The Peace Child

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal on December 2, 2007, First Sunday of Advent

Now that Peter and I have moved into our house in Marina Hills, I don’t have many occasions to drive all the way down Crown Valley Parkway and I miss it. So I was glad to have a reason to enjoy that nice drive the other day. As a bonus, the Christmas banners had been put up and I found their “Peace on Earth” sentiment to be thought provoking. I remember the first time I saw them, three years ago. The memory of having been confronted by someone who was angry with me for having preached about peace from this pulpit was fresh in my mind. My sermon had been perceived as an insult to those who were in Iraq fighting. It was also deemed unrealistic and very Pollyanna. War is just a fact of life and to think otherwise is to be naïve. So when I saw those banners on my way home it seemed incongruous. I wondered what my critic would think of them. Is “Peace on Earth” just something that you say at Christmas like “have a nice day?” Is it acceptable Christmas card sentiment but somehow unacceptable if you really mean to be talking about peace as opposed to war?

Other criticisms echoed in my ears as I drove under the banners hanging on lampposts on Crown Valley Parkway. Didn’t I know that this is a pretty conservative area that I was really out of touch with the mainstream? If I were going to preach about things like peace I would run the risk of alienating much of the prevailing community and stifling our growth. And yet that same community hangs banners that proclaim the same thing that I preached and it doesn’t seem to offend people. It’s kind of confusing.

I’m tired of the war in Iraq. I’m tired of reading Christmas sentiments about peace while we are in fifth year of a war with fluid justification, and no end in sight. I’m tired that our precious young people are coming home in pieces, broken in body and mind and spirit, never to be the same. I’m tired of Iraqi people having to bury women and children who were caught in a conflict that no one seems to know how to stop. I am tired of people thinking that we cannot do better.

At the Diocesan Convention this weekend we heard a very helpful dialogue between a rabbi and a Palestinian Christian priest. Everyone is pretty clear that religion has become one of the stumbling blocks to peace. Rabbi Jacobs contributed a truly important point. All religions will need to address their sacred texts and give something up. The Jews will need to give up their claim to being God’s only chosen people. The Christians will need to give up Jesus as the only way. The Muslims will need to give up the wrongness of everyone else. If that could be done, imagine what progress we could make.

Then let us consider the nations. Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan have an extraordinary book called The First Christmas and they bring some important scholarship to the context of Jesus’ birth and life. Israel at the time that Jesus was born knew all too well how the Roman Empire considered peace. Rome wanted peace but what that meant was an absence of revolt. Peace through victory was Roman peace. Around the time that Jesus was born, Rome proved its point. When Herod the Great died in 4 BCE there were uprisings all over Israel. Rebels hoped to replace Roman rule with a ruler the likes of which the prophets described – a messiah. Rome responded to the rebellions with two legions or 18,000 elite troops, 2000 cavalry and 1500 extra infantry. The army marched into Galilee and did what the Roman army always did. They killed the men, attacked the women and stole everything they could carry. This was the context of Jesus’ youth. When he preached and taught about peace it was because his neighbors had lived the reality of Rome’s kind of peace – peace through violence. Jesus would teach a different kind of peace – Peace through justice.

Rome was an Empire and they had no design for the kind of work that justice requires. They had one strategy – war and occupation. What do strategies for peace through justice look like? I’m fairly certain that if we have any they aren’t getting a whole lot of attention. Strategies for peace through justice include things like diplomacy and negotiation and self-evaluation of our habits and preferences that have an impact on the rest of the world. This kind of peace might require us to give up things like gas guzzling cars and suburbs in the desert. Peter and I met a Lebanese physics professor on the plane on our way to Beirut. Samir observed that if the resources were committed to the creation of a middle class through out the middle east so that people had jobs, homes and vacations they would lose their will for perpetual conflict. This new kind of peace might even require the US to give up its self-image as the world’s super-power. Could Rome have done that – probably not. Would we be willing to? That remains to be seen. What will it take for us want peace more than we’re willing to tolerate war?

One thing is certain – peace through justice requires sacrifice.

In 1955, Missionary preacher Don Richardson traveled New Guinea to live with the Sawi, a fierce and violent people who ate their enemies. Here is how their children are described…

A Sawi child is trained to get his way by sheer force of violence and temper. He is goaded constantly to take revenge for every hurt or insult. Parents give examples as they carry out violent retaliation for anything that offends them.

Don Richardson and his wife hoped to bring the Gospel, helped by practical enticements like nylon fishing line, mirrors and machetes. The Sawi were curious about them but the Richardsons witnessed fourteen bloody battles within their first two months. The only Bible story that interested the Sawi men was that of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. Judas was considered a clever warrior and therefore worthy of honor. Eventually Richardson decided that he would have to leave or feel responsible for the continued bloodshed. The leaders of the two warring villages told him that they didn’t want him to go and to prevent his leaving; they were prepared to make peace.

The next day the two villages came together and the leaders approached one another, each carrying a child. The two men exchanged their names and their children. The peace children were then all touched by the villagers who vowed to never harm a member of the child’s village as long is he lived. The giving of a peace child was a covenant. Finally Richardson was able to explain Jesus.

The story of the peace child tells us that in order to achieve peace, we have to give something of ourselves – something that is dear and precious to us. As we wait to welcome the Prince of Peace, our peace child maybe now would be a good time to start thinking about that.

** The story of the peace child is from Dr. Jack Rogers of Fuller Theological Seminary, Gospel Light Publishing.