Peace vs. Security

One of my favorite songs from the musical Hamilton is “One Last Time,” the song in which George Washington writes his farewell address, much to the initial chagrin of his friend and secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton expects that Washington will run for office again, but Washington, for several different reasons, decides to step down, ceding his power peacefully and setting up the orderly transfer of power in our country for the next 220 or so years, up to the present day.

The song includes a lyric directly taken from our reading from the book of Micah a few minutes ago.

Washington expressed his wish that he would sit under his “own vine and fig tree,” meaning for Washington, a peaceful existence back at Mount Vernon, away from the tumult of politics and government, away from New York, and Philadelphia, and Washington, DC; but, perhaps most importantly, away from war.

Micah, the prophet who wrote those words originally,

lived around 2800 years ago in a time of war,

a time in which the tiny but resilient Jewish nation had been

overcome by the brutal Neo-Assyrian Empire.

The Neo-Assyrian kings had a formula they would repeat after conquering the smaller nations of the Near East:

“I destroyed, I devastated, and burned with fire.”

They practiced mass deportations of the peoples they conquered

in order to completely break their spirit.

They punished their captives with grisly tortures

and displayed their bodies for all to see,

as a warning to anyone who would dare to stand against their

military might.

So it is significant that Micah,

at the end of this prophecy in which

there is much sadness and lament for the fate that befell his

people,

looked forward to a time in which all the nations would be

taught peace by God,

a time in which weapons of mass destruction would be beaten,

melted down, and recast into the tools of agriculture,

not the tools of war.

He looked forward to a time in which nations would not “learn” or “study” war any more.

He looked forward to a time in which every member of society would be provided for, would have their own land, and would have a relationship with that land that yielded food, enough food for everyone to eat and be filled.

It is a beautiful enough vision;

but the line that always gets me is this one:

“and no one shall make them afraid.”

You see, fear is always a tool of Empire.

The Neo-Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Persians,

the Romans—

every empire worth anything has always used fear as a motivating tactic against their enemies.

And, unfortunately, fear is still used as a weapon of war today.

There is a striking contrast in this passage of Scripture between

Peace and Security.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire may have had Security because of their

ability to conquer and subdue the nations around them;

but they did not have Peace.

Security says, I am safe because I have an army protecting me.

Security uses fear and other violent techniques as threats,

constant threats, to uphold order amid the chaos.

Security says: don’t mess with us. We have all the weapons.

Peace, on the other hand, is much more difficult to achieve than security.

Think of the bravery and courage involved in Micah’s image of the nation beating their weapons of war into weapons of agriculture.

To be a nation at peace, however, requires that individual people are at peace.

Dag Hammersjkold said this: “Our work for peace must begin within

the private world of each one of us.

To build for [humanity] a world without fear,

we must be without fear.

To build a world of justice, we must be just.

And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds?

How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?”

Do you think of yourself as a peaceful person?

At first, you might say, “of course,” because you haven’t been in any

armed conflicts lately;

you get along with people, generally;

you are therefore a peaceful person.

But being a peaceful person requires attention; it requires work.

Peace is not merely the absence of conflict. That’s security,

remember?

In security, conflict is avoided because of the ever-constant threat of violence.

Peace, on the other hand is a lifestyle of deep concern for our own

lives and all the lives linked with ours,

as well as the universe that surrounds us.

Peace is not passivity.

Peace requires courage and action.

Peace does not say “nothing bad will happen to me.”

Peace says, “I am secure in who I am as God’s beloved child, I am

secure because I know who I am, and no

matter what happens to me, I am at peace.”

Paul knew this;

in the letter to the church he had founded in the Greek city of

Colossae,

he writes the words that we heard just a little while ago.

The churches Paul had founded were not always peaceful places,

and so he gives each one some advice.

To be a peaceful person, Paul writes, to be a peaceful community,

you should clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility,

meekness, and patience.

That’s a good start; but to those qualities, he adds one crucial

component: “bear with one another.”

To bear with one another means to have a great deal of empathy for one another. It means to be quick to forgive and slow to speak. Just as God has forgiven you through Jesus, Paul writes, you now have the chance to extend the same forgiveness to those around you.

Jesus says in the Gospel for today that we are to forgive and pray for our enemies, which may seem like insanity to some of you.

It certainly seems to be insanity to much of the world we live in now.

After all, the world of security says that forgiveness equals weakness.

But Jesus isn’t interested in security. He is the Prince of Peace.

When Jesus was arrested,

his friend Peter jumped his aid and tried to take the head off a Roman

soldier;

but Jesus told him to put away his sword, because those who live by

the sword, die by the sword.

Jesus was showing Peter the same vision that Micah had seen 700

years earlier.

To be a person of peace, a nation of peace,

we have to be better than our enemies.

We cannot employ their tactics and ever “win,” because

violence only breeds more violence.

Prayer for enemies, and love for enemies,

helps to dismantle the systems of our world that encourage

and breed violence.

In the midst of the Fifth Crusade,

when violence between Christians and Muslims had been going on

for hundreds of years, a young man, Francis,

from the town of Assisi in Italy, crossed the sea and went

to Egypt.

His trip was not encouraged or solicited by the Christian Crusaders.

He went on his own, as a representative of Jesus only,

with the words from today’s Gospel no doubt ringing in his ears

the whole time.

Love your enemies.

He tried to love the so-called enemy and attempted to make peace.

Unfortunately,

his attempts to make peace failed,

not because of his new Muslim friend al-Malik al-Kamil,

but because of the Christian Cardinal Galvani,

who desired SECURITY more than PEACE and

continued the war.

But you don’t have to be Saint Francis to be a peacemaker.

I have seen you all, in different ways, making peace.

Any time you go out of your way to make someone else’s day

better, you are creating peace.

Any time you sacrifice even a little bit of your precious time to play bingo with the elderly,

or serve at Games of Acadiana,

or make cancer care packages,

you are making peace.

I think of Madame as an incredible peacemaker,

in planting and tending and making the lives of all the creatures

around her better.

We are blessed to be surrounded by peacemakers.

The shape of this liturgy that we are celebrating today is meant to be

practice for peacemaking;

a rehearsal of peacemaking;

a miniature version of what peacemaking looks like.

We begin by asking for God’s mercy to help us do the things that seem,

at first, to be so hard, even impossible, to do.

We continue with education,

by hearing the words of Scripture and

listening to a sermon meant to help us understand them better.

We continue with prayer, humbling ourselves before God

and remembering all those near to us and far from us.

Then we offer each other the sign of peace.

In that sign of peace,

we remember Jesus’s rhetorical question from the Gospel today:

“if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing

than others?”

The peace is meant to be a time for us to remember that we are all equal in

the sight of God,

and that we can love even our enemies,

because all of us have been forgiven and are loved by God.

Then, finally, we share a meal together, the meal of Jesus’s body,

which was broken and torn apart by those who were seeking

SECURITY rather than PEACE.

This Eucharist is itself a sign of God’s PEACE,

a sign that God has definitively come down on the side of the

peacemakers,

on those who recognize that PEACE is more valuable than

SECURITY.

In this meal, offered by Jesus, we find true and lasting PEACE, the mercy and

LOVE of GOD, poured out for us.

May God give us all God’s PEACE today, and always, AMEN.