Pray
of the Peace…
October 12, 2014
BMC – Micah 4:1-4, Romans 12:1-2, 9-21 & Joshua 22
Shalom (Peace) Sunday
Introduction:
Eclipse
Allow me to begin by saying that as
a pastor, you hope and you pray that as you deliver your sermon that God will
touch at least one person each Sunday through you. And often times you never know if that has
really happened let alone who that person may be. But occasionally, you realize that the person
that you are speaking most clearly to is actually yourself. This is one of those Sundays, but perhaps God
may speak to others as well today.
{Pray}
It was Wednesday morning and the
alarm went off at 6:10 in the morning.
That’s about the time that it often goes off at our house on most school
days, but this week it wasn’t because we had to start getting the kids ready
for school. This past Wednesday was
actually a scheduled one-hour delay day so we could have slept in for a bit
instead.
But the night before, Elam had
shared with us a part of his weekly reader.
Some of us remember weekly readers, right? His weekly reader said that at 6:25am on Wednesday
morning, all across the US, people would be able to witness a total lunar
eclipse. He and I had decided that we
would get up at our regular time so that we could go out and see this event.
Now the rain clouds the night before
had made us a little concerned that it might be too cloudy or foggy in the
morning to see the eclipse. But when I
looked out the window that morning, I saw that the sky was clear. I got Elam up, we got dressed and we walked
out our front door. We went out into the
street, looked west up the hill and sure enough between the trees the moon was soon
to be totally eclipsed.
We decided to walk up the hill to
the parking lot behind the old high school to get a better view. There is one security light on back there
that diminishes the visibility of the sky a bit, but it gets us up a little higher
and away from some of the trees around our house. It turned out to be a nearly perfect view of
the eclipse.
As the eclipse progressed, we talked
about the Big Dipper and about Orion, two constellations that were also visible
and that I can easily pick out. As we
stood there looking at the moon being covered by the shadow of the earth, we
reflected on God’s design that allows this to happen from time to time. We talked about the fact that the size and
distance of these bodies in space are such that they occasionally line up so
that one is directly in the middle of the two and casts a shadow on the third.
And I said to Elam, “From our
perspective on earth, this is a Lunar Eclipse.
The earth is in the middle of the sun and the moon and we are looking at
the shadow that the earth is casting on the moon.” I said, “But what is this event to the
moon? If there were people standing on
the moon looking at the earth, what would this event be to them?” Think about that for a moment, because it
connected for me as I was considering our theme for this morning, Shalom, and
the passages that Chuck read for us. But
before we connect those realities, consider the story of Joshua 22 with me.
Joshua 22: a
brewing conflict
Now when I say Joshua 22, everyone knows exactly the story that I am
talking about, right? It’s just like
when I say John 3:16 or Matthew 5-7, right?
No? Well good then I’m not the
only one. This is a story that I came
across in my daily reading with Elam this week; and as I thought more about it,
I began to see that it has connections to our discussion for this morning as
well.
The book of Joshua is primarily the story of what happened after the
Israelites entered into the Promised Land.
The Israelites had wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Moses had died and God allowed them to cross
into the Promised Land through the Jordan River on dry ground. But it wasn’t just that simple was it? Other people were living there and the
Israelites had to take ownership of the land from them.
Well much of the book is about the battles between Israel and those
living there, but Joshua 22 is a little bit different. You’ll remember that the people of Israel
were divided into twelve tribes and that the land was divided among them so
that they each had a portion of it.
Three of those tribes, the Reubenites, Gadites and the half tribe of
Manasseh, were granted land on the east side of the Jordan with the promise
that they would aid their fellow clans in laying claim to the land on the west
side of the Jordan.
Chapter 22 begins with Joshua acknowledging that the Reubenites,
Gadites and the half tribe of Manassah had fulfilled their promise. They had done as they were commanded and
Joshua released them to go home to the land east of the Jordan. He released them with a reminder, “But be very careful to keep the commandment and the law that Moses
the servant of the Lord gave you: to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to keep his commands, to
hold fast to him and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
So Joshua sent them with his blessing and
they made their way home. Along the way
near the Jordan River on the Israelite side, the Ruebenites, Gadites, and the half
tribe of Manasseh paused to build an imposing altar. When Israel heard of this, they all gathered
at Shiloh and prepared to go to war against the tribes who had built this
altar.
Joshua
22: in one another’s shoes
In preparation for war, Israel sent a
delegation to the Reubenites, Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh. The delegation included Phinehas the priest
and the ten tribal leaders from the Israelite side of the Jordan. They went to these tribes to ask them, “How
could you break faith with the God of Israel like this? How could you turn away
from the Lord and build yourselves an altar in rebellion
against him now?”
As they continued to speak, we come to
realize that they feared that the Lord’s wrath would be upon all the tribes for
what theses tribes had done. They feared
that God’s wrath would be released not just on the Reubenites, Gadites and the
half tribe of Manasseh, but upon all of Israel.
And they were so concerned about this, that they invited these three
tribes to join the rest of Israel on the west side of the Jordan. They offered to share their land rather than
risk angering the Lord with this altar.
But when given the chance to speak, the
intentions of the Reubenites, Gadites and the half tribe of Manasseh became
clear. They too continued to declare God
their Lord. And they too called upon the
rest of Israel to destroy them if their actions were a sign of
unfaithfulness. In fact, they even called
upon God, Himself, to call them to account if this was the case. But then they then went on to assure the rest
of Israel that this was in fact not the case.
The tribes of Israel on the eastern shore of
the Jordan did not build this altar against the Lord, but rather out of fear of
what might one day happen. They feared
that one day the rest of Israel might ask what those on the eastern shore have
to do with Israel and their God. They
feared that the Jordan River might be seen as a boundary to separate them from
each other.
And so the Reubenites, Gadites and the half
tribe of Manasseh decided to construct an altar on the western shore of the
Jordan, not for burnt sacrifices as the rest of Israel feared. Rather, they constructed this altar as a
witness that now and for generations to come; the tribes on the eastern shore would
remain faithful to their God. They planned
to continue to come and make sacrifices properly. That is why they built this altar as a
replica of the one that they sacrificed on.
It was not built for sacrifices but rather as a witness between them.
When Phinehas and the leaders of the other
tribes of Israel heard this, they were pleased.
Phinehas declared that they now knew that the other tribes were in fact
remaining faithful. These leaders then
returned to their homes and reported to the rest of Israel what they had
found. This ended their talks of
war. “And the Reubenites and the Gadites
gave the altar this name: A Witness Between Us—that the Lord is God.”
Shift in Perspective
How
often is this the case both at a global and a local level? We are so caught up in our fears and so driven
by our assumptions of intent that we are unable to see things from the other
person’s perspective. We act out of our
own certainty about what the other person is thinking or feeling only to find
out after the fact that it was not the case at all. Often times our quest for peace, for the
Biblical peace of Shalom, of wholeness; begins with a shift in our perspective
from ourselves to the other.
The
eastern tribes of Israel assumed and feared that one day they would be excluded
by the western ten tribes of Israel. So
they built an altar as a witness to their commitment to the Lord and to faithful
sacrifice. Meanwhile, the western ten
tribes of Israel heard about this act and they assumed and feared that the
western tribes were acting in a way that was unfaithful to their covenant and
that would bring judgment upon them all.
It
was only when they came to talk together that either side was able to get
outside of themselves enough to learn each other’s perspective and to own that
for themselves. If they had remained
dogged in their own understandings of what was to come and what these things
meant, they would have surely gone to war against one another. The situation would have surely escalated as
is so often the case.
It
was a shift in perspective that opened the door to shalom among them. And it was a shift in perspective that I was
reflecting on with Elam as we looked on the full lunar eclipse. To us from the earth, this was a lunar
eclipse. But if we were astronauts
sitting on the moon looking back on earth, we would have been witnessing a
solar eclipse in which the earth was blocking the sun. It’s a matter of perspective, but when we
shift our perspective it makes a big difference in our understanding and how we
experience our circumstances.
Micah 4:1-4
And it seems to me that it is a
radical shift in perspective that Micah 4 is calling us to as well. And I think that this happens at multiple
levels. In the first place, it is a
shift in perspective to the larger picture, to God’s picture. What happens here and now is important. We are called to live our lives as God desires
us to; but we may also live with the bigger picture in perspective. We may live with the end game in our current
perspective. Micah offers the perspective
that in the end, all peoples will be streaming to the house of the Lord. We will all be coming together to this one
temple of this one God. That is a shift
in perspective.
Another shift in perspective that
Micah invites us to is to move from the belief that we need to have the final
say on the settling of disputes. In Micah, it is the Lord who will ultimately
settle the disputes. It is God not us
who will bring about justice and understanding.
This doesn’t leave us impotent or helpless, unable to speak truth until
the Lord finally weighs in; but it invites us to humility in our decisions. It invites a shift in perspective.
A third shift in our perspective is from the ways of the world in
settling our disputes to learning and taking on as our own, God’s ways of
justice. To shift from settling our
differences by way of weapons such as swords and spears, to creating shalom
through the use of tools like plows and pruning hooks that will provide for the
needs of people, needs that often are contributing components of conflict,
needs that withhold shalom. That’s a
shift in perspective.
Romans 12And perhaps it is a shift in perspective that Romans 12 picks up on as well. Romans 12 calls us to move away from the vantage point of this world and to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Paul calls us to shift our perspective from one of hate and cursing to one of love and blessing. He calls us to live in harmony with one another and to avoid repaying evil with evil. In fact if our enemy is hungry, Paul tells us to feed him. If he is thirsty, Paul instructs us to give him something to drink. As far as it depends on us, Paul tells us, we should live at peace with everyone.
But often, this is not what plays out in our own lives and it is certainly not what we witness on the world stage. Rather we see the ways of the world played out in which people call for revenge, in which people repay evil for evil, in which people starve the hungry. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we see played out in Jersusalem and beyond is a microcosm, one example of this greater reality in our world.
At face value, the words of Psalm 122:6 may seem a little odd to us when it calls us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Jerusalem means, city of peace, or literally city of shalom. This means that the Psalmist is calling us to pray for the Shalom of the city of Shalom, and yet the reality is that like much of our world and many of our lives, Jerusalem is in need of a deep, shalom peace.
There is fault on all sides of this conflict though there is also a definite imbalance in power as well. And there is certainly no simple solution to the depth of this destructive conflict, but perhaps a shift in perspective could be a beginning step in moving in some different directions, because it seems that the same realities continue to be played out repeatedly year after year and decade after decade, and century after century like two rams that continue to butt heads together until something changes.
This was evident
to me as I was listening to a Bethel worship service from December of 1991. You’ll remember that back then worship was
first followed by Sunday school; and at the close of the service, Mary Newcomer
shared about how the youth had studied the book Blood Brothers that fall. They then performed a reader’s theater that
shed light on the complex dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian region. And I was struck as I listened by how a 23
year old reading sounded oddly contemporary and relevant.
It
sounded eerily like my own understanding of what has played out in that
region. In the fall of 1996, I traveled
to Palestine for my Bluffton cross cultural trip. We were only there for about two and a half
weeks; but in that time, I stayed in the homes of Palestinian Christians. I also stayed in Jewish Kibbutzim. In the process, I heard from each of their
perspectives, and my own perspective was changed as I heard from their stories.In 2001 Bill Shoemaker also traveled to the region. He went with an organization that is similar to Christian Peacemaker Teams. And within his journal, we read of these ongoing cycles as well. But I also found the significance in a change of perspective, in stepping back to see things as the other sees them.
In his December 25th
journal entry, Bill shares of what I might deem as a shift in perspective. As he looked into the faces of some of the
Israeli soldiers, he recognized the difficult position that they found
themselves in. Participating in
conscripted service, these soldiers were placed between angry Israeli settlers
and oppressed Palestinians. He was able
to step back and attempt to look through the eyes of another, to gain a
different vantage point, to gain a different perspective.
Conclusion: Pray for the Peace…
Ultimately, it is not by our power that
we will bring about peace, let alone shalom in our world. It is only by the divine intervention of the
God that we serve that true peace, deep peace, holistic shalom peace will come
about in our world. And that is why we
are called to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and the peace of our world for
that matter.
And while we are not able to bring about
complete peace for our world, we are also able to do more than pray for God to
bring about peace. We can also act for
peace in our own lives as we seek to live out Paul’s instructions in Romans
12. We can act for peace in our world as
we aim to live into the vision that Micah 4 offers us. And we can often begin this work with a shift
in our perspective that takes us beyond our own vantage point to see things the
way that others see them and perhaps even the way that God sees them.
May God allow us to see with his
eyes. May God allow us to hear with his
ears. May God act through our hands and
feet for God’s kingdom purposes.
Amen
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