“When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his relatives, the Israelites. 24 When he saw one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian. 25 He supposed that his kinsfolk would understand that God through him was rescuing them, but they did not understand. 26 The next day he came to some of them as they were quarreling and tried to reconcile them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you wrong each other?’ 27 But the man who was wronging his neighbor pushed Moses aside, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? 28 Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ 29 When he heard this, Moses fled and became a resident alien in the land of Midian. There he became the father of two sons.
30 “Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush. 31 When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight; and as he approached to look, there came the voice of the Lord: 32 ‘I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Moses began to tremble and did not dare to look. 33 Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. 34 I have surely seen the mistreatment of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. Come now, I will send you to Egypt.’
35 “It was this Moses whom they rejected when they said, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ and whom God now sent as both ruler and liberator through the angel who appeared to him in the bush." (New Revised Standard Version)
“Peace I Give, Peace I Leave: Making Peace in Times of Strife,” Week Three
I remember the men’s lunch because even though I had ordered a Corona and lime, it began raining partway through the lunch. Fortunately, we were under a covered area, but it was very much unlike all those beach commercials you see on the telly hawking the stuff.
I turned by attention back to Stewart, who was relaying to us his memories of serving in the United States armed forces in the Marshall Islands during the Castle tests, which included the most powerful human-made explosion in history in the detonation of the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb.
The cost of that achievement was great—the human cost in the forcible eviction of the indigenous Marshallese people from their ancestral lands, the environmental cost in the sheer—and often unanticipated—levels of radiation unleashed, and the frightening Cold War reality that two different countries had assembled enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth a hundred times over.
Layered amid those realities was my own personal one—that military service in the Pacific represented a well of deep emotions for me. Both my grandfather George and my great-uncle Albert fought in the Pacific theater in World War II. George landed on Leyte in the Philippines with General MacArthur and survived the war. Albert fought as a Marine on Okinawa and was killed in action just months before the war’s end. One of them came home to extend a family tree that would eventually grow to include me. One of them didn’t, and another branch of the tree of my mother’s side was cut off permanently. Who appointed them, to use Stephen the Martyr’s words, to live and to die? Who appointed them soldiers and peacemakers? Who appointed their loss and their traumas?
Such is the cost of war. Such is the moral imperative, then, in making and keeping peace.
When we speak of peacemaking, 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 with two weeks on passages from the Gospel of Matthew on the nature of peacemakers and mediation respectively, and today we jump over to the book of Acts and this excerpt from the parting soliloquy of Stephen the Martyr.
Before we dig into the meat of what Stephen is saying in this passage, a disclaimer: this is not a passage for us to point at ancient Judaism as intolerant of Christianity—firstly, because Christianity as an organized faith system really did not exist then. As the New Testament scholar Paul Walaskay hastens to note in his commentary on Luke, Stephen himself may well have been a Pharisee. So describing his treatment as “Pharisaical” both misses the mark and is unnecessarily pejorative of contemporary Jews at a time when antisemitism continues to be a violent reality for them.
Secondly, Stephen’s speech itself is replete with the themes of the Tanakh, and we hone in today specifically on his recounting of the biography of Moses, who was famously reluctant to pick up the mantle that God had placed upon Him at the burning bush, going so far as to beg God to please send someone else. God, rather memorably, refused.
Moses’s story did not end with the Exodus—it bittersweetly ended with him still having not reached the Promised Land, having been rejected multiple times over by the people whose liberation he had engineered. As Stephen recounts, the rejection started much earlier on, as Moses attempted to be a peacemaker between quarreling men and was met with the words, “Who appointed you as our leader and judge?” And when I think of peacemaking on the week of Veteran’s Day, I think of the people enlisted and drafted to fight our wars as God enlisted Moses to fight against Pharaoh.
For there were grievous casualties as a direct result of the plagues—the tenth, against the firstborn, is the most obvious and most directly devastating, but also among the plagues were the striking down of the livestock, and many of the other plagues could well have resulted in deaths themselves. The liberation of the Israelites, like the liberation of so many peoples across history, came at a cost. There is a scene in the Steven Spielberg movie Munich in which Ciaran Hinds recounts the Pesach story that when the angels celebrate the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, God asks them, “Why are you celebrating? I just had to kill a multitude of my children.” We should strive for the liberation of others precisely because we know that in the past, liberation has come at a cost.
But back to Moses. He engineers the liberation of the Hebrews and is subsequently rejected by them, and in that facet of his story, I see the soldier—the person enlisted to potentially liberate or free a people or land, only to return after their enlistment and, in so many ways, be rejected by the country they served. Homelessness, mental illness, unemployment, and substance abuse are only a few of the many ills veterans face down later in life, all of them contributing to a profound loss of dignity, security, and stability.
Being peacemakers, then, includes making peace for the people who have already given of themselves to make peace. We are devoting this series to the need to make peace where little or none may exist, and that means recognizing the reality that for so many of our neighbors right here that peace remains terribly elusive. Sometimes it is elusive due to mental illness or addiction or any number of things, but our society’s ability to forget all about them, to deny them the lifesaving help they need, all of that contributes to the absence of true and deep peace like what Spinoza describes.
By this point in the series, I hope that you see my concern for creating a deeper peace among us as being rooted in Scripture and not simply a pipe dream, because this next part is one of the toughest: to make peace usually—maybe not always, but usually—requires we move out of our comfort zones.
Just as a soldier on a peacekeeping mission may be in an area of the world where they do not speak the language or fully understand the culture or customs, peacemaking here can mean pulling yourself out of your own comfort zones, be they emotional or geographical or cultural, in order to meet another person where they are at and make peace for them.
Church has a real and lasting role to play in this process—it can, and should, be a safe zone for us. The very term “sanctuary” to describe the space we are worshiping in comes from the Biblical tradition of seeking and claiming sanctuary in the presence of God before the Ark of the Covenant. So in this space of safety, we need to feel courageous enough to equip ourselves to step outside of our comfort zones outside these walls, in order to minister to others and build up peace for them.
Because truthfully, the same answer Moses would present is the answer we must present to ourselves. When we ask, “Who appointed little old imperfect me to make peace for others and help them create a better world?” Our answer can, and must always, be, “God, the maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen.” No lesser answer will do.
In a world where war is easy, peace comes at a cost. Peacemaking comes at a cost. Liberation from sin comes at a cost, this we know by right of the crucifixion. And creating repair where there had been loss comes at a cost. I am reminded of it when I think of my great-uncle Albert’s grave near the family plot in Michigan, of the ongoing plight of the Marshallese peoples who lost their homes, of the veterans we have forgotten about here and today.
Remembering all of them, and trying to do right by them in a society that does not always want to do what is right at all, these are not easy or comfortable things. I know that. You know that. It would be easier to pretend none of that was the case. But that, too, would come at a cost—a cost I believe our God sees as far too high. When our peace of mind comes at the expense of peace for others, it is not really peace.
So by making peace for them, may we, in the end, make peace for ourselves as well—a peace that may not come today or tomorrow, or make us feel better in the here and now, but which will be capable of, at long last, ushering in the kingdom of God.
To that great and holy task, yes, you and I have indeed been appointed. May the God who has appointed us to such a task give us the strength to fulfill it.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 7, 2021