11/12/2023: Blessed are the Peacemakers

Get Up, Go Ahead, Do Something, or Get into Good Trouble

         Dear Ones, I am flat out spent from 5 days on Pilgrimage with 25 other sojourners from around the country who came to witness our country’s shameful history of racial terror from slavery, to lynching, to segregation, to mass incarceration. Before I had planned to go, I had created a worship series that would end with the Beatitudes, “the hope and prayer and vision of Jesus, the blueprint for Christian discipleship, the job of every Christian,” says Father John Dear. And I knew before leaving that I wanted to focus on peacemaking since this blessing seems to have disappeared from everyone’s mind except those few brave souls who are calling for a Ceasefire in the war between the Palestinians and Israel.

         I wanted to remind you that we Christians are called to wage peace, not war. The early followers of Jesus practiced nonviolence and would not participate in Rome’s wars and thus were persecuted and killed. Later when Christianity became an imperial religion, a Just War theory was created that would allow them to fight under certain conditions. Dear Ones, we have lived with Just War theory ever since. Only the Anabaptists---Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, and Quakers, have kept to the commitment to resist violence with nonviolence. UCC churches who have become Just Peace churches have covenanted to studying nonviolence and the history of peacemaking, to seek peace by preaching and practicing nonviolence reminding us that as Rev. Dr. King said, “True Peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is presence of justice.” Furthermore, peacemaking is not passive. Listen to this definition of what peace making is from Common Prayer Book: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals:

         Peacemaking, thus, by definition or necessity means practicing nonviolence. This is why King went to India to study with Gandhi. He went to learn about nonviolence in action, to see how it might fit with his understanding of a God who intercedes in history. While there he learned that Gandhi was a follower of Jesus and that he read the Sermon on the Mount every day for spiritual guidance. From Gandhi, King learned how the principles of nonviolence could be applied both practically and spiritually to the movement and to building God’s Beloved Community.

         I invite you this morning as we focus on God’s children, the peacemakers, to listen to these principles. As you listen, I invite you to listen for those that affirm what you already know, those that are new, and those which are surprising or challenging:

1. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
2. Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding
3. Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
4. Nonviolence holds that suffering an educate and transform.
5. Nonviolence chooses love, instead of hate.
6. Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice

         I learned about many peacemakers. I would like to lift up two: Diane Nash and John Lewis. Both were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC) who worked initially on integrating lunch counters, then became Freedom Riders, and later joined in marches for the Right to Vote and the March on Washington. Both contributed to the passage of legislation: The Civil Rights At or 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

        Nash was a transfer student from Howard University to Frisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she experienced the full effect of the Jim Crow system of systemic and legal racism. In 1960 she attended nonviolent workshops by Rev. James Lawson and became engaged in nonviolent actions focusing on segregation as it related to lunch counters. She became one of the founding member of SNCC. In 1961 she played a crucial role in sustaining Freedom Rides initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality. From her base in Nashville, she coordinated student efforts to continue the rides into Mississippi.

       One of the reasons I am drawn to people like Nash is her courage, her bravery in face of danger. The success of the Freedom Rides to integrate the interstate buses was due to her leadership in refusing to give up when it was known that they would be met with extreme violence by angry White mobs. At one point, she was told it was too dangerous and she replied, “We have already signed our Will and Testaments.” Nash is one of those rare souls who was willing to stay the course until the end, to live what I call a resurrected life, to practice resurrection in the face of death.

       John Lewis, the boy from Troy, Georgia, was such person and also another student leader. He was one of the original Freedom Riders and became a founding member of SNCC along with Nash and was arrested or jailed over 40 times for civil rights. He was hit severely on his skull a few times. In Montgomery, our pilgrimage stopped at the Harris House where the organizers gathered to plan their strategies and where an unconscious John Lewis was bandaged up. Later in 1965, in Selma Alabama, he was attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading a group of marchers on a march from Selma to Montgomery. His skull was fractured when attacked by police during the “Bloody Sunday” march. Pictures of this violence on national TV led directly to Johnson calling in the US Army and the Alabama National Guard to escort the marchers on their 54 mile march to Montgomery.

         I visited the church where the bloodied marchers went after being attacked and realized I was visiting not only the official sites of the Civil Rights Movement but the places where they went to recover and recommit themselves to the struggle for freedom. We were witnessing not only the trenches but the places where they were stitched back together.

         While walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a Klansman, I remembered those savage images of marchers being attacked. However, I also remembered their victory, felt their joy. It took them three times; the last was with a court order and an accompaniment of soldiers. The fight for freedom often involves violence. As you know John Lewis, the man who fought for the Right to Vote became Georgia’s 5^th Congressional Representative from 1987-2020. He remained one of America’s strongest voices for human rights, democracy, and nonviolence.

         I wish to end today with a return to our Sermon on the Mount and the original meaning of the word we have translated into Blessing. Abuna Elias Chacour, former Archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in the Galilee, Akko, Haifa, and Nazareth reminds us that the original word in Aramaic was ashray from the verb yasha. Ashray means “to set yourself on the right way for the right goal; to turn around; to repent. He illustrates his point this way:

       Or in the words of John Lewis, “Get out there and push, and stand up, and get in the way… Get into good trouble.” Dear Ones, claim your inheritance in being one of God’s beloved children by getting your hands dirty, by waging peace. Get up, go ahead, and get yourself into some good trouble.