“Be careful that you don’t look down on one of these little ones. I say to you that their angels in heaven are always looking into the face of my Father who is in heaven. 12 What do you think? If someone had one hundred sheep and one of them wandered off, wouldn’t he leave the ninety-nine on the hillsides and go in search for the one that wandered off? 13 If he finds it, I assure you that he is happier about having that one sheep than about the ninety-nine who didn’t wander off. 14 In the same way, my Father who is in heaven doesn’t want to lose one of these little ones.
15 “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and correct them when you are alone together. If they listen to you, then you’ve won over your brother or sister. 16 But if they won’t listen, take with you one or two others so that every word may be established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. 17 But if they still won’t pay attention, report it to the church. If they won’t pay attention even to the church, treat them as you would a Gentile and tax collector. 18 I assure you that whatever you fasten on earth will be fastened in heaven. And whatever you loosen on earth will be loosened in heaven. 19 Again I assure you that if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, then my Father who is in heaven will do it for you. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I’m there with them.” (Common English Bible)
“Peace I Give, Peace I Leave: Making Peace in Times of Strife,” Week Two
We began last week’s message with me sharing with you my experience of visiting the home of Chief Albert Luthuli, South Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate of three—all of whom were awarded the prize for their sacred labors in demolishing apartheid.
When we talk about peacemaking and peacemakers, though, the Nobel Prize has historically also missed the mark. For each Luthuli there is, say, the 1973 award to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, a treaty to end the war in Vietnam that was broken pretty much the instant the ink dried, or the 2019 award to Ethiopia’s president Abiy Ahmed, who almost immediately went on to launch an increasingly genocidal campaign against the Tigrayan people.
I do not make mention of that to depress you, but to emphasize that sometimes, our ability to judge our own history is greatly inhibited in real time. People we initially laud as heroes and peacemakers turn out not to be. Our practice of retaining memory, of keeping history, is doubly important given our own real time shortsightedness.
One of the most profound ways I have witnessed the power that storytelling across generations holds was in my doctoral program at Seattle University, and it intersected with the sort of high-wire diplomacy that those Nobel Peace Prizes tried to recognize. One of my classmates was married to a diplomat and so had lived in several different places all over the world, but the one that I remember to this day is Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea. And as my classmate’s husband performed his diplomatic responsibilities, she collected the stories and oral histories of elderly North Koreans who had survived the Korean War, which would eventually become the basis of her doctoral thesis.
The peacemaking that international diplomacy is capable of is obvious, but I believe this sort of preservation of stories of living with unimaginable oppression can be just as important, because they are not stories we often see or hear—or want to see or hear. Yet they are the stories of the Gospels: stories of the lepers and the disabled, the blind and the outcast, all championed by our Lord and Savior. I have to think that in being seen by Him, being treated as a human, a child of God with a heart and a soul, there was some peace made and felt.
In that way, Jesus functioned as a go-between, an intermediary or mediator of God’s grace and love. It is a role passed down to the saints of the church for centuries now, and a role we can inhabit still.
When we speak of peacemaking, then, we speak of being at peace or in a state of peace, we do not speak merely of a lack of violence. As Baruch Spinoza puts it, “Peace is not an absence of war. It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice.” Peace is something that is proactive, not reactive. It must be created before it can be maintained. So before we can keep a peace, there must be a peace that has been made. Before we become peacekeepers, we must first be peacemakers. Which leads us to this sermon series.
There may be an absence of war for us in the United States at present—rightly or wrongly, we are out of both Afghanistan and Iraq—but I do not think any of us would describe the circumstances since March of 2020 as “peaceful” either. A pandemic means we live not only in a time of increased mortality and danger, but also of increased fallout from all the mental and emotional consequences of living during a pandemic. We are cruel to one another, tearing one another down and apart rather than building one another up and whole. We live in an absence of war, perhaps, but we also most certainly live in an absence of peace.
Yet we follow as our Lord and Savior a Messiah who is called, among other titles, the Prince of Peace. An entire week of Advent is devoted to the virtue of peace. We sing hymns to the peace that God is capable of through Christ. As Christians, making peace—and then keeping it—is part and parcel of our faith. We cannot separate peace from Christianity, they are completely intertwined. We began this series last week from that place as Jesus proclaimed the blessedness of the peacemakers in the Beatitudes, and today we fast-forward in Matthew several chapters to two passages that sound on the surface like maybe they are separate, but which are similarly intertwined.
The second part of this passage is famous for laying down the basic strictures for seeking redress or mediation from a peer who has done you wrong. We especially like to hear that final verse—where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there also—devoid of that context. But the first part of this passage, about looking after the little ones, the sheep, and going after the one even if it means leaving the ninety-nine to their own devices for moment, that pairs along with the verses on mediating a dispute, because that is the overarching pattern of Matthew 18.
If we take a step back and look at the first ten verses of Matthew 18 as well, we see that pattern: a concern for the little ones—the children—followed up by a strong exhortation to ethical behavior—the famous “if your hand causes you to sin, chop it off” passage. So there is this pattern in Matthew 18 of first expressing concern for the littlest and the least, and then for right action and good behavior from the rest of us who are maybe not so immediately vulnerable.
That is because ethical behavior and right action is meant to protect the more vulnerable among us. Our ethics are meant to teach us to do right by them, even when—especially when—our selfishness does not want us to do so. Jesus puts himself between us and the children to mediate with us on their behalf, to tell us to emulate them better, to be more like them. Jesus is their go-between to us.
I think that is part of the role of the diplomat, the mediator, to be that channel or go-between. I think of my classmate’s spouse when I think of Jesus in that role—of all the people selflessly serving in those roles trying to make peace and achieve harmony, so far as it can be had. But I also think of my classmate, as an interlocutor for the stories of the vulnerable people she met along the way, of how she would champion them and wanted to make sure that their stories were honored as well. Mediating between two such vastly different countries and cultures in order to honor the other, I see Jesus in that too—Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus relenting to the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus healing the Roman centurion’s servant, and more. Mediating, going between, the different people was an integral part to Jesus’s public ministry.
We worship today on Halloween, the “hallowed eve” of All Saints Day. It is a day to remember those whom we have lost, but also celebrate the role they now occupy. Saints are that great cloud of witnesses of which the author of the letter to the Hebrews writes. They show us the way and intercede on our behalf to give us strength to follow the way that is just, that is righteous, that is lifegiving. The saints mediate the way for us by paving it, illuminating it, making it more accessible for us to follow.
In this way, saints attain immortality, for they are continuing to do that which they did when they were alive in this world: show us the way to God. By the ways in which they made peace in their lifetimes, they show us ways to make peace in ours, and in so doing, they give life across generations.
Making peace in a way that makes you remembered also makes you and your labors immortal.
This is something that Carrie and I have begun to feel more and more acutely as we become settled in Birmingham and passionate about our justice work. I love the way she put it as a question for us: What sort of ancestor do I hope to be? Or, for the purposes of All Saints Day, what sort of saint do I hope to be?
We do not always, or even often, benefit from saintly ancestors, and it makes the ones who were righteous, who made peace, who lived out the lifechanging love of God, all the more precious to us. And that should be a caution to us. How will our children and grandchildren be guided by God to see us? How might their memory of us strengthen their faith and better their lives? How will we be able to intercede for them in those ways? Will they even want us to do so? May we live our lives so that they will.
Wherever two or three of our children are gathered in the future, may we be there to intercede for them, as our saints and ancestors do for us. For Jesus says that we will be there not only with our children, but with Him, and our Creator, in peace.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
All Saints Sunday, October 31, 2021