peace — Page 2 — Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 12:9-21
preached on October 6, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are two kinds of texts in the Bible that I especially love: texts that talk about the new and different thing that God is doing in the world and texts that urge us to live and walk in new and different ways in our life together. I like the first kind of text because I know that there is so much wrong with our world that is beyond our ability to fix. There are still so many places where things are just not like they should be. There is so much war and violence that distract us from living together in justice and peace. There are so many places where divine intervention seems to be the only way to extract ourselves from the mess around us. I like the second kind of texts that talk about a new and different thing that God is doing in our world because they remind me that there is hope even when things seem to be a giant mess. Even though we can’t fix it all ourselves, these texts make it clear that we have a responsibility to take action and live differently to make our broken world a better place.

Our two readings today are perfect examples of my favorite kinds of readings from the Bible, especially if we want to think more clearly and directly about God’s deep desire for peace in our world. Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah gives us a vivid vision of a new and different Jerusalem. This vision of the city shows us a place that stands as a monument of peace, justice, and integrity for all nations. It is a factory of transformation for the difficult but crucial work of turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. This Jerusalem is a center of instruction for following God’s ways and learning to live in peace.

Isaiah’s vision shows us the components that make this city such a place of peace, life, and health for all. First, it is centered around the gift of God’s teaching in the temple, where people can learn not just who God is but also what God is doing and how God is calling all people to be a part of the transformation of the world. It is a place where people look for new ways to explore God’s presence in the world and so walk in God’s ways each and every day. It is a place where God’s gracious judgment is lived out, not just for one nation or for a privileged few but for all people, everywhere. And most of all it is a place where war is finally set aside, where conflict is not settled by violent reaction but where peace is learned and practiced anew each and every day.

Sadly, this was only a vision. To this day, Jerusalem remains a city divided, torn apart by nearly every imaginable sort of conflict around religion, race, class, and history. It doesn’t have a good record of being a place to go to learn how to live in peace—unless the best way to learn about peace is to learn how it doesn’t happen. Yet the promise is clear: “In days to come” Jerusalem will be the city of peace, where people will stream to learn the ways of God and discover a way of life that does not learn war, and so all people are called to find this new path and walk in the light of the Lord.

This kind of challenge to “walk in the light of the Lord” is a great example of the second kind of my favorite texts from the Bible, the texts that invite us to a new and deeper faithfulness in our life and in our world. Our reading today from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome gives us deeper instructions on how to do this, and it too focuses squarely on issues of peace as it directs us into a new and different way of life. Many of these words are likely very familiar to us, as they have been adapted over the centuries into words that we use in the charge that often concludes our Sunday worship. There is still something important about hearing them in this context, for while they can seem like a long series of unrelated commands, they all point to a deeper and more genuine way of living in love and peace with all creation.

Paul begins by offering exhortations toward love, emphasizing that love should be real and mutual, that evil must be resisted, that honor belongs to all, and that serving God with all our hearts stands above everything else. He recognizes that life is not always easy, so he lifts up hope, patience, and perseverance as essential attributes of the life of faith and urges his listeners to support those who are in need and to extend hospitality to strangers. Then Paul turns more directly to describe how to live in peace with others. Repeatedly he demands that curses and vengeance toward those who have wronged us be set aside, that we take seriously the situations of our sisters and brothers and embrace both their celebration and their mourning. He demands that we recognize our limitations in all of life and living, and that we work to overcome evil, violence, and injustice not by responding with more of those things but by offering deeper and more real good in the world. This is not an old way of life but a new one, one that places the emphasis on right relationship over rules, one that sets aside old grudges for new possibilities, one that insists that peace really and truly can become real in our lives and in our world if we stop trying to defeat our enemies with the sword and instead seek to live with them in the same way we would like them to live with us. So rather than taking up the role of divine police officer, detective, judge, jury, and executioner for ourselves, Paul insists that that we leave vengeance for God and instead seek to overcome evil with good and so walk more closely in the way of peace.

These two kinds of readings that look ahead for us to give us visions of new and different things and invite us to do them ourselves are deeply challenging in our world today. When we look around this world, peace seems so distant—both in far-off lands like Syria, Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, and all those other nations and places that we lift up in prayer each Sunday but also in places much closer to us where families are broken apart, gun violence spirals out of control, mental illness tears at the fabric of our communities, lesbian and gay youth are kicked out of their homes, and people are threatened by those they love the most. In our complex world, peace seems so impossible—so often, a compromise that seems to resolve one place of brokenness ends up driving others apart. And when we think about taking up the way of peace in our daily lives, the things we can do seem so insignificant, so tiny, so unimportant, so unable to actually make a difference amidst all the big things that pit us against one another.

Yet Isaiah and Paul insist that we must start somewhere. Following Paul’s charge to walk in a new and different way might actually help bring about the kind of transformation that God so deeply desires and Isaiah so beautifully described. Our hope of something new and different for our world can be made real even in tiny ways with simple actions of love, justice, and peace. And throughout it all, we can trust that God will work in all that we are doing to make even our seemingly insignificant actions important, transforming even the smallest actions for peace into a part of the new life for all creation, working in even our greatest brokenness to redeem the whole creation and guide us all to walk in the light of the Lord.

So as we gather at this table on this World Communion Sunday, as we remember our sisters and brothers in Christ around the globe who join us at this strange feast that looks back to Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and forward to the great feast of all creation in the years yet to come, as we make even a small offering to deepen the work of peace in our community, our denomination, and our world, may we trust that God’s vision of peace for our world is deeper and broader and wider and more possible than we could ever imagine, and may we then walk in the light of the Lord as we love one another, rejoice in hope, and live peaceably with all each and every day until all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

a sermon on Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 for World Communion Sunday
preached on October 7, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Back when I was in college, I was attending a conference when a minister I knew pulled me aside. We had met in person earlier in the week, but we also knew each other from online conversations. I had been working on the website for the conference, and she was wondering if I might help with the website for another conference that she was helping to organize. Rather than just signing me up to work, she invited me to be on the conference planning team, working with a bunch of far more experienced people to plan an event in an area where I had little or no experience. Still, she felt like the conference would benefit from my presence and work by taking a different approach to promotion. We would have a vibrant website well in advance of the conference that would not only tell people about how to register and attend but would also be updated in real time during the event so that people could follow along rather than just waiting until it was all over to read an article about it. So that’s how I came to be a part of the planning teams for the 2000 and 2001 Presbyterian Peacemaking Conferences and had my first exposure to the work of peacemaking in the church.

Those experiences were formative for me. Through the planning process and the event, I met several of the people I now consider mentors and friends in ministry, including two colleagues who later became moderator and vice-moderator of the General Assembly, several of my colleagues here in New York City Presbytery, including Krystin Granberg, our guest preacher last week, and several others who are nothing short of legendary in many circles in the Presbyterian church. The people were great, but we had some fun times together as well, beginning with a memorable afternoon in a 15-passenger van circling the LAX airport to pick up members of the planning team and continuing through three years of work together to pull off two years of Peacemaking conferences.

But the most memorable and most important part of that formative time for me was learning more about what it means to be a peacemaker in the church. As I, a college student from a pretty conservative background in Mississippi, sat with these women and men who had marched for civil rights and campaigned against the Vietnam War, among other things, I learned so much about our call to be peacemakers. Every year on World Communion Sunday, the first Sunday in October, I think about these experiences, for this is the day when we collect the Peacemaking Offering to continue this work that I was a part of and the time when we celebrate and reaffirm our call to be peacemakers in the world.

The most difficult lesson of those days for me was one that I hear repeated in our reading from Proverbs this morning: there can be no peace without justice. These words from Proverbs talk about the responsibility of those who have—the “rich”—toward those who do not have—the “poor,” and ultimately that responsibility shows us that justice is required for there to be peace in our world. The first saying here calls us to take a first step in this direction:

A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.

Money and power and wealth don’t matter as much as doing what is right, whether you are rich or poor, because in the end, God makes everyone and everything and will call everyone to account for their use of what has been given to them. But the second saying here makes the link between justice and peace very clear:

Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.

Where there is injustice, there will be strife and pain and sorrow, and justice is required to set things right and make the way clear for peace. The proverb continues by reminding us what is required of us to make justice real:

Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.

The way of peace does not come from others taking care of those in need, but instead it requires that we reach out to those who have been left behind by the ways of the world, whether they live around the corner or around the world. The third saying, then, pulls all this together into the great challenge for us:

Do not rob the poor because they are poor or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the LORD pleads their cause and despoils the life of those who despoil them.

We are certainly not to take advantage of anyone, but here God goes beyond this to challenge us to join in God’s preferential treatment of those who are in greatest need, for God does not help those who help themselves but rather shows favor to those who have no way out other than God.

So on this Sunday when we remember our call to be peacemakers and gather around this table to remember how we share this feast with Christians all around the world, these warnings seem to be a good reminder to us that the way of peace requires us to work and act for justice in the world. This table of celebration is an empty promise for our sisters and brothers who long for something more if we are not working and acting and speaking up on their behalf, standing up for their humanity and insisting that all people are not only welcome at the table but should enjoy the fullness of life that is ours. Our prayers for peace in the world are empty if they are not accompanied by real and concrete action, not by putting the preferences of one nation or people above another, but by calling for justice to prevail for all so that peace can flourish. And even our action for justice is incomplete if our attempts to ease the immediate pain of our sisters and brothers in need are not accompanied by faithful challenges to the systems that allow injustice to prevail.

In 1984 and 1985, a terrible famine in Ethiopia brought a worldwide response, highlighted most by the prominent song “We Are the World” that brought together a number of famous artists to sing one song. While there was a tremendous outpouring of food aid and immediate support, those same areas in Africa have been faced with similar crises several times since because all we really offered in that moment was a band-aid rather than actually addressing the problematic systems that perpetuate violence, hunger, and injustice. A real and true response to injustice does not just fill in the temporary gap but steps up to demand change in the system so that justice might be made real and peace might take hold.

So on this day when we remember our connection to our sisters and brothers in faith around the world and offer extra gifts to support the work of peacemaking in our world and in our own backyard, may we remember God’s call to be peacemakers, not just papering over conflict or pretending that it doesn’t exist but confronting it honestly and recognizing what really separates us from God and one another, not just offering a tiny band-aid to cover up the gaping wounds of our world but working to join in God’s work of pouring out justice like mighty waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, and not just trying to bring about peace for ourselves and in ourselves but stepping up to seek and offer peace to our community, our city, our nation, and our world so that all might be made whole and complete.

So may God strengthen us for this work of peace and justice each and every day until God’s new way of peace, justice, love, and freedom is real for every human being and for all creation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Visions of Peace

Justice and Peace for All