Peace with
Justice Sunday
Isaiah 58:
1-11, Micah 6: 6-8
Luke 10:
25-37
Practicing
Peace
I saw a
term in the Star Tribune yesterday that caught my eye and heart:
Islamaphobia. The term is pretty self explanatory. It is the fear of all things Islamic.
Islamaphobia
joins a long list of phobias and socially sanctioned fears that have left scars
in the flesh of our shared humanity through the years:
Scars whose
initial woundings have names, like Holocaust, apartheid, witch trials,
Islamaphobia
and the anxieties it represents joins the powerful socially sanctioned fear
Jesus was very aware of when he told the story about the Good Samaritan. Because in his culture and in his day, Jesus
knew the fear and hatred Jews had of Samaritans. They, those Samaritans, were the people who
had the word of God wrong - because of course the Jews had it right and were
living it perfectly. They were the
people that good Jews were taught not to associate with. They were the feared and the maligned and the
to-be-avoideds because they just didn’t relate to God and their culture in the
ways that were right - the Jewish way.
So by
telling a story in which the priests and those thought to be so very holy in
the way of God walk right past the obvious human carnage writhing in the ditch.
By telling
a story where the hero, the man who has heart and compassion enough to stop and
tend.
By telling
a story in which the hero is precisely the despised and feared Samaritan, Jesus
powerfully reminds his disciples through the ages that we can dress ourselves
up like that priest and deck ourselves out like those so holy Levites but it’s
what happens on the roadsides of our lives that make for answering the
question: are we admirers of Jesus
making it look good, or are we willing to be living breathing tending stopping
noticing bandaging disciples of Jesus who DO good?
It is peace
with justice Sunday in the United Methodist church calendar. Tomorrow is the day we celebrate the vision
of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A vision shattered by an assassin’s bullet fired by a power akin to
Islamaphobia.
This past
week our president ordered some 20,000 more troops to
Our nation
continues to sound bite the supposed audacity of an Muslim congressman placing his
hand on the holy book of his tradition before taking office.
Is there a
one of us who has not whispered or hurled prayers begging for peace in the past
week?
What does
the Lord require of us, anyway? Jesus,
schooled in the power of the Jewish Biblical and communal teachings, knew well
what God requires of us.
What does
the Lord require of us? The prophet
Micah would have us to know that the Lord requires - not suggests, not hints,
but REQUIRES of us that we do justice, love kindness, and walk with God in such
a way that we know that God has vision and power greater than the phobias that
keep us from seeing grace in each other.
When we walk humbly with God, we remember that God’s vision is a day
when we live as one, as community where tending each other is more important
than trying not to see each other’s needs as we scurry by them in life.
What does
the Lord require of us? Third Isaiah
would have us know that our worship is what we do with our lives once we leave
the temple. And worship looks like
this: we loose the bonds of
injustice. We share our bread with the
hungry. We take in the homeless and
clothe the naked and we love people in such a way that they don’t feel they
have to hide from our judgment.
What does
the Lord require of us? The messiah
Jesus would have us know that God requires of us a willingness to know our own
power. To know the places of our own
privilege. To know that as a people of
God, we cannot pretend that following Jesus gives us a platform upon which to
separate ourselves out from the aches and the cry and the heart and the need of
the world.
Because we are Jesus followers, we pay
attention to the cries of the wounded even when the world would tell us to walk
on by. Because we are Jesus followers we
stop and know that cry to be our own.
Last week I
was at a conference in
Our
speaker, the Rev. Dr. Robert Linthicum, defined Shalom as a Biblical concept
that goes far beyond a common understanding of the work: peace.
Shalom is
bigger and more nuanced. It is a
corporate word. Meaning, it doesn’t
apply to my own sense of all-is-right-with-the-worldness. Shalom is about what we live together as
community. And it applies to our
religious life, our political life, and our economic life. As community.
It means we
practice our faith in such a way that we seek God’s vision as disciples of
Jesus, not mere admirers. We look to
scripture and learn that the needs of any are the needs of all. Scripture is so clear about this. And because this is true, we must consider
what it means that one fifth of our children live in poverty, wars are entered
into, and phobias are fanned while we continue to walk down the roads of our
lives as though we are not affected. We
are.
So what do
we do?
We
understand our power. We are the church
of Jesus the Christ. Powerful beyond the
telling. And within us each lives a
place so hungry for peace with justice, for Shalom, that we near go crazy with
the longing for it.
What do we
do? We respond to the pain-wracked
neighbor in the ditch. We can pay
attention. We can share what we have -
our hearts, our building, our outrage, our witness, our presence.
And we can
know that God is in the struggle with us.
God wouldn’t have laced scripture with an insistence upon the vision of
Shalom if God weren’t going to work with
and through us to achieve it.
We are not in this alone.
One of the
best hours of my week is Men’s Bible Study.
A few weeks ago as we ended our time together and as we prepared to
pray, as we do every week, one of the men suggested that he was struggling with
what to do around prayer for Saddam Hussein.
Earlier that week Hussein had been tried and hanged for horrific
violation to creation. And, Saddam
Hussein, as this man well knew, was a fellow human being -
A man left
for dead on the side of the road.
So this
brother of ours shared that he decided that we will and does pray for Saddam
Hussein. Unsure about what that means in
the long run, he responds to the call his heart tells him is real.
He prays
for a man his heart and culture and soul knows as enemy.
And I’m
thinking this man is not simply an admirer of Jesus. He’s a disciple of Jesus. He’s willing to see past the phobia of these
days into the gospel message of his savior.
Peace with
justice. It begins in our hearts. It begins with our refusal to hate. It begins with our conviction that we will
look to the sides of the road and respond.
It is. What the Lord requires of us.
Amen