I have several confessions to make. My first confession is that my title for this blog entry scares me a little, if not a lot. “Just peace.” It’s a good sounding title I suppose. Among all the things we can have, who among us wouldn’t settle for just peace? Among all the places we can go, who wouldn’t like a lawn chair on a remote beach or a field of flowers under a starry night sky? Just peace. And yet we all know peace is more than wishful thinking and that when Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he probably didn’t mean, happy are the beach goers. I do think he meant for us to know that peace doesn’t come to us all at once, that it must be made. I don’t know if it’s something that we must always make for ourselves or if it’s something others might make for us and then give to us, like a Christmas present or a birthday card.
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing much, a little homemade trinket I just call peace.”
I think of the story of the Good Samaritan who gutsily stopped to help an enemy on the side of the road. Think like it was you. Bruised, battered and left for dead, and the one person you hate the most, the one person whose existence makes your blood boil, saves your life. They scoop you up, lay you in the backseat, drop you at the ER and tell the doctors, “Whatever you need to do, do it. I’ll cover the bill.” Jesus tells this story in response to a question he gets asked by a lawyer. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer of course is, “Show mercy. Do this, and you will live.” It’s not the answer we might expect to get from Jesus. Whatever happened to, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved?” Or, “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of good works?” I don’t know but that faith isn’t faith until it’s been turned to action. So Jesus says, “Show mercy, and you will live.” Or, put another way, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
You think of it this way and peace doesn’t sound like a day at the beach after all. In his book, The Dignity of Difference, Rabbi Jonathan Saks writes that, “The pursuit of peace can come to seem to be a kind of betrayal. It involves compromise. It means settling for less than one would like. It has none of the purity and clarity of war, in which the issues—self-defense, national honor, patriotism, pride—are unambiguous and compelling. War speaks to our most fundamental sense of identity: there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ and no possibility of confusing the two. When, though, enemies shake hands, who is now the ‘us’ and who the ‘them?’ Peace involves a profound crisis of identity. The boundaries of self and other, friend and foe, must be redrawn.”
And so my own title for this blog entry scares me a little, if not a lot. But I’m going with it anyway because it seems necessary given the types of conversations I’ve been hearing around me this week for us to talk about whether we can make it on just peace. And this leads me to my second confession. In the wake of last Saturday night’s verdict concerning George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I’ve been confused. I am not confused by the verdict itself. I have no opinion to offer regarding the verdict. I did not follow the case near as closely as I feel I would have needed to in order to now hold an opinion on it. Maybe I should have followed it closer. Many did and perhaps, for a case that captured such national attention and seemed to involve so many questions of conscience, we should be preaching on it in church. After all, throughout history haven’t preachers mobilized their pulpits to speak out on everything from the Holocaust and Nazism to Apartheid in South Africa to racial inequality and the misguided steps of U.S. involvement in wars and international aid? Didn’t Jesus himself stand before the congregation in Jerusalem and say that the word of God is a call to revolution on behalf of the poor and oppressed? Isn’t the church only the church then when it is taking sides even at the risk of losing its life? Yes, so long as we know what to do first after we’ve taken a side. Blessed are the peacemakers.
But in this case I still have no opinion to offer, no side to take when it comes to the terrible shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. A few days ago I thought maybe I could formulate an opinion, and then I’d have something relevant and smart to say about the problem of race in our country and the way of our justice system and what side the church should take in it all. So I read about two dozen blogs this week, I kept my homepage open to the New York Times and a variety of other news feeds, some notably conservative and others notably liberal. (I’d try to formulate a balanced opinion.) But the more I read the more confused I became. Some have praised the trial process saying that like it or not, when a killer is found innocent, it shows evidence of a fair trial. Others have said that due to racial bias and prejudice, even a “fair” trial would not be fair. At the gym yesterday I overheard two people in a discussion in which one person said that they thought the President showed courage and conviction when he expressed sympathy with Trayvon. The other said the President’s given too much attention to one person, ignoring the fact that soldiers and innocent others are being killed as we speak. I don’t know but that it seems there is no verdict that guarantees peace for everyone.
In Matthew’s gospel we read about a mute demoniac who is brought to Jesus. We’re not told what the connection is between this person’s demon and their inability to speak. Whether the demon has caused the muteness or whether this person was mute and then took on a demon, we don’t know. But we can imagine this person’s inability to speak is a demon to them, for when the demon is gone Matthew records, “and the mute spoke.” Now what I find interesting is that Matthew doesn’t record what the mute said. I mean, if someone couldn’t speak for a long time, or had never spoken at all, and they could suddenly speak, wouldn’t you want to hear their first word? If it were you, if you suddenly found your voice, what would you say? Would you go back to that conversation everyone else was having around the dinner table ten years ago, the one you so badly wanted to be a part of but couldn’t? Would you recall the amazing sights you saw on vacation five years earlier? Would you finally scream out against that certain injustice, the one your eyes have endured up close everyday? Who would you say, “I love you,” to? Or would you just whisper joyful sighs? But we don’t hear from the mute. We hear only from the crowds, who can’t believe what they’re hearing, and from the Pharisees, who quickly act to silence what they’re hearing, and in so doing demonize this person all over again.
“It won’t be they say.” It’s not that it can’t be, for they can’t undo what has happened. It just won’t be. “You have a demon,” they say. ”That’s why you couldn’t speak, because you’re sick, you have issues, you’re guilty of some terrible sin that God was punishing you for. We can’t change the fact that now you can speak, but we won’t have you going around saying that God has healed you, that you’re actually free and innocent, that you’re just like us.”
What do we do when we don’t like the verdict? When the outcome is not as we expected? Is there another one? Is there an option beyond anger, apathy, and even protest? All of which have their time and place, but none of which have the power ultimately to heal us. Is there another verdict? Yes, there is, but we should be warned. We may not like it. In fact, we may like it even less than the first verdict, because this verdict has a certain shade of gray to it. With this verdict there is no accuser or defendant, no judge or jury. It is the verdict we hear rendered in the ancient Biblical book of Leviticus where God says to the people Israel: “When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune the vines and gather in the crops; but in the seventh year there shall be complete rest for the land. You can eat whatever the land gives you that year, but don’t go trying to grow anything.”
Naturally the people ask, “But what if it’s not enough?” And God responds, “In the sixth year I will order my blessing for you so that there will be enough not only in the seventh year but in the eighth and ninth year as well.”
“Why are you doing this,” they ask? “What’s the point God?”
“So you will never forget that once upon a time you were slaves in Egypt, that you worked the land everyday, breaking your backs for someone else, but never did you get to eat off the fat of the land. That in a land of plenty there was no peace or justice for you. And yet, I showed you mercy and you had everything you needed. And now you live in a land of freedom, and you can work as much as you can to get as much as you want, but there are still those who cannot, and you must show them mercy.”
“Lord, we would do for the widows, the grieving mothers, and the helpless babies, but what about those who don’t deserve mercy, those who have never given a morsel of bread to a hungry brother or sister, who have actually only ever denied a brother or sister? Wouldn’t it be a denial of justice on our parts to let them off the hook, to clothe and feed the guilty?”
And God, holding up a loaf of bread, breaks off a piece and handing it to us says, “Would you also like a little something to wash this down with?”
I say, thanks be to God whose mercies are from everlasting to everlasting. Amen.
PleaseGrace 