A Prayer For Peace

Formed in 1984, Churches for Middle East Peace is a coalition of 24 national Church denominations and organizations, including Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions. It works to encourage U.S. government policies that actively promote a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ensuring security, human rights and religious freedom for all people of the region.

The following prayer by the Rev. Doris E. Warrell is for a meeting today of representatives of the European Union, The United Nations, Russia and the United States that is to focus on Middle East peace negotiations.

---

A Prayer for Peace on the Occasion of the April 11, 2012 Quartet Meeting

When your people quarrel and cannot find a way, you become the way.
     God, have mercy on us, your quarrelsome people.

When we fear that all we can do can never be enough, you become enough for us.
     Jesus, give your hope to us, your struggling people.

When we don’t do all that we could do, you call us to move forward.
     God, have mercy on us, your timid people.

When we dare to try once again to be the peacemakers you call us to be, you move among us.
     Jesus, give your strength to us, your tenacious people.

For people in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank who suffer the shock of past violence and fear future violence,
     Give safety and comfort to your hurting people.

For people who work for peace yet see the increase of sorrow and despair,
     Sustain their perseverance and vision.

For people who generate violence and injury,
     Show them the better way of Your justice, mercy and faithfulness.

For people who sit at tables and talk of things with which others must live,
     Fill their hearts with love of neighbor and compassion for strangers.

We pray for national and international leaders meeting this day in Washington, D.C.:
     Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy,
     Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State,
     General Ban Ki-moon, General-Secretary of the United Nations, and
     Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia.

We pray also for the Israeli and Palestinian national leaders:
     Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, and
     Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel.

Generous God, give them persistence, wisdom and vision.
Give them love and compassion for all God's children.

You, O God, change hearts of stone into flesh,
     beat weapons into plows,
     give hope in the midst of despair.

May the fulfillment of your justice, mercy and faithfulness come.

May your call for peace be ever apparent in our words and actions.

You, O God, who create Easter people,
Hear our prayers.

Amen.

---

An Invented, United People

Once you were not a people,
but now you are the people of God.
                                - 1 Peter 2:10 a


For he himself is our peace,
who has made the two (Jews and Gentiles) one,
and has destroyed the barrier,
the dividing wall of hostility.
                                  Ephesians 2:14


There before me was a great multitude that no one could count,
from every nation, tribe, people and language,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb.
They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.
And they cried out in a loud voice:
  
“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”
                                   Revelation 7:9-11


In the Christian tradition, Christmas becomes a part of the fulfillment of the dream of the Hebrew prophets, a quiet proclamation of a vision of nations beating their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, an announcement of "peace on earth and good will toward all." It is an expression of God's plan for all people to become united as children of one Creator, not through the force of God as warrior, but the love of God as Lamb.

On a more mundane level, I submitted the following thoughts in a letter to the Daily News-Record yesterday:

Editor, DNR:

Like many others, I was struck by candidate Newt Gingrich's recent reference to Palestinians as "an invented people." While he is not alone in opposing the two-state solution (actually favored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of his fellow Israelis), I'm wondering how he defends our own country's founders who, in the name of "we, the people," insisted on being recognized as a sovereign nation in spite of not being of one culture, language or national origin.


I've always thought it was a good thing that the original colonists represented a mix of Germans, Irish, English, Swiss, Scotch, Dutch, French and other people of all social classes. And that among them were Dunkards, Catholics, Jews, Methodists, Mennonites, Baptists, Congregationalists, Anglicans, Amish, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Freemasons, Deists and yes, even a group of Muslims from Morocco (down in Charleston, I'm told). Yet many of these diverse folks came together to "form a more perfect union," a great "invention," if you please.

If I understand Gingrich correctly, only native Americans should have had the right to form a sovereign state on this soil. Tragically, they were excluded and decimated. And African-Americans, sadly, were subjugated and denied any right to citizenship for decades.

When will we learn to truly proclaim liberty and justice for all?

Saying No to War

There were 51,000 Civil War casualties at Gettysburg
alone.

“As disciples of Christ, we do not prepare for war, or participate in war or military service.”
       
This succinct statement taken from Article 22 of my church's "Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective"  sets us apart from all but a small fraction of other Christians around the world, although I am heartened by more and more individuals and denominations, notably Quakers and the Church of the Brethren, supporting this position.  Yet the above was embraced universally by believers in the first and second centuries, and by most Anabaptist-minded (later Mennonite) Christians since the 16th century.

To cite two of many examples, Tertullian, a leader and theologian in the early church expressed this vision when he spoke of the church as a people who “join to beat their swords into plows, and their lances into sickles.”  Origin of Egypt, a contemporary of Tertullian’s said, “Nor do we ‘learn war any more,’ having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, our leader.”  

To them, Jesus spoke the final word from God on issues of war and peace.  War was simply over for Christians, a thing of the past. Menno Simons and other outspoken leaders and martyrs in Anabaptist and other renewal movements simply helped revive this conviction. Menno himself wrote, "True Christians do not know vengeance... their hearts overflow with peace... The regenerate do not go to war, or engage in strife...  they are the children of peace, who have beaten their swords into plowshares."

Sadly, few followers of Christ over the centuries have maintained such positions, which has resulted in Inquisitions, Crusades, multiple wars among so-called Christian nations in Europe and elsewhere, and Christians defending and participating in every kind of military adventure imaginable, all in the name of God and country, and each case defended as a "just war." And there has been a gradual erosion of anti-war conviction among Mennonites as well, members of a small “peace church” that has maintained for most of 500 years that military membership and church membership are incompatible.

To me, a weakening of any church’s position on this kind of witness represents a crying shame.  Surely there is a need for at least a remnant of people somewhere who consistently teach and demonstrate that Christians, by definition, are people who will not harm or kill under any circumstances, not even in a time of war, not even their enemies (and certainly not their fellow believers) anywhere in the world.

I see this as not about some sectarian “peace position,” but about an “agape position,” about Jesus's followers being a people defined by their passionate love for God above every other love or allegiance, and by a compassionate love for neighbor--friend, foe and foreigner alike. 

And lest we reduce agape to being a mere sentiment, an attitude of niceness, or as simply a benevolent feeling toward others (one that still allows us to engage in their destruction under certain circumstances), the New Testament makes clear that God's kind of unconditional love is defined by its actions, not merely its motives or emotions.  Thus Jesus, in explaining what loving ones neighbor actually means, tells the story of a Samaritan binding up the wounds of his mortal enemy, a Jew.  And Paul, in Romans 13 (the very passage that urges respect, rather than armed resistance, toward even the occupying, crucifying, terrorist Caesars) makes it clear that love will "do no harm to a neighbor." Period.

As Ghandi once observed, Christians seem to be the only ones who believe Jesus and the New Testament are not absolutely clear on these points: Do no harm.  Return good for evil.  Take up the cross, not the sword.  Follow Jesus’s personal example of a completely nonresistant life, who taught, "My kingdom (government) is not like those of this world. If that were so my servants would fight."

If, in our baptism, we receive a missionary commission to evangelize and reconcile God’s enemies to God and to each other, how can we accept a military commission to harm them?  And if we are convinced that in Jesus God’s future kingdom has already been inaugurated, how can we also pledge, under oath, to become a part of an enterprise committed to harming or coercing others “in the national interest”?

Clearly, most decent people, Christian or not, would renounce the following as immoral and unacceptable:

breaking and entering
lying and other forms of deception
physical, psychological, or other forms of torture and abuse
armed robbery
malicious wounding
organized acts of terrorism
using racial or other demeaning slurs
using explosives to destroy people or property
destroying land or other natural resources
stabbing or strangling
forcing people from their homes or communities
committing mass murder

Without question, most believers would speak out against members of churches engaging in such behaviors--and would disapprove of their supporting or belonging to any groups or organizations that do--yet raise no objections when military forces routinely encourage, train and/or command people to do all of the above and more.  Thus we are in danger of accepting, on a mass and organized scale, what we could not accept or allow on any other basis. Unlike legitimate police force, necessary in human societies to maintain order within national boundaries (and intended to preserve life and bring individuals to justice under laws designed to protect individual rights), military forces have a long history of plundering and destroying without benefit of such civilized restraints.

True, we pacifist Christians must repent of the many "beams" of self righteousness, materialism, and cowardly indifference that interfere with our moral vision. Because of these we may not always “see clearly” to lovingly help remove any specks of militarism from another’s eye.

But remove them we must, all of us, lest history write off the church as having been irrelevant and mute in one of the most pressing moral issues of all time.

I like this piece by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself; I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his payroll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.