TO HEAR THE WORD OF PEACE
Texts: Isaiah 2:1-4; Matthew 5:43-45; Luke 18:41-42

I am preaching about “hearing” today: Hearing God’s word and hearing the word of Christ.
To enter a medieval cathedral is to enter a “many-storied” universe with all the great stories of scripture captured in the stained-glass windows that surround you in the cathedral. “You are your child’s cathedral,” I say to parents as we give them a Children’s Story Bible. From you they will hear these stories.

The church is called to be a cathedral for the hearing of God’s word. Israel was above all a people created and called to hear. Their most basic creed begins, Shema, Y’Israel: Hear, O Israel. And we the church are those who hear the word of Christ. As Paul says, “Faith comes by hearing and what is heard comes from the word, or utterance, of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

Buechner says that poetry starts things echoing inside us the way a cathedral starts sounds echoing inside it. Can this church be a cathedral where the word of God, word of Christ can echo? Can your inner life be such a place?

I have this opposite image in mind: The church as a recording studio. The singer has on earphones, and all she can hear is the sound of her voice mixed with the sounds of the other musicians in the room. Those sounds only. No other sounds beyond themselves.

John Webster, British theologian, writes of the role of scripture in the church’s life:

...it builds the church by breaking the
church open, and therefore in large
measure by breaking the church down....
Scripture is as much a destabilizing
feature of the life of the church
as it is a factor in its cohesion
and continuity. Through scripture
the church is constantly
exposed to interruption.
Will we let the scripture interrupt us today?

I

This day we have heard the word of the prophet Isaiah and the word of Jesus.

There are a number of sophisticated, scholarly ways that have told us we need not take these words seriously. Here are some:

1) The prophet’s vision of the kingdom of God is meant for the world to come, the next world, not this world. So the words do not pertain.

This limitation of the prophet’s vision has even worked its way into our translations of today’s text. Isaiah 2:2 begins: “In days to come” (NRSV). But the NIV begins: “In the last days,” which signals: “not this world but the world to come.” The vision has to do with the end of history, not the history we live in, so we are told.

2) Jesus’ ethic described in the Sermon on the Mount was an “interim-ethic.” Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who thought the world was soon to end. His moral teachings were applicable only to the short time left, not for the longer time in which we live. They do not pertain.

3) Jesus’ teachings are about individual ethics, personal ethics, not about communities, nations and peoples. They are not a social ethic.

So for example we hear the word “righteousness” today only in the meaning of personal righteousness and uprightness. But for the Hebrew people justice and righteousness were formed from the same word: Social justice and personal righteousness were the warp and woof of the same fabric.

So when Jesus said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” - - which is the title sentence of the Sermon on the Mount - - what we should be hearing as the cathedral of the word of God is this: “Unless your justice and righteousness exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). Even the phrase “kingdom of heaven” has impaired our hearing. Jesus said, of course, “kingdom of God” - - and Matthew substituted the word “heaven” for the word “God” out of his reverence for God and refusal to say the name of God. (The way someone might say “For heaven’s sake” rather than “for God’s sake.”) But it has caused us to hear the “kingdom of God” in other-worldly ways.

So, some say, Jesus’ teachings pertain to individual ethics but not social and political ethics. We limit beforehand their hearing.

4) And here’s the other way we’ve figured out how not to hear Jesus’ teaching as applicable to us: It was meant for a spiritual elite: Monks, nuns and preachers. Jesus’ words are possible only within certain conditions - - like in a monastery or inside a church. Not outside in the world, by regular people. So Jesus’ ethic is a hothouse ethic: Possible only in certain artificial conditions.

5) Here’s another: We cannot rely on the New Testament gospel to give us reliably Jesus’ words, so how can we trust them? I looked up the Jesus Seminar’s dividing of Jesus’ words into red, pink, grey and black - - that is, from reliably his to most certainly not his. In this passage for today, Matthew 5:43-46, we have all four: red, pink, grey and black.

With these arguments - - and others - - we’ve made the church a place you can’t hear the word of God, word of Christ.

How can we hear them again? In their plain direct power? Let us rip off the earphones which feed back only what we are saying to each other, that we might hear a word outside us, beyond us.
Here is the word that Isaiah saw: It was so vivid, this vision, he not only heard it, he saw it.
“In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills.”

Can you see the temple in Jerusalem on Mount Zion? It is now rising higher and higher until it is the highest of all hills?

And what is happening? “All the nations shall stream to it.” You see all peoples, of all faiths, making pilgrimage to the house of God.

And what is happening when they get there? God is teaching them. God is not only king; God is teacher.

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,” they sing as they make their pilgrim way up the mountain, “that God may teach us God’s ways and that we may walk in God’s paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, which means “city of God,” will become the city of God for all people, a community of all faiths living in the unity of reconciled diversity. Diverse still, but reconciled diversity: Christian, Muslim, Jew, Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, all. Living in reconciled diversity because we all are learners of God, learners of the God inside each of us in whose image we are all made.

God is not only teacher; God is also judge, the maker and provider of justice: “God shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples.” The meaning of justice is clear from the Torah: It means protection for the poor and powerless, the widow, orphan and stranger (immigrant). It means opening your hands to the poor and hungry. It means the end of the economic exploitation of the poor. In the words of Micah, every person would sit under his own vine and fig tree and not be afraid. It meant an every-seven-years forgiveness of debts. In other words, justice is the foundation for peace. The growing gap between rich and poor is the kindling for war. Peace means not only the cessation of war but the well-being, the wholeness, the shalom of life.

Then Isaiah’s vision is completed in this glorious sight:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

Humvees will be turned to hamburger. Fighter jets into tractors. Halliburton will rebuild inner city schools, and the technology of war will be turned into technology for energy independence.
President Eisenhower in his last Presidential address warned of the power of the growing “military / industrial complex.” As a General and a President he knew how controlling this alliance could be.
What is our military budget today? It’s 441.6 billion in 2006 - - not including the war expenses of Afghanistan and Iraq. And this while we are making draconian cuts in social programs. If you do not think they are draconian, you do not live near enough to the poor.

And how much is our corporate and economic life dependent upon this budget?
Our military budget is greater than the budget of the next nine largest nations combined! We are not only consuming a huge amount of our budget learning war. We are the world’s major teacher of war.

You do not want to hear this - - and I do not want to say it - - but I see no moral or biblical proportion in these things.

That’s the vision of the prophet Isaiah. Harvard’s Paul Hanson writes that the Hebrew prophet was given a vision of God and sought to apply it to the realm of “plain history, real politics and human instrumentality.” That is, this world. “This kingdom come thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”
Now Jesus. Jesus does not make it easier. The Law of Moses differentiated between obligation to family and neighbor on one side and obligation to enemy on the other. Jesus said,

You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor
and hate your enemy!
But I say to you,
Love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
 

Our God is the one who “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends the rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

Who then is the “enemy” we are to love and pray for? As I’ve quoted before, Karl Barth defines your enemy as anyone who tempts you to return evil for evil. That brings it as close as the breakfast table, or the office, as the church pew.

It also includes the Islamic terrorist Moussaoui, sentenced this week to life imprisonment and not capital punishment for his role in 9/11. “I won, you lost,” he said at the sentencing. No, the rule of law won, terrorism lost. “An eye for an eye” lost and life won, a lifetime to ponder his deeds before God.

Martin Luther King, Jr. moved his protest from the Civil Rights arena to the war in Vietnam. It made many nervous, even his friends. At Riverside Church, April 2, 1967, he said,

Have they forgotten that my ministry
is in obedience to the one
who loved his enemies so fully
that he died for them?... What
then can I say to the Viet Cong,
or to Castro, or to Mao, as a
faithful minister of this one?
Can I threaten them with death,
or must I not share with them
my life?

Martin Luther King wept over this nation as Jesus wept over Jerusalem saying,

Would that even today you knew
the things that make for peace!
But now they are hidden from your eyes.

Jesus did not give us blueprints for the building of peace in our society and world. That is left to us - - to draw and build them with all other citizens of this nation and world. I have no ready blueprints to offer you.

This one thing I have: The words of Jesus to echo in our hearts, to work their way through our minds in their holy, mind-boggling and saving way. Here they are again. Would you repeat them after me?

You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor
and hate your enemy!
But I say to you,
Love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you.