Just Peace: Forging Weapons of Mass Construction

December 1, 2013

Scripture    Isaiah 2:1-5

Welcome to Worship! …

Happy New Year! The long night’s journey into day that is Christmas begins this very day: the first day of the Church year. The first Sunday in Advent. Advent 1.

Happy New Year! And yet: What’s so happy about it? We gave thanks for much on Thanksgiving Day. And then, the very next day, we trampled on one another to get what we did not yet have.

But now, Black Friday: Meet Good Friday! Peace-through-Consumer-Victory: Meet Peace-through-Human Justice.

The story of Just Peace. That’s today’s scripture story of Advent hope.  Of creating Weapons of Mass Construction.

Sermon …

What we have just heard is the Hebrew scripture reading for the First Sunday of this Advent season. Translation: This is our scriptures’ very first words to us as the new church year begins.

Act I … Scene 1.The curtain rises. A prophet walks onto the darkened stage in a circle of light. His first utterance: “In days to come …” A new beginning! He begins to sing – of a mountain. Of nations streaming there, for holy instruction. To be judged by that instruction. To make peace from that instruction.

As the song is ending, another sound arises. It’s a ringing sound – of a hammer striking metal. It fills the room. In the church’s new year, it’s the first sound we hear. A harsh sound. Hammer on metal: Bam – bam – bam! Forging weapons of mass construction.

It’s a new church year: “In days to come.” This First Sunday of Advent, we begin to peer into God’s future. A Christmas future, where the holiest ground is a place of just peace.

Just peace. God’s judgment of and arbitration for the nations, and our peaceful response that flows from this. A just … peace.

Isaiah’s destruction-into-construction images of just peace – destruction-into-construction – of swords forged into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks – provide the inspiration for a large sculpture that stands outside the General Assembly tower at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Just peace – a sculpture for all nations to hear the prophet’s call to justice and to be shown the way of peace from that call. Just peace – the United Nations’ mission is symbolized by this sculpture.

And yet, when was the last time we have heard of nations gathering at the UN to arbitrate, as this passage puts it, for a just peace? What we hear arbitrated instead are rationale for just war.

Just war. A protocol whose criteria originates not with a nation-state, but ironically with a churchman – St. Augustine – in the late fourth century.

Well, things have changed a bit in the ensuing 16 centuries. More than a bit.  We live in an age where more people were killed in war in the last century than in all prior human history. We live in an age where civilian war casualties are no longer five percent, as they were as recent as 100 years ago – they are 50 percent, or higher. We live in an age where 1/25 of the world’s population – here we are – own more military weaponry than the next 25 countries combined.

Can we engage anymore – therefore – in a just war? Leave we any room in our political lexicon for Isaiah’s vision of just peace: “in the days to come”?

The search for a just peace. According to Isaiah, our holy ground provides that highest ground. The church, the synagogue, the mosque, the ashram: These holy places and others can best speak of such a magnificent thing. All the just-warring nations will be judged by the voice emerging from those mountains.

And yet we know that this is not true. Faith communities throughout our land – especially the most influential faith communities in our land – are co-opted into driving the just war debates. Exhibit A: Iraq; Exhibit B: Afghanistan. Isaiah’s vision of a just peace – where God arbitrates and judges, where we respond with weapons of mass construction: Where may we see it? Where may it be heard?

And yet, sometimes – sometimes – God’s voice in Isaiah today – “I do the judging, I do the arbitrating!” – is so arresting, so compelling, the most powerful on the planet find themselves transformed. Transformed into warriors for a just peace.

It’s a call that a war-weary general-turned-President named Eisenhower overheard when he was urged by his military advisers and his Vice-President to intervene forcibly in a land known to very few in the 1950s: Viet Nam. Eisenhower’s reply: "I am not sending our boys ten thousand miles from home to fight a war in that elephant grass.” Ike left that quagmire for future presidents. A moment of just peace, Eisenhower’s was – consummated by his farewell address, warning us all with a prophet’s edge of the rise of “a military-industrial complex.”

The sounds of just peace reached the ears of President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The voices around his table rang clear: Attack the Russians! Drive them from our hemisphere! Kennedy’s response: Wait. History has chronicled that he heard another voice – and banked our country’s, and most of humanity’s, entire fate on that voice: the voice that said Khrushchev was hearing the same. Both of these statesmen heard it then: the voice of the Holy One judging us by how peacefully we respond. The voice of just peace.

That voice – God’s, saying “I judge, I arbitrate, you transform your weapons in response” – is heard among the culturally powerful, as well. When the professional basketball superstars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and their respective teams, the L.A. Lakers and the Boston Celtics, squared off throughout the 1980s, they carried with them “just war” hopes of separate races and separate coasts and their own ambitions to be recognized as the greatest at their craft.

And then, Magic Johnson discovered in 1991 he was carrying the HIV virus – a pandemic we remember, on this World AIDS Day, in our continued fight to vanquish it. And it was then that the uber-competitive relationship that has developed between Magic and Bird over the years became transformed.

“The day that I heard about Magic(‘s plight),” Larry Bird said, “It just sort of changed my love for basketball. It shook me up. Probably the same kind of feeling I had when my father died.”

Through tears, Magic Johnson remembered his archrival’s response. “I’m choked up because he did call me. You know, when something happens to you, and then you find out who really your friends are, the people who really care about you, you figure all those battles, all those things we had to go through as warriors, as competitors, and then as men … this man says, ‘You know what? You’re okay.’ And that was my greatest moment … to have him check on me, to make sure I was okay.”

The just war on the court between Magic and Bird had now become – in the game of their lives – transformed into the construction of a just peace.

The voice is God’s through Isaiah – it’s a voice of justice: “(I) judge the nations, (I) arbitrate (among) the peoples.”

The response to that voice is ours – it’s a response of peace: “(We) shall beat (our) swords into ploughshares, and (our) spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

God’s judging and arbitrating voice is sometimes – sometimes – so compelling, the most powerful people on the planet are turned into the most prominent warriors for a just peace.

Friends: We cannot lay our Advent hope on the “sometimes”. We can only trust in the Advent “days to come” that the prophet’s concluding invitation today may prove too compelling for us to resist: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”

In a world of institutions, political and religious, lost in the delusion there can be a “just war”:  Who but we who are faithful to the gospel can present on more than a “sometimes” basis God’s alternative to God’s world? Who but we can commit to the light of just peace – and hear others doing the same? And lead others to do the same?

This table of Holy Communion is where Isaiah’s “all the nations” and “many peoples” gather. This table reminds us that we are that Advent light of the Lord to the world. We come here today as erstwhile just warriors – each of us. We come carrying just warriors’ weapons: of resentment, of anxiety … of fear. We come here to be transformed into “weapons” of mass construction.

We come here knowing all this: locked in the stare of a world looking to justify war all around us. For the “just” in “just war” is not justice – no. It’s self-justification.

And so we come here knowing the burden of hope ironically falls upon us. But our burden is light. For we are not alone. For it’s a burden of a just-peace hope that Jesus carried. He died for that “peace-through-justice” hope.

And so now, we participate at this table in his dying once again. Dying, to the warring chimera of “peace-through-victory” all around us. Dying, to live into God’s calling : peace-through-justice, forevermore!

And so, I bid you – as the prophet bids us: Come. Take the first small steps with me of this Advent journey: This long night’s journey into day. The first small steps, from just war (peace-through-victory) to just peace (peace-through-justice).

“Come,” Isaiah proclaims to us today. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord!”