A Dividing Peace

Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56

After Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem, he begins walking a road he knows will lead to a final confrontation with Roman and Jewish leaders,

He was intent on taking his message and healing and person straight to the center of power

He knew that God was doing something new and that this was his road.

It would not be easy. It would not end well.

But it is what he had to do.

Faith is described in Hebrews 12 as a race that we run following Jesus the pioneer and perfector of our faith.

Have you ever set out on a race that you realized half way in, or a quarter way in, or maybe just after the starting blocks, that you’re not prepared for?

One time during Junior High track, I decided I would run the 400, I’m not sure if this was before or after I decided I would eat a peanut butter sandwich.  But following on the peanut butter sandwich, the four hundred was a lot more difficult. I made it half way and walked off the track.

“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me” we sing – but peace is not something we will into being by ourselves.

At least that’s not the peace on earth and good will toward men that we sing about from Luke’s gospel.

The peace on earth that we read about in scripture is a much bigger peace – it’s a peace that has it’s base in righteousness and justice, in changed hearts and transformed social structures.

It’s a peace that is the cultivation of the kingdom of God.

The Hebrew word for peace shalom means so much more than the absence of conflict, it means the well-being, the soundness of the land and the people.

This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. calls this a substantive and positive peace, “in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.”

So often we get to the 200 meter mark and begin to feel the peanut butter sandwich and realize that maybe we’d prefer something a little easier.

This is the peace that people are talking about around Jesus that he responds to.

The paradoxical thing is that in order to find that substantive and positive peace,

The things that get in the way need to be brought to light and confronted.

We all understand this when it comes to sickness and health of bodies.

When you break your arm, it does no good to wish yourself peace and not do the hard work of going to the doctor, of getting a cast, etc.

Peace is not something we can order ready made.

We are called into faithful community and on to the road of discipleship to seek peace and pursue it,

Not to find a way to easily manufacture and mass market it.

That’s impossible –

The positive peace that Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks about comes at a cost to ourselves and at a cost to a society that has gone astray.

In his 1963 open letter, written from the Birmingham jail in response to a statement from eight white Alabama clergy calling for unity and criticizing King’s movement, he writes:

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” 

The good news is that we can choose to seek real and lasting peace,

The uncomfortable news is that this is going to be not as easy as it would be to stay with the way things are.

But we take encouragement from the faithful people who have come before us.

By the long list of heroes who sought the peace of God and suffered in their seeking.

Moses who chose to give up his status as an Egyptian noble in order to speak for the liberation of God’s children.

Prophets and freedom-fighters who faced persecution and death as they sought a better city than the one that they found themselves in.

They believed the promise that God was not done with the people of this world, that God has a better way.

These join with the many since then, with the apostles and martyrs through the ages whose faces populate the pictures in Hebrews 12:1, the great cloud of witnesses.

People who struggled with the call of God and the inertia of a broken world so stuck in its ways.

I was reading a book by African-American theologian James Cone and he talked about the personal struggle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he sought that positive peace and confronted the powers and principalities of his day.

He writes:

“Openly to fight white supremacy in the deep South during the 1950s and ‘60s  was unthinkably perilous. Even at a distance of more than fifty years, we can still sense the fear.  When King agreed to act as the most visible leader in the civil rights movement, he recognized what was at stake. In taking up the cross of black leadership, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear. This fear reached a climax on a particular night, January 27, 1956, in the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott, when he received a midnight telephone call threatening to blow up his house if he did not leave Montgomery in three days.  Later he told how that call created a “spiritual midnight,” as he thought about what could happen to him, his wife, and newly born baby girl. Later recalling this incident, King told how fear drove him from bed to the kitchen where he prayed, “out loud,” pleading, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right…. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faulting, I’m losing my courage.” Yet then… King said he heard a voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even to the end of the world.”

…That message choed the words of an elderly-unlettered woman, who was “affectionately called Mother Pollard.” At an earlier mass meeting where King was urging the people to continue the boycott of the buses, she had perceived his doubt and fear. He did not speak with the conviction she was accustomed to hearing. When she confronted him, King denied anything was wrong. “You can’t fool me,” she told him. “I know something is wrong. Is it that we ain’t doing things to please you? Or is it that the white folks is bothering you?” Before he could reply, she said, “I don told you we is with you all the way…. But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.”

(James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, pp. 77-78)

Think about the power of one person saying a costly yes to God’s call to speak up for the ones who have no voice. Think about the power of one woman encouraging her pastor. Think about the power that God works through us in order to save us, to heal the earth.

In our world, in our nation, in our state, in our communities, in our families, and in our hearts,

There is struggle going on.

It is the struggle between the spirit and the flesh,

Between good and evil,

It is the struggle between those who lord it over you and the ones who imagine a peace that passes all human imagination.

In the resurrection, God has inaugurated a new creation,

all old systems of relating to self and others have passed away.

All things have become new.

But the new exists in the midst of the old.

And this is where the struggle enters.

The new of God’s love for all,

The new of God's cherishing of each person regardless of their appearance, status, wealth, country of origin, culture,

The new breaks into the old of our nationalist allegiances, the old of our implicit negative bias, our fear-driven, wall-building, refugee-shunning, poor-blaming, punitive and violent domination-systems, the old of our self-seeking and anxious striving for control, the old of our numbing pain rather than seeking out connection with others.

The new creation’s presence in the midst of the old causes struggle.

The presence of the new in the midst of the old produces division.

This is what Jesus means when he says that he came to bring division.

That’s not his ultimate purpose,

But in a world as broken and so bent on power-seeking and wealth-accumulating,

Peace will look like an unwelcome refugee from a strange and scary land.

And it will be hung up on a cross if needs be.

But if we believe in the freedom of God, if we believe in the power of God to save ourselves and our world,

We can choose to let go of the sin that so easily ensnares us,

especially the sin of clinging to the old just because it’s more comfortable,

or aligning ourselves with unjust power merely because it gives us a sense of peace in a chaotic and uncertain world,

And we can seek the peace not made by human hands,

that city that the author of Hebrews tells us beckons us from afar

That we might run the race following in the way of Jesus – the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,

Knowing that when we run with Jesus he is with us all the way.

Even to the end of the world.