Romans
15:4-13
Be totally honest. Do you expect to see peace between the
Israelis and the Palestinians in your lifetime?
Do you think that the Russians can ever be trusted? For that matter, do you think that people
from this country are fully “over” the Civil War? It wasn’t that long ago that I went to church
with friends in southwestern Virginia.
After church we were in the car and one of them apologized to me; I
hadn’t heard it but when I was introduced as being from Philadelphia, someone
sniffed and said, “A Yankee!” I told
her, “That’s okay, Tammie. Where I come
from, that’s a compliment.” Division,
stereotyping, fear of the stranger, dislike of foreign ways, distrust of
motives, and outright hostility seem to be baked into human nature. I would be wasting your time if I gave a lot
of examples, because we all know them and see them every day.
Yet deep down we know that cannot be
right. We are stirred by the idea, as
crazy as it is, that there might come a time when the notion that some people
are just natural enemies won’t apply. I
don’t just mean that over the centuries the English and French will stop making
jokes about each other and will pick on the Spaniards instead. I don’t mean that the Albanians and Croats
and Serbs will decide that the Turks are their real enemy and band together
against them. I’m talking about the
poetic prophecies of Isaiah:
“The wolf shall live with
the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and
the fatling together,
and
a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear
shall graze,
their
young shall lie down together;
and
the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” [Isaiah 11:6-7]
“The
peaceable kingdom,” we call it. It was
one of the things that William Penn hoped to create in Pennsylvania when he
opened it up to religious groups from all across Europe who had been killing each
other for a century. This Peaceable
Kingdom, as Isaiah sings of it, is an unnatural place. It goes directly against experience and
natural instinct. Woody Allen said, “The
lion shall lay down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”
It isn’t about the animals,
though. It’s about us. It’s about what can happen, must happen, for
peace to show up on earth and good will to be found among its peoples. Peace comes from God, not from us. We speak about being “peacemakers” and cite
Jesus’ blessing:
“Blessed are the
peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.” [Matthew
5:9]
They
are called “children of God” because they take after their heavenly
Parent, who gives them the seeds of peace to plant and tend and nurture. Peace does not come from us, but it is ours
to experience, to share, and to bear witness.
The early Church struggled to deal
with the fact that it encompassed, at first, both Jews and Samaritans. (Ha!
You thought I would say, “Jews and Gentiles, right?) The gospels, especially John’s gospel,
contain stories of how Jesus and the Samaritans reached out to one another even
though they were culturally and religiously expected to stay on their sides of
a centuries-old feud. Then, when they
had begun to get over that, suddenly the Holy Spirit began doing wonders in
Jesus’ name among the Gentiles. The book
of Acts is filled with those stories and what it took for the Jewish believers
(among whom there were likely Samaritans) to recognize that the Gentiles were
also welcome as full participants and partners in the Kingdom.
Paul
reached back to Isaiah’s vision to find words for what was going on. Unity among people wasn’t because they all
liked each other. It wasn’t some sort of
Rodney King “why-don’t-we-all-just-get-along” moment. There’s enough of that kind of papering over
real hurt and ugly history, and ignoring or denying it never brings true
healing. Instead, he saw it as God’s
grace showing up in our lives because of Jesus.
If one person could, in himself, reconcile humanity and God, then that
person could and would reconcile people to one another. He points out what the Hebrew scriptures say:
“‘Praise the Lord, all
you Gentiles,
and
let all peoples praise him’;
and again Isaiah says,
‘The root of Jesse shall
come,
the
one who rises to rule the Gentiles;
in him the Gentiles shall
hope.’” [Romans 15:11-12]
Another expression for this
Peaceable Kingdom comes from an American poet and preacher and prophet, who
called it the Beloved Community. In his essay
Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote (and bear with
the language of a previous generation):
“Men are not easily moved
from their mental ruts or purged of their prejudiced and irrational feelings. When the underprivileged demand freedom, the
privileged at first react with bitterness and resistance. Even when the demands are couched in
non-violent terms, the initial response is substantially the same. …But the nonviolent approach does something to
the hearts and souls of those committed to it.
It gives them new self-respect.
It calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know
they had. Finally, it so stirs the
conscience of the opponent that reconciliation becomes a reality.”[1]
And
you know that this man was ready to die to see that happen. Even more did Jesus before him die to see
God’s love shared with all people.
Peace always requires
sacrifice. At the most basic level, when
there is conflict someone has to give something up. Usually, everyone involved has to give
somewhere. Compromise is not a sign of
weakness, but of strength. It is only to
be avoided when it asks someone to surrender their integrity or to excuse an
injustice. When it is a matter of
respecting your opponent, it keeps an opponent from becoming an enemy. Think of the way that families negotiate
where and how to spend holidays.
Thanksgiving is at one house and Christmas at another; or maybe
Christmas Eve is for the extended family and Christmas Day is for the
household. A really trivial example from
my own family, where a lot of people like dark meat, is that we give the
youngest person a chance to have the turkey leg, since the younger you are, the
more likely you will want to eat with your fingers anyway. Why not let them have the piece that comes
with its own handle?
To go to the other end of the
spectrum, the ultimate peace came to us when Jesus surrendered the glory of
heaven and lay aside his complete power, his equality with God the Father, to
walk us back out of our sin and death into eternal life. That is real sacrifice, that sealed peace
between God and us. And what it asks of
us is to live into the reality that Jesus creates, the Peaceable Kingdom, the
Beloved Community, to be centered no longer on ourselves, but on God, along
with the many others whose voices together with ours form a symphony of praise
and worship, of love and service. Said
Paul,
“May the God of
steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another,
in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice
glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” [Romans
15:5-6]
And
let all God’s children say, “Amen.”
[1] Martin
Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Strength to Love (New
York: Harper & Row, 1963), 139.
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