Building Peace

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

For Sabbath, December 6, 2014

This is a preliminary version. Revision likely. Comments welcome.

Texts:

Isaiah 9: 6-7

Mark 4:35-39

The front page of Wednesday's Seattle Times featured this headline: “Mammoth cleanup ahead for fouled Duwamish River.” The entire page above the centerfold was taken up with an aerial photo of floating cranes and barges and dredging apparatus just upstream of the South Park Bridge. This equipment was engaged in early stages of the mammoth cleanup.

The reason for the headline was the release the day before of the final draft of a plan to clean up the Duwamish River. The project will take nearly twenty years. It will cost 342 million dollars. A million cubic yards of extremely contaminated sediment will be removed. Hundreds of acres of river bottom where the contamination is less will be covered with clean rock and sand to seal the toxins in place.

When the project is completed, the river will be a better place, a sweeter place. Perch and sole and crabs and clams will no longer be contaminated with PCBs and arsenic. People who eat fish from the river will no longer be poisoned by their catch.

The cleanup on the Duwamish will improve the water quality of the entire Puget Sound.

It might seem like a long way from the Duwamish River to the Bethlehem of Christmas fame, but I think I have found a worm hole that connects them.

In the Advent Candle reading this morning, we heard the words of Isaiah 9.

For a child is born to us, a son is given to us.

The government will rest on his shoulders.

He will be called:

Wonderful Counselor,

Mighty God,

Everlasting Father,

Prince of Peace.

His government and its peace will never end.

[Isaiah 9:6-7 NLT] 6

This is a prophecy of the work of the Messiah, a description of the mission of Jesus, the baby born in Bethlehem.

The priest Zecharias prophesied:

The morning light from heaven is about to break upon us,

to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

and to guide us to the path of peace.”

Luke 1:78-79

What is this peace that is mentioned in both these passages? Jesus is the Prince of Peace. His mission is to guide us into the path of peace. What does that mean?

It might be tempting to define peace as merely the absence of violent conflict. But peace is far more fundamental than that. Making peace is far more than stopping war. Making peace means creating opportunities for people to thrive. The first picture of peace making in the Bible comes right at the beginning:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void and darkness covered the face of the earth. God stepped into that dark and lifeless void and created light and life. God turned chaos into the Garden of Eden. This is what it means to make peace.

The mission of Jesus was to bring healing and hope and harmony. To end conflict by replacing enmity with community. Making peace means making the world better. The goal of peacemaking is joy, harmony, well-being. This was the mission of the Son of God. When we make this mission our own, when we practice peacemaking, we are acting like the children of God, we are demonstrating our family connection.

Right now, our country is roiled with controversy surrounding killings by the police. In some instances, the details are murky. In others, the evidence is glaringly clear: gross injustice has been done. Whatever the details of this incident or that, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt: Black men and boys suffer disproportionately from police wrong-doing. Whatever the facts in any particular case, as a society we are failing to give equal welcome and equal protection to Black men and boys. This is wrong.

Denouncing the evil is the easy part. The hard question, and the best question is: How do we make peace? Not just, How do we end the egregious miscarriages of justice? but How do we create a society that promotes the well-being of all, includin pg Black men and boys?

We are Christians. Being a Christian means more than saying Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays. Being a Christian means more than going on mission trips to foreign lands. It means more than having a correct opinion about soteriology. (I couldn't help myself. I thought I would toss in a latinate word here to highlight the risk of dressing up irrelevant theorizing with fancy words.) Christians are followers of Christ. At minimum, this means we are called to be peacemakers. We are called to be active in turning chaos into the Garden of Eden. We are called to do all we can to cooperate with Jesus in making peace. Here. Now.

For about a century, people dumped “stuff” in the Duwamish River. Tires and trash. Old trucks. Carcinogenic lubricants and coolants. Sewage. Industrial waste. Some of this dumping was done with clear knowledge of its potential for doing harm. Some of the dumping was done without a realization of the consequences. Some was inadvertent. However it happened and whoever was responsible, for a hundred years human activity turned the Duwamish River into a place like the dark, lifeless void mentioned at the beginning of Genesis. We had created chaos.

Activists, reformers, protesters eventually got our attention. This soiling was wrong. This chaos making was immoral. We had an obligation to do what we could to reverse a hundred years of wreckage and spoilage. It was time to make peace. The restoration is going to take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, but as a civilization we owe this to the river. We owe this to our children.

Like the mess in the Duwamish, the problems of race and class that confront us have been a long time in the making. Making peace from the chaos we have created will take time and cost money. But as children of the Prince of Peace, do we have any options? Our obligations to our Heavenly Master and to our children require us to make peace. Not just stop the war. Not just end hostilities. We are called to work toward the beauty of the Garden of Eden.

I appeal especially to you who are young. Put your energy, your minds, your education, your advantages to work for peace. Yes, pursue your careers. Yes, dream of a comfortable income and a nice house. But dream higher than that. Ask God to give you a vision higher and nobler than mere survival or comfort. Partner with God in making peace, in turning chaos into the Garden of Eden.

The moral of the Christmas story is that God did not ignore the chaos, the mess. God gave his best to humanity. Any of you who are parents will understand that behind all the complicated theology we have developed over the last two millennia, the core message of the Jesus story is this: God gave his best, his highest, his most treasured to humanity. Making peace is not a hobby for God. It is the very essence of the divine existence.

So when you young people dream big dreams of making the world better, when you take great risks, and attempt heroic feats, you are entering into the very life of God.

The child of Bethlehem and the Duwamish River are connected through the worm hole of a mission to bring about healing and new life. In fact, every effort to bring healing and harmony, to foster life and happiness is a cooperation with the mission of God.

Thursday morning, next to a different Seattle waterway, I caught a glimpse of the power of holy imagination to create peace.

I left the church about 7:30 and ran over to the Ballard Locks. I jogged across the locks and ran down to see if there were any fish moving through the fish ladder. No fish. Back up top, I headed toward the rest room. There was a sign out front: Closed. But inside I could hear a commotion of voices.

I pushed open the door. A worker was standing there. With a big grin on his face, he announced, “We're open. You can come in.”

His speech was not entirely clear but his grin was perfectly understandable.

“You're open?” I asked. “It's okay if I come in?”

Another worker came around the corner, pushing a mop. He saw me and grinned. It was obvious both men had some cognitive impairment. They were simple people.

They were delighted I had come to their restroom. “We keep everything clean,” the first guy declared with obvious pride. His partner, the one with the mop, grinned at his buddy, and repeated, nodding his head. “We keep everything clean.”

“And you're sure it's okay for me to come in now?” I'm watching the guy with the mop continue sweeping back and forth across the floor.

“Yes. We're open. Everything's clean.”

A supervisor stuck his head out of a store room and confirmed that I was welcome to use the facilities.

As I resumed my running, back across the locks and up the streets of Ballard, headed back here to the church I replayed the scene over and over in my head.

The two men with special needs were obviously finding satisfaction in real work. They were building peace, reducing chaos and increasing life-sustaining order in a tiny corner of the world—the restrooms at the Ballard Locks. They were mopping floors, wiping walls and toilets. They were making the world better.

But they could do this only because other people, an entire system, had worked to put them into a place where their disabilities did not keep them from the satisfaction of work. There was an entire system of supervisors and community support that enabled these guys to play their part in the peacemaking of God.

I wondered about their supervisor. What kind of special person does it take to direct the work of people with cognitive difficulties, people who want to work, to contribute, but are not capable of competing in our intense society? I wondered at the geniuses who found a way to connect these two simple men with their big grins and hearts of gold and impaired cognition with meaningful work.

This season as we sing Christmas carols and enjoy Christmas cookies and Christmas gifts, let's ask God to give us a brighter, clearer vision of how we can cooperate with the Prince of Peace in his work of transforming chaos into an idyllic Garden of Eden. Let's work for a community that comes ever closer to the ideals of God.