For They Will Be Called the Children of God
The central role of peacemaking in the church and the cost of ignoring it. This is the second of three dispatches on the church (Part 2 in a Series)
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In September of 1994, almost thirty years ago, I was an engineer for McDonnell Douglas heading overseas for the first time to work the large European air show which was in Farnborough, England that year. Foreign travel is always an interesting, expanding experience - but it is hard to interpret in the moment. Things are different there, wherever there is, but you don’t always know why - or if this different is normal. I suppose that is why I didn’t in the moment pay attention to some of the differences … like walking on a street with some trash from my pretzel (or whatever it was) in my hand and being unable to find a trash can anywhere. I carried it all the way back to my room. It wasn’t until later that I realized or discovered (I don’t remember which) that there weren’t public trash receptacles anywhere because they had so often been used to plant bombs. The next morning, entering the air show, armed and uniformed soldiers searched each car for explosives.
It has been 25 years since when what was known as “The Troubles” - the three decades long conflict between Irish Republican nationalists hoping to expel the British from Northern Ireland and the Ulster unionists fighting to stay in the land in which they had, at that point, resided in since the 16th century, formally ended. During that time, most acutely in Belfast, capital city of Northern Ireland, violence routinely and sporadically flared. Approximately 3500 people lost their lives during those troubled decades - most of those lives were lost in Northern Ireland, but the conflict was carried into England by those loyal to the Irish Republican cause.
All of this was brought to my mind through an article Making Peace, Making Worlds in Comment magazine by Christa Ballard Tooley. Dr. Tooley recalls her visit as a teenager on a family trip to Belfast just a few months before I was in Farnborough - and how peace has been reached and (mostly) maintained since 1998. She explores the role the church - the Catholic church with the Irish Republicans and the Protestant church with the Ulster Unionists - had both in propelling and maintaining the conflict, and in initiating and continuing the peace process.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Matthew 5:9
During the conflict, much of the church on both sides of the conflict effectively defined the word “peace” away in order to continue to believe they were following the words of Jesus above. Peace might have been referenced in the Old Testament context - the conquest of the enemy - or linked to “justice”, similarly defined away to mean our justice enacted against them. Either way peace involves defeating the enemy. I’m fairly sure that isn’t what Jesus had in mind. Dr. Tooley helpfully draws the comparison between the Troubles and our cultural moment - including the role of the church in this cultural moment. There are those in the church who have an unspoken understanding - because it is hard to justify this understanding explicitly within Christianity - that peace must involve the defeat of cultural enemies, through politics or other forces not involving (for now) active violence.
Just as ’The Troubles’ and the more recent and more familiar war on terror seemed to give permission for all sorts of potential peace breaking and became its own justification for itself - our culture war tends to have the same effect. The church has not been immune from this. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture outlined seven decades ago how the church has related to culture over the past two millennia. He reminded us how easy it has been for us to mistake cultural supremacy with peacemaking and to mistake the culture war as a divine imperative. The answer to the question “How does this end?” can easily become the answer given by Noah Vosen, a fictional Deputy Director of the CIA in The Bourne Ultimatum when pressed about the war on terror - “It ends when we’ve won.” I’m fairly sure that isn’t what Jesus had in mind.
Jesus also wasn’t speaking in the Sermon on the Mount of another common conception we have of peace - inner tranquility and the absence of anxiety. Peace in this sense is something to be desired - we hope that God will bring this peace to us amid the troubles of life. But it isn’t peacemaking. While we pray for peace for ourselves, we are to be peacemakers - bringing peace to others. The peacemaker has others in mind - including those whom many would regard as enemies, often including those whom they would regard as enemies. The culture war doesn’t end when we’ve won. Or when we’ve lost. It ends for us when we stop fighting it. It ends with transformation in the face of our enemies and redemption for us and for them. It ends when a larger calling replaces it. It ends when we surrender and start off in another direction.
Peacemaking, here, is a practice for God’s children to take up. His blessing does not name those who try to achieve their own inner peace, nor those who receive peace from God, but rather those who make peace with and for others. Theologian Justo Gonzalez calls this ‘for-otherness,’ the everyday habit of the kingdom of heaven, whose end, ultimately, is shalom. Peacemakers are often called children of God because, in likeness with God, they are the reconcilers who mend relationships and heal wounds in our world.
Christa Ballard Tooley - Comment
Alongside those in the church who enlisted the authority of the church to further the conflict (and bolster their personal standing), there were those in the church who sought to bring peace. The Irish Churches Peace Project was an ecumenical organization bringing together the four main Christian churches - in disagreement on so many issues - for peace. Perhaps more pivotal in Northern Ireland was ECONI -Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland - an evangelical protestant organization. This protestant organization was uniquely positioned to critique the central slogan and idea of the protestant unionists - “For God and Ulster”. This rallying cry so often invoked by Ian Paisley and other protestant leaders in Northern Ireland was meant to claim God for one side of a righteous conflict. The church in America does not have one rallying cry, but the spirit of righteous conflict is the same. The ‘other side’ does great damage - of course. But that is where peacemaking starts, not where it ends. The same self-critical movement in the church that helped bring an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland is needed in the church now.
In 1994, when Dr. Tooley, then a teenager, was visiting Northern Ireland and I was a young man searching in vain for trash cans on the streets of London, peace seemed very far away. But less than four years later, when a power-sharing and demilitarizing agreement was put to a popular vote, over 70% voted to enact it. Peace is always far away when we don’t have it, but it moves close only when we seek it - or seek to make it. Blessed are the peacemakers. Jesus said they will be called children of God. Not by everybody, of course - but by Him.
Links
Making Peace, Making Worlds - Comment - Christa Ballard Tooley
Christ and Culture - H. Richard Niebuhr
