Sustaining the Spirituality of Peacemaking

Coordinator, Every Church A Peace Church

How do we sustain the spirit of resistance to oppression and engagement in peacemaking over the long haul? For Christians I believe that the spirituality of peacemaking is sustained through growth into the image of Jesus and the love of God. In the words of Jesus according to the Gospel of John, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." (John 20:21). Jesus, the Human One (the son of man), taught and lived the practice of loving the neighbor, the enemy, and God. The image of Jesus is revealed most vividly in the love of enemies. That was the spirit and spirituality of Jesus. It can be ours as well.

A spirituality for the long haul may be thought of as a table with four legs. But before the four legs, first the whole thing, the table itself. "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven." said Jesus (Matt. 5:44). This was his teaching. It was his command. Nothing is more foundational to who Jesus was, what he did, what he taught, or to the table around which his followers are gathered. Love of enemies is the mark of Jesus, the image into which we are called to grow.

Why then, after 2000 years, is the church still talking about 10 commandments, all of them from the First Covenant, and not 11 commandments, with one of them, just one of them, from Jesus? The Second Covenant, the New Covenant, contains something new: love your enemies. To practice love of enemies is to be at the table fellowship of the new covenant. To ignore or reject the love of enemies is to reject the Gospel image of Jesus, with his vision of the way to a transformed world and the spirituality which can lead us there.

Four sayings of Jesus constitute the four legs of this welcome table of sustainable spirituality. Implementing the practice of loving enemies, they are concepts and disciplines which according to Jesus, conform us to his image and show our kinship with our Father/Mother in heaven.

It is important to say that this welcome table spirituality assumes a certain view of human nature, including all people who might for any reason be considered enemies. It was put this way by Mark Noll, a trial lawyer turned peacemaker and mediator as he gradually awakened to a new view of human nature: "The human capacity for compromise, forgiveness and tolerance astounded me time and again, until I realized that this is the way people are when given a chance. I saw the transcendent good in all people, which led me to a deeply spiritual life of meditation, work, healing, and faith." (DreamSeeker Magazine, Summer, 2003).

In addition to four key teachings of Jesus, this short introduction to a spirituality for peacemakers draws upon and points to four books (plus one) to support the table. I want you to know of these wells from which some of us around the table have drunk along the way. First, Jesus' words "You have heard that it was said, but I say unto you" (Matthew 5) establish a presumption for growth and change. Nothing is quite so deadly to the spiritual life as the notion that "I have achieved the truth and I certainly cannot be expected to grow or change." Jesus set a powerful and enduring presumption for growth and change when he, as The Human One (exemplary human) challenged both Scripture and tradition with his life and teachings.

To give substance to this radical characteristic of Jesus, I recommend two books. Reading them will nurture your growth in a spirituality of risk. They have changed me toward the image of Jesus and will do the same for you if you are open to growth and change. I agree with this commendation by Charles Elliot of Cambridge University for Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination: "This is the most important and exciting theological work to emerge in a generation. It will have a profound effect on Christian thinking well into the next century." Yes it will. Whether it has a profound effect on you depends on whether you read it. As a small spiritual exercise, I recommend using the title of this book as the basis for an hour of silent reflection. What substance can you give to each word in that title, and to their combined force?

The second book which I recommend on the presumption for growth and change is Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's Jesus Against Chistianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus. Again, a title worth an hour's meditation even before you read the book. What could it mean? Let me suggest this much: your image of God will not grow or change much for the better until you learn some new ways of thinking about Scripture.

Secondly, a spirituality for the long haul requires a way to think about justice and the disparity between the rich and the poor in our nation and world. There can be no doubt that growing into the image of Jesus has much to do with adopting Jesus' attitude toward the poor and the outcast. Mark 8 records Jesus' encounter with a Gentile woman from Syrophoenicia. She begs him to heal her daughter. The account continues: He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go -- the demon has left your daughter." The disturbing words of Jesus about dogs is thought to have expressed a common Jewish attitude toward Gentiles. Jesus may not have held the sentiment as his own, but used it to discern whether the woman would accept or acquiesce to it. She did not acquiesce, and the rest of the account turns on the Jesus' response to her response. "For saying that," says Jesus. For saying that you, a Gentile, have a right and a claim, for asserting your selfhood, for this expression of female Gentile chutzpah, your daughter is healed. A spirituality of peacemaking shaped by Jesus life and teachings will recognize the right of the poor, and affirm the strength of every human to assert their selfhood and improve their lot in life.

The Black freedom struggle in the United States was a daring, courageous and insistent claim for the right of all people to the benefits of democracy. Just as Jesus affirmed the Syrophoenician woman's assertion of her dignity and right, Christians in the United States must understand, affirm, and join the dignity and power of the African American freedom struggle. For a healthy spirituality the individual must connect with a community of struggle.

The book which I recommend on this spiritual challenge is Vincent Harding's There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (Vintage, 1981). Harding's opening words in the book invite us, all of us immigrant Americans and even Native Americans, to join our lives with the lives of those who led this struggle for more than 200 years on these shores: This work is an experiment in history, solidarity, and hope. It is part of a continuing attempt to discover and develop the sources of creative tension among my responsibilities as a historian, my commitment to human liberation, and my urgent determination to keep faith with that magnificent company of witnesses -- my mothers and fathers -- whose lives form the wellspring of the black struggle for freedom in America. Ultimately, what I have written is also meant as an offering to the children, all our children, who shall live and prevail. These pages are my encouragement to them, the expression of my hope that they may join their lives with all life in love and courage, daring to create and become much more than we ever dreamed was possible on these shores of darkness and light.

Thirdly, a spirituality for the long haul is rooted in Jesus' vision for the transformation of the individual and society. "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 7:10). The reign, or kingship, of God is a corporate vision of society doing the will of God. The familiar Hebrew literary pattern of repeating a thought in different words is evident in the Lord's Prayer. The petition for the coming of God's kingdom is repeated in the petition for the doing of God's will. To envision the doing of God's will on earth is to envision radical transformation of individuals and society. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, it is not easy to continue to believe that this is happening and will happen.

Jesus likened the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, which he calls the smallest of all seeds (Mark 4). This image was a radical disappointment to people who looked for God's apocalyptic violence to defeat the enemy and establish Israel's domination. We too often lose hope because we dislike this image and this method of transformation of self and society. We want big change, and we want it now. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer writes, in Jesus Against Christianity: Most of us throw the seed away. We cling to illusionary messianic promises and apocalyptic fantasies that have failed to materialize over thousands of years rather than accepting the seed, planting it, nurturing it, and seeing how it grows. We continue to idealize scriptural passages in our telling and retelling of biblical stories about God's redemptive, punishing violence. God's violence is placed in service to justice and the struggle against unrepentant evil as God's pathology is shielded beneath a canopy of liberation themes. (p. 312) He continues: Jesus invites us to work for justice, reject violence, and embrace a call to be subversive weeds. To accept this vocation, however, we must stop projecting violence onto God. God, according to Jesus, will never violently impost justice, not within history and not as part of an end time judgment. Why? Because God is nonviolent. We must stop waiting for God to do what Jesus says God is incapable of doing: impose justice through violence. The alternative to violence is to embrace nonviolence, sow mustard seeds, live as communities of subversive weeds, and imitate the nonviolent compassion of God. This is where abundant life is to be found.

One thing which sustains a spirituality of hope is to observe the doing of God's will and speaking of God's truth by people of no religion, or religions other than "Christianity." That is to say, if we will not rejoice in the doing of God's will where it is evident before our eyes, we are rejecting that in which God is rejoicing -- never a good thing to do. The book which I recommend on this theme of transformation is Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change by Roger S. Gottlieb. (Westview Press, 2002). Gottlieb writes, at the end of the book, of "quiet moments of faith when those who seek to change society for the better hold on to a single image, one clear thought, a simple shining possibility. ... We may recognize it in wheelchair-bound men and women refusing to be shunted to the sidelines of life, in courageous Afghan women risking death to teach their daughters how to read, in Nigerian tribes resisting the oil companies poisoning their homelands. Or in any one of us who makes peace by seeking to understand the pains and passions of those with whom we are at war.In such instances, we see realized -- if only for a moment, or only in imagination -- something of the world we seek to make. And as our own spirits are raised by these glimpses of a better world, we need only remember our own passion to believe that there is hope. The love and care these images inspire in us -- we must believe -- can reach others as well. (p. 214)

The fourth leg of a communal table of long-haul spirituality is a commitment to the power of nonviolence. The community of faith and the individuals in it must make a clear choice for nonviolent struggle as their form of power to effect the transformation of the world. Jesus made the question of nonviolence central to worship and ethics when he asked in the synagogue, Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill? (Mark 3). Neither those who heard Jesus in the flesh ask that question, nor we who hear it today, have to turn to a book, tradition or great philosophers for an answer. The answer is written in our hearts by our Creator. We are being conformed to the image of Jesus when we give the answer Jesus expected to this question, and shape our personal and social behavior, our institutions and our politics, accordingly.

The dynamic at work in nonviolence is the unconquerable power of redemptive suffering. Jesus affirmed the power of redemptive suffering in the experience of political execution when he said "whoever would follow me must take up their cross and come after me" (Mark 8). As Roger Gottlieb put it in Joining Hands, "People who choose suffering are no longer victims" (p. 112). As proof of that dynamic he points to the black freedom struggle in America. As a "no" to violence, nonviolence simply recognizes the truth spoken by Jesus, "They that live by the sword shall die by the sword." As a "yes" to transformation, nonviolence is the implementation of Jesus' words, "Love your enemies." To ignore either the "no" or the "yes" is to ensure personal spiritual decay and ultimate disaster for the corporate human experiment.

No one has made this choice clearer, or more urgent, or more hopeful, than Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (Metropolitan Books, 2003). A unique feature of Schell's book is its comfortable embrace of both religiously and non-religiously based nonviolence -- though not really unique, as Gottlieb and others are doing the same thing. A most impressive historian as well as ethicist and writer, Schell turns the old "realist school" arguments on their head: The means of annihilation paradoxically put their possessors in a predicament that was better described by the precepts of Jesus than by those of Augustus. Through the creation of the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War and their doctrinal accoutrement the strategy of nuclear deterrence, it became literally true that the users of the sword would die by the sword....The increase in available force, rooted in, among other things, fundamental scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, is not a change in attitude or beliefs but an irrevocable change in the world, at least as durable as any state or empire. It has called into question the age-old reliance of politics on violent means. The iron laws of the world have become different laws, and those who wish to live and act in the world as it really is must think and act differently.

And just as realism clarifies that violence cannot be realistically expected to give humanity a future, looking at an additional set of facts, it also shows us that nonviolence can be expected to do exactly that. Fifty-eight years after Hiroshima, the world has to decide whether to continue on the path of cataclysmic violence charted in the twentieth century and now resumed in the twenty-first or whether to embark on a new, cooperative political path. .... The cooperative power of nonviolent action is new, yet its roots go deep into history, and it is now tightly woven, as I hope I have shown in these pages, into the life of the world. It has already altered basic realities that everyone must work with, including the nature of sovereignty, force, and political power. In the century ahead it can be our bulwark and shield against the still unmastered power of total violence. In our age of sustained democratic revolution, the power that governments inspire through fear remains under constant challenge by the power that flows from people's freedom to act in behalf of their interests and beliefs.(pp. 386, 387).

The Syrophoenician woman whom Jesus praised for her courageous words simply exercised her freedom to act in behalf of her interests and beliefs. To so act is to grow into the image of Jesus, the love of God, and a spirituality which sustains peacemaking over the long haul.

To see our spirits flourish, let us embrace with Jesus a presumption for growth, the right of the poor, a vision for transformation and the power of nonviolence.