Blessed are the Peacemakers . . .

PEACEMAKERS AT WORK

There is no case so strong as a good example. I have always admired that blind man in John 9, who held fast to that one little beachhead he had gained, “All I know is that I was once blind but now I see.” Even though they were right about everything—and what poor blind man could question a Pharisee?—there was one thing he knew for sure, and there he took his stand. And since he stood before them seeing, after being blind all his life, there wasn’t much they could do to assault his beachhead.

So it is with the subject before us. Whatever we may say or not say about the meaning of the great beatitude, there is nothing so persuasive as a good example. What would it mean to all our people, as well as to the world, if there was in each of our congregations even one honest-to-goodness peacemaker. Even if we are lost for an adequate definition of what a peacemaker is, we all are able to recognize one. It is like peace itself, which may be one of those things that is better felt (and exemplified) than told.

The brother who is praying the prayer that appears on our cover for this issue is such a peacemaker. He lives in Long Beach, California and is 82 years old. He writes of all the years he spent in the bondage of sectarianism and of how Jesus has at last made him free. And now he prays for us all, as well as for himself, asking the Father to forgive us of “those misguided years,” and thanking Him for prolonging our days so that we might live to be free men and women in Christ. Since it is the prayer of a peacemaker, it defies all challenge. He does not judge any of us, not even himself, but simply acknowledges what is all too obvious, that we have been terribly sectarian. It is a prayer in peace and for peace. While our brother recognizes that our divisions are sinful, motivated as they are by our carnal-mindedness, he sees that we can be free of our divisiveness by becoming sons and daughters of peace.

So impressed am I by this prayer that I took it along with me to a meeting with college kids at Eastern Illinois State University in Charleston, using it as the close of one of my presentations. Even if two generations separate the aged brother from these college youth, they readily identified with the prayer. Long since turned off by all our silly, stupid divisions, they realize it is time that someone call the divisions what they are, sinful, and ask God for forgiveness rather than to try to justify them.

The book of Nehemiah invites us to assemble and spend the entire day reading the word and repenting of our sins. That book tells how the people asked God to forgive the sins of their ancestors who had turned from the pleading of a loving God. “You have shown your faithfulness, we our wickedness,” they cried out, and they went on to confess how they had ignored the warnings God gave them. “Our fathers grew proud, were obstinate, and flouted your commands. They refused to obey, forgetful of the wonder that you had worked for them,” they prayed.

When we compare the concern of Jesus for the unity of his disciples as expressed in his prayer in John 17 with our apathy along these lines, it would be appropriate that we too declare a day of mourning over our sins and those of our fathers. If our actions and attitude were used as the gauge, one would suppose that Jesus had commanded us to be a divided people and had prayed to the Father to make it so. How we have sinned against the Lord’s prayer for the oneness of his people!

Some years ago when I was visiting Westminster Abbey in London I was impressed to find a notice on one of the columns of that elegant old shrine that meetings for prayers for the unity of Christians were held on a regular basis. We know of course that God does not hear the prayers of Episcopalians, but even so I was gratified to learn that somebody took Jesus’ prayer for unity seriously. I did not have to be reminded that I had never seen nor heard of such announcement in the Churches of Christ during my entire life. Since we true Christians hardly ever bother to pray as Jesus did, it just might be that the God of heaven will even hear the prayers of Episcopalians when they show such concern.

So those who only hope and pray also serve. There may be no “great” thing that we can do, but we can all pray as Jesus did, for the oneness of all God’s children. When we do so we are peacemakers at work, and it is probably the most important thing we can be doing. If our voices were lifted to heaven in a great swelling chorus for the forgiveness of our sins and those of our fathers for both the creation and the preservation of schisms in the Body of Christ, and pray that we might apply ourselves to the undoing of the factions with the same zeal with which we created them, “the horrid evil,” as Thomas Campbell called it, would soon be corrected. We may not be able to do more than to pray like that, but how can we with good conscience do anything less?

Others make peace by being an instrument through which the Spirit bears love, joy, and peace. One of the great lines of Scripture is in Rom. 5:5: the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us. Those who are bearers of that love in our cold and heartless world are makers of peace. One sister, who has been forbidden to do anything else, writes that she finds her ministry in quietly being a vehicle for God’s love within her congregation. She allows the Spirit’s love to move through her heart into the lives of those about her, some of whom are less than friendly, and she finds simple and humble ways to show that love. William Barclay tells the story of a servant girl who labored most every waking hour and had little time to be a maker of peace in any special way. But each night she would go through the obituary column of the newspaper and pray for the bereaved families in her community, and then turning to the “Births” column, she would pray for each little soul as it came into a world that she found difficult to negotiate. Such ones are peacemakers at work.

Some make peace by visiting those that others neglect. Some make peace by sending a note or a letter, or perhaps a little gift, to some lonely soul. Some find time to convey a kindly word by telephone. Or they make it a point to notice those that others are likely to pass by. Or they have a smile for those who see too few smiles and who have themselves forgotten how to smile. Or by offering an encouraging word. Or simply by believing all things, enduring all things, and hoping all things.

If we will not only live in the Spirit but also walk in the Spirit, as the apostle urges us, that heavenly Guest will fashion us as peacemakers in one way or two. We do not have to create the peace, but to open our lives and hearts to the Spirit’s work in us. The Scriptures refer to “the working of the power of his strength in us.” That was the secret to the dynamic of the primitive church, and it is the secret of all peacemakers at work. There is no way to make peace except by the Holy Spirit within us.

If one wonders what it is that we moderns lack, it is this, the dynamic of the Spirit in our lives. Those who turned the world upside down did not rely upon gimmickry but upon the message that was in the demonstration and power of the Spirit.

These are of course the most fruitful peacemakers of all, those who bear the Good News to lost humanity. The message is not so much the story of the church or even of the sinfulness of man. The first evangels did not proclaim doctrines or theories or theologies, but that Jesus was the risen Christ and that in him man has the forgiveness of sins. Their deep fellowship, which made them a part of the Way, was centered in a simple trusting faith that Jesus of Nazareth, their teacher and Lord, has been raised from the dead.

As the prayer of our aged brother in California would suggest, there is much in our own past as well as the history of the church at large that we should be ashamed of. Along with ugly factions there have been wars and persecutions even among believers. There has been much phoniness and hypocrisy. We must admit, perhaps on our knees, that the church has been largely ineffective and that we have been less than faithful to the gospel. We have not been a Spirit-filled people, as were the primitive saints. To become true peacemakers we must take account of our failures, and we must especially resolve that we shall never be content with a divided church.

In spite of all our glaring faults it is encouraging to know that there are many believers today with the zeal and dedication of the early church. As Spirit-filled people they are at work among us, making peace. Many of them are being persecuted, sometimes at our own hands. Lives are being changed through their influence. Our task these days is to increase their number, the company of the committed, and not merely regret our blunders of the past, as important as that may be.—the Editor