Blessed are the Peacemakers

Note: Much of this sermon was inspired by a post from Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin, and I am grateful to him for his witness and his wise guidance that is reflected in this sermon.

In a dark time in American history, when oppressed people were overwhelmed with fear, they turned to music.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home
A long way from home

Sometimes I feel like I’m almost done
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost done
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost done
A long way from home
A long way from home

When parents arrived at the school on Saturday morning in Minab, Iran, what they found was smoke rising from burnt out walls, debris spread across the road, and onlookers crying and screaming. At least 100 children had been killed by a bomb dropped by the state of Israel. [edit: We have since learned that, in fact, it was the United States that dropped the bomb that has now killed over 180 individuals, mostly little girls.] We have no idea how many more bodies will be pulled from the rubble.

I had a fine sermon written for you on the readings for today. But then we all woke up to the news that the U.S. had joined Israel in an attack on Iran – while we were in the middle of negotiations.

I know that some of you would prefer I not talk politics from the pulpit. But I also know that many of you are scared, angry, or at least confused about what is happening. This is a moment that cannot be ignored.

Another war has erupted and we are all struggling to find our moral footing and clarity. We need to look at where we are and seek to be where God would be, and where Jesus would be, in this moment.

In the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, verse 9, Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Blessed are the peacemakers. Not the peacekeepers. Not the warmakers. Not the people who stay quiet to keep the powerful comfortable. Blessed are the peacemakers.

But what is peacemaking? Is it turning off the television to avoid the horror? It is cheering the dropping of bombs as if we were playing a video game? No, peacemaking is a courageous and active endeavor that demands justice.

And we have to be very careful here, because in the fog of war, warmakers will say whatever they need to say to justify their actions. Remember “weapons of mass destruction” that were never there in Iraq? Remember how we were going to be celebrated as liberators?

In 2001, about 10 days after the September 11 attacks, General Wesley Clark was in the Pentagon where he was greeted by an officer who handed him a memo that he’d just been given by the Secretary of Defense. The memo outlined a plan to “take out” seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. It’s taken longer than five years, but I’m pretty sure that we’ve attacked all of them at this point.

But it’s those little girls I can’t stop thinking about.

Historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. You cannot justify the mass killing of people by simply calling them the enemy. They are human beings… When governments wage war, they turn living, breathing human beings into abstractions on a map. And once they are abstractions, it becomes easier to destroy them.”

Those little girls are not abstractions. And neither are the young men and women who will pay for this foolishness with their blood and their lives.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

As Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin points out, peacemakers are not just peacekeepers. Peacekeepers keep things quiet. Warmakers use fear to justify violence. But peacemakers actively work to tell the truth and protect the vulnerable.

It’s easy to dismiss Jesus’ words because we think they “aren’t realistic.” That was 2000 years ago, and Jesus wasn’t facing what we’re facing. Of course that’s ignoring the harsh reality that Jesus was facing the Roman Empire – one of the most brutal regimes that ever existed. But let’s set that aside, and talk about the real situation we are in today.

First of all, the Constitution of the United States requires Congressional authorization for war. That did not happen here. We were told that Iran is inches away from producing nuclear weapons. But the last time we bombed Iran, we were told that we had taken out their nuclear capacity.

Which is it? Both things cannot be true.

We were also told that we are bringing freedom to the Iranian people. Yet that’s what we were told about Afghanistan, about Libya, about Iraq, and about Syria. Are any of those places better off now than they were before we attacked them? No. In fact, they are worse off.

But now we have families – mothers, fathers, grandparents, and young children – waking up in Iran to explosions. And American soldiers are being sent into harm’s way without a clear justification.

There are people for whom we pray every Sunday that I’m sure are losing sleep fearing for themselves and their fellow service men and women.

Children of military personnel in Iran, in Israel, and in the United States now have futures that are at risk because of decisions made far above them by people who will never have to pay any real price for what they’ve done.

As pastor Sandlin writes, “Every civilian or soldier is someone’s whole world.”

We have no right to shatter anyone’s world without moral clarity and a damn good reason. It is up to us to demand those reasons from our legislators and our Commander in Chief.

I read an article in 2007 by a writer named Lawrence Leshan that I’ll never forget. It was called “Why We Love War.” In it, he warns that there are three ideas that, when they appear in society, are “signals that we are moving toward war.”

• [First,] the idea that there is a particular enemy nation that embodies evil, and that if it were defeated, the world would become paradise. (The latter part of this statement is the crucial danger signal. The first part may well be true–as with Hitler’s Germany.)
• The idea that taking action against this enemy (now the enemy) is the path to glory and to legendary heights of existence.
• The idea that anyone who does not agree with this accepted wisdom is a traitor.

He then adds,

“These danger signals often appear at the same time in two enemy nations, which probably speeds the slide into armed conflict. If they appear in only one, and that nation then attacks its enemy, then the attacked nation is likely to believe that it has been victimized (the great majority of wars start with an armed attack preceding a declaration of war). This in turn increases that nation’s sense that its attacker is evil.

The way that people begin to perceive reality in the period typically preceding the outbreak of war is very seductive. I call it the ‘mythic’ mode of perception, as opposed to the ‘sensory’ mode we ordinarily use. Once mythic perception takes over, we cease to structure the world in our customary way and turn to the ways of a fairy tale or a myth. In the mythic reality we never question why evil exists; it simply is. Since the enemy is evil, we’re quite ready to starve, torture or kill them; after all, they cannot really be considered part of our own species.”

That is why they make us afraid; they need us to be afraid so that we’ll blindly accept the death machines that they’re always aiming at someone in some other place far from our own daily lives. Fear is the preferred tool of warmakers. But love is the tool of peacemakers. We must make sure that we’re not just reaching for the tool of fear.

So what can we do?

• First of all, we can refuse to dehumanize anyone. There is no person on earth that is not our human brother or sister.
• Second, we can advocate for diplomacy. We can insist that our elected representatives return to the negotiating table. Just because we’ve taken these first violent actions doesn’t mean that we have to stay on that path.
• Third, we can reject the idea that violent regime change is the only way. If history has shown us anything, it has shown us that the violence and warmaking we do in other countries often returns to us as blowback and terrorist threats against our own civilians.
• Fourth, we can speak the truth even when it feels risky.

But the most important thing we can do is to recognize that peacemaking begins right here at home. It begins when we stop yelling at our spouses and children. It begins when we reach across the fence to shake hands with that neighbor we’ve not spoken to before, or whose yard signs we don’t appreciate. It begins when we step out of our comfort zone to try to understand someone who doesn’t look or dress like us.

Peacemaking begins in our own households and in our own communities. How we care for each other is how we resist the narratives of violence.

As Pastor Sandlin reminds us, “Blessed are the peacemakers. Not the ones who stay quiet. Not the ones who cheer violence. The ones who choose compassion, justice, and courage in a world addicted to fear.”

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home
A long way from home

Amen.