A PARTICULAR PEACE

May 31, 1992
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture

Micah 4:1-4
John 14:25-31

"...Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you..."
~John 14:27 (NRSV)

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. And so in the
interest of starting this new week off on the right foot I am
going to make a confession. I have never preached a passable
Sermon on the topic of peace. TI take comfort in the fact that I
am not alone. Roman Catholic scholar, Gerard Sloyan, observes
that our text this morning ordinarily brings out the banal in the
preacher... After all, what can you say about peace except that
it is a good idea? And sermons on the topic, he observes, are
consistently boring. (interpretation, John, p. 177]

And yet, my Church, the Presbyterian (U.S.A.), declares that
it is for peace every year. -"Peacemaking," the Presbyterian
Church says, "is the believers! calling." It is what Christians

are to do, what we are about. I have read the literature and
attended seminars, and I have learned how complex peace is, how
easy to over-simplify, but also how absolutely important the to
ic is. TI have aiso learned how mixed-up our ideas about peace
can become with our feelings about our nation.

I once led a senior high school work-study trip on the topic
of peace. We visited and worked at Corrymeela, an ecumenical
peace community in Northern Ireland which brings together people
who are on either side of the issues which so tragically divide
that community. Corrymeela, actually, gets people talking to each
other instead of shooting, which many agree is, if not peace, at
least an improvement. -And then we visited and worked at Iona,
one of my favorite places, an island off the west coast of Scot-
land where Celtic missionaries from Ireland first landed in the
Sixth Century, and where today there is a restored abbey and the
Tona Community - dedicated to the Peace of the World. I aman
associate of the Iona Community. But when we took our senior
high school students there to attend an international symposium

on peace it turned out to be a kind of annual reunion gathering
of a group of British.Socialists who were unhappy because of
America's nuclear weapons“aimed’at the Soviet-Union’ from “bases in
Great Britain - thus making them, not us, primary first strike
targets. They were not: only unhappy-about that,: but it seemed to
me, they were really unhappy because: our youngsters.were wearing
.. Such expensive sneakers and looked so prosperous.

My colleague on that particular adventure was a minister who
had graduated from Annapolis, served nine years in the United
States Navy on nuclear submarines before he felt the hand of. God
tapping him on the shoulder. Jerry listened to the United States
and its military, specifically, being criticized with mounting
indignation... And I wondered what he was thinking about. I
became concerned when, with a devilish twinkle in his eye, he
told an outrageous Navy story, full of black humor... something
about "candy missles." And then, having gotten their attention,
he said, with grace and conviction:

"T joined the Navy because I felt called to in the
same way I feel called to ministry. I believed
that I was involved in peacemaking then. ..I still.
do."

It was a great moment.

And so, my confession must include my.;observation that some
of the people who talk longest and loudest.and.most definitively
about peace, don't seem to have ever been in an important fight.

There is, let us be clear, nothing good.about war: .I have
not personally fought in one, but I have been close. With a lot
of other college students my age I sat in a class for two years
to learn how, on a very basic level, to do the coordinates for
high altitude bombing - factoring in air speed, wind, altitude,
impact, objective. And eventually I reflected that some of my
classmates, ten years later, were doing that over the jungles of
Viet Nam, unloading B-52s day after day, simply obliterating
everything in wide swaths of jungle; carpet-bombing we call it,
designed to kill every living thing, five, six, ten football
fields long... just like the pictures we watched in the class. I
don't think I've ever talked to anyone who has actually partici-
pated in a war - not in a movie theater, but an actual shooting
and killing war - who believed that it was a good idea.

So ambiguity. about peace. is not enthusiasm for war. «It is
simply that there have been, by my lights, some important fights,
some necessary wars, and some.noble. sacrifice,.and-some selfless
dying - for which I continue to be grateful. And that is part of
why we are uncomfortable when peace rhetoric becomes simplistic.

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I read an essay on the topic this week by Episcopal clergy
Barbara Brown Taylor, which identified part of our problem. We
equate peace with passivity. "A peaceful person," she wrote,

"is quiet and untroubled. . To hold one's peace means to be quiet,
to make peace means..to. surrender ,..and..to..rest..in-peace, after
all, means to die.’ Given all.these choices, ‘is-it-any wonder
that we feel some ambivalence about whether or not we want this

kind of peace in our lives." ‘[Weavings, "A Fierce and Realistic
Peace," March, April, 1988, p. 7]

The funeral home is the one time we hear our friends de-
scribed as peaceful, as in "Doesn't he look peaceful?"

One time, actually a very.significant time, Jesus said to his

disciples, "Peace I give to you. My peace... Not as the world
gives."

Some translate it:

"Peace is my parting gift to you" [{Taylor] or

"Peace is my farewell." [R. E. Brown ]
It was the Last Supper... a‘time for summing up... for
saying important things... one of them was this:

"Peace I give to you - My peace."

It is a fundamental Scriptural idea... God's peace... the
peace of the creation. The word is one you know - "shalom." It
is a word Jesus knew. It is the word, in its aramaic equivalent
that he would have used here. "Shalom - my shalom."

"A word so rich," Barbara Brown Taylor observes, "it em-
braces all realms of human life." For the individual shalom
meant wholeness, integrity and self-possession as evidenced by
bodily health, longevity and prosperity. To have shalom meant to
enjoy the free, uninhibited growth of the soul in community with
others and in right relationship with God." (op. cit., p. 7-9}

Shalom - wholeness, well-being.
Psalm 133 expresses it eloquently:

"How very good and pleasant it is
when kindred live together in unity!
It is like the precious oil

on the head,..."

It is putting your: babies to -bed: and singing them to sleep
and knowing they are safe and well. -It is walking down Pearson
-and.seeing children of:two or three races playing ina sandbox.
It is sitting in grace-filled silence with your parent.

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It - shalom - is individual and communal and spiritual.

It is the peace of the-world when swords are beaten into
plowshares, and it is comfortability. with.yourself, living in
justice with your neighbors and in right relationship with God.

-All of that is the content of the word Jesus’ used when he
said, "My peace."

It is not the simple absence of conflict. Peace enforced by
a powerful oppressor is not peace. Everybody knows that. When
Jesus said those words he was in the middle of a major conflict,
with the political authorities and there is, in addition, every
evidence that there was major conflict in his own soul. So,
neither is shalom a kind of placid peace of mind.

That is, of course, what we have made it. Confronted by a
world in which conflict continues to be a daily reality, we
retreat and go inward. Think of the tragic irony of Yugoslavia,
Armenia, and Azerbaijan, held in peace - if peace is the absence
of conflict - by an authoritarian political entity... And when
suddenly free of that authority, suddenly turning’ on each other
with an unbelievable degree of violence and hatred. We live ina
world and a culture that is increasingly violent: more automatic
weapons, more murders, capital punishment very nearly on the
evening news, live and in color.---reporters -outside the prison to
be sure we can experience it up close; movies and television
cluttered with exploding cars, the human body hacked, stabbed,
mutilated; force, coercion, violence asa way to resolve differ-
ences. There is not much peace actually.

And so what peace there is we assume will be found internal-
ly. "Peace of mind." There are a plethora of peace of mind

merchants and methodologies. The Sunday Tribune, last week
offered the following:

"At home, at work, in transit, even on vacation,
most of us could benefit from more relaxation and
stress reduction." And then a resume of the
following techniques for achieving some

peace of mind: "massage therapy, yoga, exercise,
progressive muscle relaxation, guided imagery,
environmental peace - which, if you can't make it
to the ocean or mountain top means - looking
intently at a house plant, music therapy and
aromatherapy.

"The food/mood connection-~--eat-pasta; popcorn and
bread instead of hamburgers and New York strip
Steaks which signal your body ‘to brace itself!
for work and battle."

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Peace of mind as a reduction of internal stress is a very
good idea. But it is not, I think, what Jesus meant.

The prophets helped Israel to.-learn.-that- peace had more to
do with justice than with anything else. A difficult lesson for
them and for us. The prophets. were critical of the preachers who
proclaimed peace when there was no justice. Individually, peace
means being -reconciled,: living in ‘integrity: and love with -your
neighbors, your family, your co-workers, your employees, employ-
er. It doesn't much matter what else is going on. If there is
no justice, no reconciliation here in your own personal relation-
ships you will not have peace.

Jesus took that idea and placed it squarely in the matrix of
the divine and human: God and you. To put it simply... Get
right with God and you will receive peace. Neglect that, avoid
it, banish it to the back compartment of your mind, and you will
know what peace is primarily by its absence.

Now there is an ethical and social imperative. There is no
more important topic than the peace of the world, peace between
nations, and peace among various communities within our nation.
It is, very simply, the highest priority for those of us who
claim as Lord one who is known as Prince of Peace.

We may differ on strategies,..but.we.must=be:untied in truth
telling and in our particular understanding that the way to make
peace is to work for justice. And, it is to confess and acknowl-
edge that we are an increasingly violent nation, that we choose
to deal with injustice, not by establishing justice, but-with an.
escalation of violence. Each incremental increase in public
violence, by some devilish logic, seems to lead us to embrace
even more violence. By some incredible departure from sanity,
the easiest response to the presence and use of military assault
weapons in our streets - is for everyone to own one. The saddest
image of our deep pathology was the N.R.A. using a picture of
Korean shop owners defending their stores.

Death by hand gun and automatic weapon is so much a part of
America and happens so routinely and commonly across the life of
this city that we don't much notice it any more.

On the first day of the week in which he would die violently
Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem and he said "would.that you
knew the-things that-make for‘ peace." Would he not weep over the
aying innocent children in Chicago's ghettos, caught in the
crossfire between gangs? Would he not -weep over: the’ picture of
those frightened Koreans with- their shot guns?

And looking at this wonderful nation, would he not weep over
the simple fact that the one area of pure scientific research

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unscathed by economizing cutbacks in recent years is not cancer,
Alzheimer's, AIDS, environment, food production - but thermal
nuclear weapons. Lewis Thomas writes: "the amount of money
(invested in weapons research and development) is enough to
sustain all other fields. of:basicscience-for generations...
enough to build Scarsdale on Mars if he had a mind to. We could
be gardening out in the galaxy. We could free ourselves from
disease. We could solve our energy problems. We could begin
paying attention to our children." [Late Night Thoughts while
Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, p. 83] -

Several years ago Frederick Buechner wrote about peace ina
way that sounds prophetic today:

"A nation has only so much money to spend, so much
time, so much energy, so much ingenuity to spend
and as the years go by we and our enemies are both
spending so much of all of these things on the
great instruments of death that we have less and
less to spend on hospitals and housing and
schools." [A Room Called Remember, p. 76]

When we talk about peace in the context of our faith in the
one who was Prince of Peace, we must be willing at least to risk
seeing the truth and telling truth and acknowledging that truth
in the public sphere is a matter. of..politics and budgets and
priorities,

Personally, it has to do with justice - right relationships.
If you seek peace, be a reconciler and peacemaker wherever you
are. If you want peace in your heart, make peace with your
Spouse, your friend, your church, your neighbor.

"My peace - not the world's," he said. And I know that what
he meant was that ultimate reconciliation between God and you
that he came to proclaim and to effect. At the heart of it all
is a basic human hunger for peace with God. You can spend your
life trying to describe it in respectable intellectual categories
~ none of which are any more helpful than this... You need and I
need to be reconciled, in relationship with, at peace, with the
God who made us, who continues to love us, who is present every-—
day in our lives.

What Jesus. was saying to his friends at the table of. the
Last Supper and by extension to you and me, was very good news.
The peace we seek and need - has been given. God's love has been
expressed: God's commitment to us is complete: ‘the door is
open, there is a place at the table; there: is a loving father -
or mother - with outstretched arms to welcome us home.

"My peace," he said, "I give to you."

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St. Paul would later say of him simply:
"He is our Peace..."

Apart. from our ability to understand’.it or articulate the
notion of peace, God's peace, the peace of Jesus Christ is so
central to Christian experience that one of the oldest liturgical
acts in.our tradition.is the Passing of the Peace. Worshipers
greet one another with a hand clasp and the words:

"The Peace of Jesus Christ be with you."

At the end of the service this morning, I invite you to
affirm it and claim it and say it, even if you don't understand
it. When you greet your neighbors this morning, extend to them
and yourself the magnificent promise of his particular peace.

"The Peace of Jesus Christ be with you."

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