat and prayer and effort has to be invested before mission can take place, before righteousness can be produced.
Had we as Americans and as Christians worked for freedom and justice in Central America, maybe there would be no need for the people to turn to Sandinistas and no temptation for North and Poindexter and all the rest to arm the others. But "there are no grapes on the vine nor figs on the fig tree. "
Had we as Christians and Americans taken seriously the starvation of Ethiopians and other Africans a few years ago, maybe the horn of Africa would not have turned to repressive Marxist regimes. But again, "there were no grapes on the vine nor figs on the fig tree." We did not produce righteousness.
No, I tell you, the peace of this world will not be secured by half-hearted measures or by investing less than the cost of a McDonald’s Happy Meal! There is a price to pay for peace, and it is the price of producing righteousness.
Repentance, realism, and righteousness. These are the prices we pay to secure the peace. Almost every responsible person I’ve known who wears the uniform of the United States devoutly hopes that he or she will never see combat. My dream is that someday there will be no need to celebrate Memorial Day, for there will be no more wars and no more blood sacrifices to remember. Let us pay the price of repentance, realism, and righteousness so that "these honored dead shall not have died in vain."
