September 18th, this past Tuesday, was an especially noteworthy occasion: it was the 40thanniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20thcentury. Following twelve days of secret negotiations with President Jimmy Carter acting as intermediary, the CampDavid Peace Accordswere signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The two framework agreements were signed at the White House where they led to the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. Due to the agreement, Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize together.
I remember that day as if it was yesterday. I was employed at the time as a fiberglass insulator in Santa Cruz, Ca. and I was working at a new apartment complex situated only a few blocks from the ocean. I kept close to my radio throughout the day so I could follow the events live. At the very moment the signing took place, I stopped work long enough to announce to everyone that the seemingly impossible had just been accomplished- President Carter had helped broker a peace between two sworn enemies who had fought three wars against each other over the previous thirty years. If I had some champagne (at least some cold duck), I would have popped the corked and shared it with everyone.
The theme of peace saturates the Bible- it opens with a PROVISIONAL peace in the Garden of Eden and it ends with an ETERNAL peace in a new heaven and earth. This is especially apparent in the gospels, beginning from the moment Jesus was born into this world. "Peace on earth" was the heart and sum of the message delivered by the angels at his birth, and throughout his ministry, he never stopped iterating “Peace be to you” and “These things I have spoken to you, that in me you might have peace.” The Apostle Paul repeated this theme all throughout his writings, telling the early church, “God has called us to peace” and “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts.”
Christ made it clear that his peace—the peace of God--was fundamentally different from any other peace that passes for such in our world. He said on the eve of his betrayal and arrest, “Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.”(John 14:27) The peace of the world he was contrasting his own with was that of the Pax Romana. The Pax Romana consisted of a world order in which Rome was its center and the conquered regions all about her became her slaves. In the outer regions of the empire, the inhabitants there were unduly oppressed and exploited, being forced to pay for the extravagances of Rome and the military campaigns of Caesar. In those provinces, there was unbelievable misery- people were lacking in food, water, shelter, work, and education; the poor there lived in hopelessness, apathy, and despair. There was peace all right, but it was an enforced peace held in check by the end of a spear in order to make the rich richer and the poor, poorer. Such was the Pax Romana, the famed "Peace of Rome.”
On the other hand, with the birth of Christ there came a NEW peace- the Pax Christi, the "Peace of Christ," an ALTERNATIVE peace that would restore their hope and lift their despair. It would start at the fringes of the empire and gradually work its way towards the center- to the capitol that was Rome. This was not some vague spiritual peace but a REAL peace, a concrete act of God in human history and in all relations. It didn't mean peace in heaven after you and I died but reconciliation RIGHT NOW between persons on the basis of God's reconciliation with US. Jesus became God's peace with us through whom all sin is cast away and all rebellion and distrust against him forgotten. Jesus was the proof of God's love and reconciliation with us, and he becomes the peace in our relation with all other human beings whether Arab or Jew, Black or White, American or Afghani.
If Americans ever needed a large dose of peace, it is certainly today. With all the demagoguery and name calling going on, the political divide in this country has never been wider. NO WONDER people become either angry or numb at the mere mention of anything political or why it is our elected officials suffer from the lowest approval ratings in history. It reminds me of the 1960’s all over again- a decade of great turmoil in our country in which we found ourselves divided over such issues as civil rights, women’s lib, and the Vietnam War. It was a social and cultural upheaval which took years for our nation to recover from, if EVER.
The Bible speaks of those who yell “peace, peace” when there is no peace. The fact is that peace is always a much RARER commodity than violence, conflict, and war has ever been. It’s been observed that Washington D.C. has so many peace monuments because they build one after every war, while peace has been described as that glorious brief moment in history when everyone stops to reload. Over the past three decades, we’ve been embroiled in the Middle East far longer than any other conflict since the American Revolution.
But such a state of affairs won’t last forever for the scriptures anticipate a “Last Day”- that time when the Bible tells us Christ shall return and put his enemies under his feet and inaugurate a NEW heaven and NEW earth. The prophet Isaiah spoke of that day when the lion would lie down with the lamb and where our swords would be turned into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Meanwhile, the book of Revelation, for all its mystery and metaphor, looked forward to when “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have all passed away.” However, UNTIL that day arrives, the church is summoned to be as leaven in the world, that is, as a transforming agent helping to alleviate its sufferings and injustices by our faithful witness and commitment to that OTHER kingdom- CHRIST’S kingdom, of which as children of God and joint-heirs with Jesus we are NOW citizens. We are to reflect its values of love and mercy and peace and justice in all our relations, and in this way, we demonstrate the REALITY as well as SUPERIORITY of that OTHER kingdom. This is why Jesus has us pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.”
As disciples of Jesus Christ and representatives of his kingdom, ALL of us who wear the badge of “Christian” are called to be “peacemakers,” ALL of us are summoned to be “agents of reconciliation” WHEREVER we may be; it is part and parcel of our calling. It was St. Paul who commanded the early church that they were to be at peace with all persons insofar as it lay in them, and so when we breed dissention and conflict rather than peace and brotherhood, it then calls into question whether we truly ARE “children of God” as Jesus says TRUE peacemakers are.
The late Dutch priest Henri Nouwen was not only a great Catholic educator and author of a number of well-known books that spoke to both Catholics and Protestants alike, he was regarded by those who knew him as a deeply spiritual man as well. For the last ten years of his life, he abandoned a lifetime of teaching at some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world including Yale, Harvard, and our own Princeton Theological Seminary to become the pastor of a small community near Toronto, Canada where people with developmental disabilities live and share life together with those who care for them. The experience changed his life and deepened his experience of God and other people in a way he never anticipated which he later shared in a book he entitled Adam:God’s Beloved. He lived in a house with six handicapped people and four assistants where they tried to imitate the spirit of the Beatitudes- our New Testament lesson for this morning. He said they all lived together day-in and day-out as a family, gradually forgetting who was handicapped and who was not.
Nouwen had never worked with handicapped people before and he did not know what to expect. He was invited to work directly with Adam, the weakest person of their family. Adam is a twenty-five year-old man who cannot speak, cannot dress or undress himself, cannot walk alone or eat without much help. He does not cry, or laugh, and only occasionally makes eye contact. His back is distorted and his arm and legs movements are very twisted. He suffers from severe epilepsy and, notwithstanding heavy medication, there are few days without grand-mal seizures. Sometimes, as he grows suddenly rigid, he utters a howling groan. It took the priest about an hour and a half to wake Adam up, give him his medication, undress him, carry him into his bath, wash him, shave him, clean his teeth, dress him, walk him to the kitchen, give him his breakfast, put him in his wheelchair, and bring him to the place where he spends most of the day undergoing different therapeutic exercises.
After the first month of working this way with Adam, something started to happen to Nouwen that had never happened before to him. This deeply handicapped young man, whom some might consider to be no more than a vegetable, a distortion of humanity, a useless animal-like creature, started to become his dearest companion. As his fears and uncertainty gradually subsided, a love started to emerge in him so full of tenderness and affection that most of his other tasks seemed boring and superficial compared with the hours he spent with Adam. Out of this broken body and broken mind emerged a most beautiful human being offering him a greater gift than he would ever be able to offer him. This is how he described what he found happening:
It is hard for me to find adequate words for this experience, but somehow Adam revealed to me who he was and who I was and how we could love each other. As I carried his naked body into the water, made big waves to let the water run fast around his chest and neck, rubbed noses with him, and told him all sorts of stories about him and me, I knew that two friends were communicating far beyond the realm of thought or emotion. Deep speaks to deep, spirit speaks to spirit, heart speaks to heart. I started to realize that there was a mutuality of love not based on shared knowledge or shared feelings, but on shared humanity. The longer I stayed with Adam, the more clearly I started to see him as my gentle teacher, teaching me what no book, school, or professor ever could have taught me.
While he was writing that book about his experience, Adam’s parents came for a visit and Nouwen asked them, “Tell me, during all the years you had Adam in your home, what did he give you?” His father smiled and said without a moment of hesitation, ‘He brought us peace...he is our peacemaker...our son of peace.”
Nouwen recognized that both he and Adam were created by the same God to share a common humanity, and that as Christians we are to love and accept others not on the basis of their various achievements and levels of success, or what it is they could do for us in kind, but because they TOO are members of same family of God WE are, that we are in fact united as brothers and sisters of the deepest kind to one another. This meant that he, this esteemed professor and writer, was no more precious or important in the eyes of God than ADAM was. God could not love HIM any more than God could love Adam- this young man who could do nothing, someone who was completely dependent upon others for even the SIMPLEST of things. Adam had never said a word to him and he never would. At his funeral, nobody would be standing up to deliver a litany of his many accomplishments- he HAD none. Yet, Adam taught him something about a peace that is not of this world. It was a peace rooted in merely being present to each other, a peace that speaks about the love of God by which we are all held, a peace that keeps calling us to a new kind of community- a fellowship of the weak.
Nouwen said that Adam’s gift was his pure “being with us.” Every evening when he’d run home to help Adam to supper and then put him to bed, he’d realize that the best thing he could do for Adam was to simply “be there” for him. THAT, for Nouwen, became his greatest joy: paying total attention to Adam’s breathing, his eating, his careful steps; looking at how he tired to lift a spoon to his mouth; always wondering about possible pains that he could not express but that still ask for relief. Where Nouwen’s whole life had been based on “doing” things for himself- on building a career and accumulating degrees and earning honors along the way with moments of suspicion and jealousy, resentment and competitiveness intermixed, he was discovering that REAL ministry begins and ends by first learning how to “be” for one another, learning to love others, not on the basis of what they can “do” but simply for whom they “are”- children of God, our brothers and sisters in Christ.
I’ve heard the parents of severely handicapped children say as much themselves, even referring to them as God’s gift to them: “Our Johnny has such a pure heart and he’s taught us how to love in ways we never thought possible” they say. Some of you have had to look after a loved one in the final stages of life and you cared for that person ever so tenderly and without complaint. And although it was never easy, it became a real labor of love for you. I shared a similar experience when my mother developed Alzheimer’s and could no longer care for herself or remember who any of her children were. I and my siblings would visit the nursing home and tenderly stroke her hand or brush her hair and tell her over and over again how much we loved her. We’d sing her songs and relate stories about our lives growing up although we knew that none of it connected with her any longer. She’d just sit there with a vacant look in her eyes and continue to smile for us. Still, our love for her was unconditional and beyond anything she could ever do in return. It was to love her just for who she WAS- the woman who gave us life, the mother who cared and provided for us before we were able to care for ourselves. Such love is the purest, most sublime love there is BECAUSE it is so selfless.
Imagine if we could learn to love others in the same way. There’d be far less competitiveness, and more support and encouragement for one another; there’d be less self-absorption and looking after number one, and more interest in trying to succeed in life TOGETHER. Consider how different our relation to our families and neighbors and co-workers would be; how our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and even our communities would be transformed in ways we could never imagine. Consider how different our politics in Washington would be and even the legislation passed by our representatives there. We’d see peace break out on an order one would only find in our Father’s kingdom, wouldn’t we.
And the fact is we CAN love like that, for people like Father Nouwen or Mother Teresa were not persons upon whom God had entrusted a special calling or gift; they weren’t somehow endowed with a larger heart and a greater capacity for compassion and patience and pity than any of the REST of us. On the contrary, they were every bit the same as you or I and possessing the same size heart, only THEY BELIEVED their Bible and took Christ seriously at his word, ESPECIALLY his saying, "Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brethren, you have done unto me." Moreover, we’re not only equipped with the SAME capacity for love that they had but we’ve also been given the very same commission THEY received which is to be peacemakers in the highest sense of the word, to fulfill a calling that includes caring for the least of our brothers and sisters, and loving our enemies even as we love ourselves.
Of course, the inspiration and highest exemplar of such love and peace continues to be Christ himself, our “Prince of Peace.” HE is the one who refused to cling to his divine power. HE is the one who says “Blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted in the cause of righteousness.” HE is the one who touched the lame, the crippled, and the blind; who spoke words of forgiveness and encouragement to everyone else while receiving none himself, only to die despised, rejected, and alone. It was Christ who teaches us that we are to reach out in love to ALL persons regardless how strange or different they may be from us for they are STILL children of God, our brothers and sisters. So long as we keep our eyes on HIM who became poor with the poor, weak with the weak, and was rejected with the rejected, will we discover the source of all our joy, the basis of all our peace, and become the TRUE peacemakers all sons and daughters of God are called to be. Let us pray…
Lord, make us an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, may we sow love; where there is injury, pardon: where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy; O divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.