Where are the words of peace?

Egyptian Muslims protecting
Christian churches

Like everyone, I am saddened at the tragic and violent events in Egypt. As a preacher, I found last Sunday's gospel lesson Luke 12:49-56 difficult to work with, to say the least: Jesus declares he comes not to bring peace but division, to set parents against children, and worse.

It was tempting to skip, to preach on something else. But I did my best. Below is my offering from the pulpit.

In the days ahead, my postings here will be less often. I am deeply immersed in writing the book about my abolitionist ancestor, the Rev. George Richardson, that I began nine years ago and put on hold. He lived in a time of great division: the American Civil War. He fought for justice and the emancipation and education of slaves. Peace without that was a false peace.

My sabbatical allowed me to regain the spirit and the words for this project, and I feel it important to finish. My morning writing time will be mostly devoted to writing the book. I will keep you posted on it, and post other items from time to time. Just not as often.

Here is my sermon from last Sunday:

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Shalom. Salaam. Peace.

The words of peace are very hard to hear in our world right now. Very hard.

Egypt is being torn apart by political and religious strife, and many have died. Syria is in the depths of a seemingly unending civil war.

Our own country remains at war in Afghanistan and there are threats of war with Iran. The words of peace are very hard to hear in our world right now.

And the words of peace are very hard to hear in today’s biblical lessons. Instead of words of peace, we get the Book of Isaiah – and words that echo in the Battle the Hymn of the Republic:

“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”

Instead of words of peace, we get the Letter to the Hebrews with descriptions of torture and flogging, and a stern admonition to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”

Nor to we get a warm, fuzzy, peaceful Jesus today:

“I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus thunders, “and how I wish it were already kindled!” Today, the good shepherd seems to be in someone else’s pasture:

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Oh my.

Jesus, most assuredly, is not giving advice on child rearing or solving family dysfunctions. Now, let me pause and tell you I don’t pick these lessons. For those of you unfamiliar with our peculiar way of doing things, these biblical lessons come from what is called “the lectionary,” and the lessons are assigned on a three-year cycle.

You will hear the same lessons today in Lutheran, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches, and many other churches.

Today, whether we like it or not, we get a sword, not a plowshare. No peace, no shalom, no salaam.

Or do we?

There may be another way to hear this. It may be that God’s peace is very different than how the world thinks of it.

It may be that God’s peace is not about power and politics, not about armies, but about justice for those who are oppressed, poor, exploited, wounded, and living in the low places. Sometimes being an agent of God’s peace means going into the heart of conflict because it is precisely in those places where God walks with the lowly.

And it is in precisely those places that God’s kingdom breaks through.

A friend of mine, Craig Klein, a deacon who lives up on the North Coast of California, terms passages like this: “God in the sharp points.”

It is on the sharp points that we are most acutely aware of God breaking open our hearts for others around us.

It is very tempting to avoid the sharp points because they are painful. Conflict is unpleasant and messy and worse.

And Jesus knows us well.

We might be tempted to build walls around ourselves by building walls around the church, and insulate ourselves from the conflicts and heartbreaks of the world.

But those heartbreaks walk right through this door whether we like it or not.

The absence of conflict is not peace, it is not shalom, it is not salaam. Sometimes the absence of conflict is acquiescence in, or wishful thinking about, that which wounds us and others. Sometimes the absence of conflict is acquiescence in evil.

The Gospel calls us to see the sharp points of our time, because it is in the muck of conflict where God finds us and shows us a way to real peace.

Real peace is not letting those who exploit people and pollute the earth get away with it.

We are called to build a world where the wounded are healed, the refugees are rescued, the poor are fed and those held in human bondage are freed.

We are called to make no peace with the forces of oppression.

The sharp points can break open our hearts and allow us to respond to the world in ways we never imagined possible.

Jesus never promised this would be easy. But each of us has the gifts to do our share to bind the wounds of the world.

Each one of us experiences the sharp points some time in our life. And that means each one of us has something to contribute from our own experience.

God gives us everything we need to do this work right here in this place and in our daily lives.

Lives really are changed by the Living Christ through you. People really are freed from what enslaves them, and God’s kingdom really is bursting alive through you.

We are called to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”

Shalom. Salaam. Peace.

A trip to Appomattox, a reminder of the consequences of war

Lori and I, and our house guest, Tony, took a road trip Friday. We were much in need of a day off, and realizing we have not done much to explore our new surroundings, we set out to rectify that situation.

Our tour guide for the day was Bill Bergen, a member of St. Paul's and an accomplished Civil War historian. We went to Appomattox Court House, the place where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysess S. Grant in April 1865, drawing to a close the most lethal conflict in American history.

Bill described for us how Grant's army chased Lee's army westward, finally surrounding Lee at this obscure stage coach stop in the rolling piedmont of central Virginia. The final battle was sharp and short, and Lee gave up rather than face certain annihilation.

Grant and Lee met for 90 minutes in a small parlor inside a house in the town of Appomattox Court House. What they said is lost to history, but Grant offered a "parole" to the Confederate soldiers, allowing them to surrender their arms and flags on the promise they would fight no more, and then he let them go home.

Lee accepted, and the next day his army marched into town, unit-by-unit, stacking their guns and shrouding them with flags. It took seven hours to complete the disarmament of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

The Appomattox Chamber of Commerce has long ago ballyhooed their town as the place "where the nation reunited," but it is really much more than that. The nation was reunited not as it had been before. Appomattox is where a terrible war ended, where slavery ended, and where Abraham Lincoln's vision triumphed "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Yet there is a sadness to this place. The sadness is in the graves of soldiers. The sadness is embedded in the historical markers that were attempts, long after the fact, to cast the war as a noble clash of noble principles. As Lincoln more aptly put it, "the prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."

In fact, the war was a terrible miscalculation of Southern political leaders grossly underestimating their opponents, and a terrible miscalculation by Northern political leaders grossly underestimating the threat that they posed. The overheated political rhetoric of the time had real life consequences. Those who paid the price in blood were common soldiers and common people caught in the path of a horrific war through no fault of their own.

Here is the question for us: Can monuments like Appomattox better serve as reminders to us of the folly of resolving our differences by violence, either through arms or words? Can this terrible war long ago serve as a reminder to us that the overheated rhetoric of our own political conflicts has consequences? Can the ghosts in the soil of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, the Carolinas, and across this great land remind us of the cost of a civil war and how we should pledge to never repeat it?

Postscript: My great-great grandfather, George W. Richardson, served in the Union Army in Memphis. He was the white chaplain to a black artillery regiment. He understood well the stakes of the war for his men and for the nation, and this is what he wrote in his journal about the end of the war:

About 4 o’clock in the afternoon of April 4th the news of the surrender of Lee and the fall of Richmond reached Memphis. The city was illuminated and guns were fired and there was wild joy among all the Union men. It meant that the hardships of the field were about at an end. It meant that the soldiers, after an honorable discharge, could return to their families, and to their peaceful occupations. It meant that the thousands of prisoners who had languished in military prisons or in prison pens would at once be liberated, and breathe the air of freedom once more. It meant that the principles for which our nation had contended for four years had at last triumphed, and that America would henceforth be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. It meant that the four and a half million of men, women and children of African dessent [sic] would have a chance to become intelligent American citizens; and this class were very demonstrative in their joy.