When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely[b] on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (NRSV)
“Peace I Give, Peace I Leave: Making Peace in Times of Strife,” Week One
I recently reminisced on photos from back when I had hair—many years ago—and my long, curly locks were posed on a bench in South Africa, where I was on a pilgrimage through Global Ministries, our denomination’s overseas mission arm, where South Africa’s first-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate had been held under house arrest by the apartheid Afrikaner government.
Three South Africans have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Two of them I am certain most of you could name: Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The labors of each man against the depravity of apartheid, and then in continuing to heal South Africa from apartheid’s wounds once the system was abolished, were divine in dimension and inspiration.
The third South African Nobel Peace laureate came some years earlier, still in the era of the apartheid, but his memory labors in more obscurity. Chief Albert Luthuli was a Zulu educator and lay preacher in the United Congregational Church who served as Chief of the Zulu tribe for seventeen years before being deposed by the apartheid government and confined to his hometown in 1953 as punishment for his campaigns against apartheid.
That did not stop him from being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize eight years later, and while apartheid would outlast Chief Albert Luthuli by more than twenty years, his labors represented an early nail in apartheid’s coffin. He did not live to see its abolition, which is sadly often the case with kingdom-sized, soul-sized work: its laborers do not always live long enough to see their work come to fruition. I understand how we say that someone who has passed is at rest from their labors. I do not always understand how we say that they rest in peace, though, until the fruit of those labors has come into full bloom. To me, Chief Albert Luthuli was a peacemaker whom his successors then needed to put at peace by stamping out apartheid for good.
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 witness this reality each time we read the famed Beatitudes with which Jesus begins His Sermon on the Mount when He gets to the invocation, “Blessed are the peacemakers (or cheesemakers, or any purveyors of dairy products, really), for they shall be called children of God.”
Lets start with what this invocation is not talking about: Jesus is not referring to the sort of peace in which you go along to get along, or let others take advantage of you for the sake of conflict avoidance. The Christian author Jared Byas refers to this as “doormat love,” of being willing to be stepped on and stepped over in the name of keeping the peace.
But that’s just it—that is the difference between keeping and making peace. The peace that is kept in a scenario where you try only to avoid conflict is a tenuous, surface-level peace. It is unsustainable and should not be, and often cannot be, kept. A new, all-encompassing peace must be made. This is why the peacemakers are blessed: they are building something anew.
The meaning of peace, so far as Jesus preaches it and offers it, is, as the Bible scholar Rudolf Schnakenburg says, “a comprehensive, salutary condition. “Peaceable” would be too weak of a translation of the word used here…the word denotes an active concern for peace as God wills it and as Jesus embodies it.”
So think about the people in your life who nudged you, maybe even pushed you, to change for the better: to become a more loving, more caring, more deeply just and generous soul. Their doing so may not have been easy; you may have even bristled at or resisted their attempts to spark you towards self-improvement. But if their efforts were successful, if you did indeed emerge a better person and a better Christian simply by dint of that person being in your life, might you see how that person is the true peacemaker, the true child of God of whom Jesus speaks?
For while God loves us and offers us grace, God also expects us to respond to that grace with a continual striving to become better people and better Christians. A good and great God does not settle for mediocrity. The peacemakers among us know this, and by reflecting this divine attitude, are recognized by Jesus as children of God.
Generally, Jesus is much quicker to recognize such realities than we ourselves are. Peacemakers, Thomas G. Long writes in his commentary on Matthew, “are seen to be troublemakers or unrealistic dreamers; this beatitude promises that, when the curtain is raised on the kingdom of heaven, they will be seen in a true light as ‘the children of God.’”
Hearken back, then, to Chief Albert Luthuli. A troublemaker to the racist apartheid government of South Africa and an unrealistic dreamer to many, he was given his due as a peacemaker with the Nobel Peace Prize—yet he remains more obscure than many such laureates. He has benefited from the hindsight of history after a life full of unrelenting hostility to him for his skin color, yet neither has the curtain fully raised either.
This is just as true here as it is there. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most hated men in the United States when he was alive, and precious few historically white congregations dared to support the civil rights movement. Now, he has a federal holiday in his honor, and seemingly everyone tries to claim that he would support their worldview if he were alive today.
If it’s easy to see with the benefit of hindsight who the peacemakers were, how can you be one now?
We will spend the four weeks after this trying to answer that question, but lets start here: does what I do contribute to the vision that Baruch Spinoza speaks of: am I contributing to a disposition not only for myself, but for the world around me, for benevolence, confidence, and justice? Even if—especially if—it is not the easy or convenient thing to do in the moment, am I doing that which makes peace?
If we make peace, Christ says, we shall be called children of God. You may think that we are already called that by dint of our faith in God, and you would not be wrong in doing so. But so too was the Prodigal Son a child of his father, but only by returning to the fold of his father, and aligning himself to the will of his father, did the Prodigal Son drop the “prodigal” adjective. We are children of God, yes, but so long as we are not making peace, we are prodigal children of God. And like the father in Christ’s parable, God seeks our full return to the fold.
The prodigal child, the believer who is not making peace, is not necessarily the one who was the outlier in their lifetimes. Chief Albert Luthuli was disenfranchised not only by South African apartheid, but by American Jim Crow when he came to tour the United States in 1948. That did not make him the prodigal child; the people who treated him thusly were the prodigals.
To make peace sometimes means going against the grain, being countercultural, being the one who finds just enough of their voice to say to the ninety-nine, “You know what? This is not okay.”
Our voices may quaver at doing that, our knees may knock and our hands may shake. But God will steel our souls and be our rock and solid foundation upon which we can make a peace in which all people might one day flourish.
It is a hope I have for us. May it come, and right soon.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
October 24, 2021