James
4:1-3
Let me start with a word of full disclosure here. I am going to talk about peacemaking. In the course of it, I am also going to say a
word or two about weapons, including handguns.
I realize that the subject is a trigger for a lot of strong feeling for
many people, but I don’t think it would be fair for me to avoid the topic.
Let me also tell you that my thoughts do not come from a
theoretical position or hypothetical situations. As a pastor, I have seen bad situations get
even worse because of the availability of a handgun. I was once called upon to bury a man I did
not know, whose widow explained that he had worked as a bouncer at a bar in
Kensington and was on his way home after work.
Between the El and his house, he saw a man hitting a woman and stepped
between them. The man took out a gun and
shot him. Another time I had to have a
talk with somebody who had a serious drinking problem and needed help (which he
eventually got, by God’s grace). He was
terribly down and thought that the only hope he had to make his problem stop
was to end his life. He had a gun in the
house, and before we could talk about the real troubles, I had to convince him
not to use it. I didn’t want to see the
gun, but asked him to give me the box of bullets and to empty out the chamber,
at least for the time we were together.
Mind you, this man had a license and the gun was completely legal and
registered. The same was true of another
time that a parishioner shot and killed someone he thought was breaking into
his pharmacy – but since he fired before the man had entered the building, there
was no legal defense based on self-protection.
You may disagree with me. That’s
fine. But you are not going to get me to
change my mind.
There is a difference between peacekeeping and
peacemaking.
Peacekeeping is the business, the duty, and the calling
of the police. They are trained to do
that, and most of the time most of them do that very, very well. When there is trouble, they are the ones who
best know how to intervene. The
situations I mentioned above were ones that took place before cell phones were
commonplace. Now, at least in the one
instance, somebody spotting an incident can just reach into their pocket and
dial 911.
Peacemaking, on the other hand, ideally takes place
before conflict gets to the point of violence or takes place between parties
with longstanding antipathy who are not at that very moment physically
attacking one another.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus, “for
they will be called children of God.” [Matthew 5:9]
Peacemaking does not
begin by looking simply at the surface situation. That’s peacekeeping – which, again, is
important and honorable. Sometimes
someone has to say, “Break it up! You go
over there and you go over there!” But
for a truce to turn into peace, someone has to say, “Okay, what’s really going
on here?” Then will come the long litany
of grievances, a tale of who did what to whom and when and what had come before
that, and who said this and who said that, and who can substantiate each
event. The whole time, tempers will be
rising again and each part of each story will be disputed. Peacemaking takes patience.
In the end, it isn’t really a matter of figuring out how
to allocate blame, which is what the angry parties will often want. It is a matter of getting people somehow to
let go of what they see as their rightful due in order to begin again. It is a matter of getting people to own up to
the ways in which we all are thoroughly messed up. The Letter of James puts it bluntly:
“Those conflicts and disputes among you, where
do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within
you? You want something and do
not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain
it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.” [James 4:1-2a]
To make peace that
lasts, the peacemaker has to appeal to the best that is within people. She has to be able to say, somehow, “You are
not that kind of person, are you?”
Two weeks ago, there was an incident in Israel in which
right-wing extremists set fire to the house of some Palestinians in the middle
of the night, burning a child to death.
This is the same sort of thing the KKK has done to create terror among
African Americans in our country. In
that land and that part of the world where it has become all too common, the
response of the Israelis has been strangely hopeful precisely because people of
faith have made that jump on which peacemaking depends and have said, “This
cannot be who we are.” The Times of Israel the very next day quoted
the head of Israel’s equivalent of the FBI, who said,
“We have a lot of
lessons to learn as a society as a result of the incidents of last night. … The
signs point to this attack being carried out by Jews. A nation whose children were
burned in the Holocaust needs to do a lot of soul-searching if it bred people
who burn other human beings.”[1]
To say that in the
heart of the Middle East takes immense courage.
God bless him for it. Without
someone somewhere saying, “Hold on!” things spiral way out of control. We’ve all seen that.
How can we, as Christians, heirs of that faith, but with
the added promise of forgiveness through Jesus for all the terrible things
within us that Jesus’ brother James pointed out, fail to follow suit? To be peacemakers is to bear witness that,
yes, we can be greedy and covetous and disputatious as he says, but that we can
set these in the full light of God’s grace so that they do not get the best of
us. When we do that ourselves, we have
standing to ask that of others.
How, then, can I own a gun? If I am called to live in such a way that I
would not use it, what’s the point? How,
then, can I let myself be drawn into the cycle of recriminations and lawsuits
that happens so much in our society? And
if I really and truly believe that I am made in the image of God, beloved by
Christ, and sustained by his Spirit, how can I fail to honor that same image in
another human being? The Bible teaches
us to be honest about ourselves and honest with others. We will get mad sometimes; even Jesus lost
his temper. The point is not to let that
anger consume us, and certainly not to make it our way of life. In Ephesians, it says,
“So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us
speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let
the sun go down on your anger, and
do not make room for the devil.” [Ephesians
4:25-27]
How best can one be a
peacemaker? It isn’t so much by stepping
in and getting yourself shot. It’s by doing
what George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, said to do: “Walk cheerfully over
the world, answering that of God in everyone.”
[1]
Gilad Erdan quoted in David Horovitz, “A Shameful Day for Israel”, The Israel Times (July 31, 2015). http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-shameful-day-for-israel/
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