Remembrance Sunday Sermon: Five Aspects Of Christian Peace-Making

Genesis 3;
Matthew 5:1-12

Introduction
My first Remembrance Sunday in the ministry fifteen years ago will stay in my
memory. Every year in the village, there was a united service at the parish
church. I found myself in a different world, where the elderly landowner whose
portfolio included many houses in the village had a separate entrance to the
church building.

Then there was the rector. He didn’t like women, at least
not in the ministry. During my time, he quit the Church of England over the
ordination of women, took his pay-off and retired. And he didn’t like preaching
on Remembrance Sunday. Which meant the Methodist minister always had to preach.
Step forward, me.

I was given this passage from Matthew, ‘The Beatitudes’.
Feeling I had to do justice to it, I went through all eight of the Beatitudes
that morning. It’s not something I’ve done since, and it’s not something I’ll
do today.

Instead, I want to pull out the one Beatitude that has the
most obvious relevance to Remembrance Sunday: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they will be called children of God’ (verse 9). What does being a peacemaker in
God’s kingdom include? The peace of God reverses all the effects of Adam’s fall
(whether you believe that story literally or figuratively). Making peace in
every aspect of life is the kingdom call to God’s children. What might it
involve?

1. Peace With God
‘Peace
With God’ was the title of perhaps Billy
Graham’s most famous
book. Peace with God is the most basic issue of life, according to the Gospel. Adam
and Eve are fundamentally alienated from God by listening to other voices than
his, and preferring their own way. When caught out, they shift the blame – Adam
to Eve and Eve to the serpent. They are driven out of Eden.

Christ wins peace with God at the Cross. He dies in our
place. He conquers sin and death in his own death and resurrection. He brings
forgiveness of sins and new life to all who make a u-turn of their lives from
the direction of selfishness to him and his kingdom, and who put their faith in
him, following him out of gratitude. This is at the heart of the Gospel. It is
the beginning of Gospel living – not the end, but the foundation upon which
Christian discipleship is built.

This peace with God stills the troubled mind. No more
anxiety about whether God loves me or accepts me – I see it is true at the
Cross, his promises are recorded in the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit brings
truth to life in my heart.

However, this peace has more than one dimension. Not only is
it the peace of sins forgiven and acceptance by God, which itself is pretty
major: imagine what that would do to so many troubled people in our society. It
is also the peace that comes from knowing that our lives are in his hands. When
a crisis comes, or when others let us down and we struggle to trust them, it is
still possible to trust the faithful God and know peace in the middle of the
storm, because he loves us and is in charge of our lives.

Only this week has this been important for me. I faced a
situation that I can’t name publicly, but I felt someone had let me down. I’m
sure it’s because they were under stress that they made a decision that made it
look like they were hiding something. Knowing the person, I can’t imagine they
intended that. But it made me feel like something was going on that wasn’t
transparent and was being hidden, or truncated for the sake of a quick
decision. I tried to find other ways around the impasse, to no avail. In the
end, all I could do was what I should have done from the outset – acknowledge
that the God of love was in control, and that he held me, the other person and
everyone else involved in the situation in his hands. That prevented a rise in
my blood pressure! All this arises from being at peace with the God who makes
peace with us in Christ.

2. Peace With People
Something goes badly wrong between Adam and Eve. Sin is not just a private
transaction with God, even if God is the primary party affected. We hurt
others. We end up with broken and distorted relationships. For Adam and Eve,
it’s seen in the pain of childbirth and the man ruling over the woman. Neither
of these were God’s best intentions for humanity. They symbolise the fracture
that has come into the human race through sin.

But the power of the Gospel of God’s kingdom is to heal
these severed relationships. Peace with God must lead to reconciliation with
others. It’s why we have ‘The Peace’ in the communion service. It’s a more
ancient version of the Book of Common Prayer tradition that called worshippers
to be in love and charity with their neighbour before taking the sacrament.

Therefore, peace is never a private matter. If we know God
has forgiven us, then we must share that with others, as Jesus taught in the
parable of the unforgiving servant. It’s why we have the difficult words in the
Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive us as our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’
Today, as we remember the deaths of those who died in international conflicts,
we must also look at our smaller, closer-to-home conflicts, and bring them to
the Cross for reconciliation.

3. Peace With The
Earth
Just giving you a title like that for this point probably makes me sound like
an eco-warrior, or a flaky New Age type. And you’re thinking, ‘He doesn’t look
like one’ (I hope!).

I am not about to spout the nonsense of those who speak
about our planet as if it were a creature, or even the goddess Gaia, but in
Genesis 3 Adam’s tilling of the soil after the Fall leads to thorns and
thistles. The close and harmonious relationship with the earth is gone. Humans
who were meant to have dominion over the earth on behalf of God now find
themselves at odds with their physical environment.

Peacemakers in God’s kingdom, then, will be concerned about
climate change and especially its effects on the world’s poorest communities.
The restoration of all that is broken requires us to be peacemakers with
creation. It is not right to say – as some fundamentalists have said – that God
gave us the earth to do with as we pleased. He entrusted us to look after it
for him. If peace is about harmony and justice, then that involves our care of
creation. It is part of being a godly peacemaker.

It was a real attraction, then, to know that the new
(Christian) head teacher of our daughter’s primary school was committed to
green issues. In teaching the children these values, she is giving a lead in
one area of Christian peace making. What steps are we taking in our family
lives, at work, and in campaigning for companies and governments to set
ambitious goals?

4. Peace At Work
Adam’s problem with tilling the ground is a problem for his work. The ground
was cursed, and he would toil as a result. Does that sound familiar to people
in work, whether paid employment or otherwise? Does it not feel like toil? How
many of us work to live, rather than live to work? The nature of the job can be
frustrating, and as for the colleagues – well, it would be easier without them
sometimes, wouldn’t it?

God made work to be good, but sin has ruined it. There is an
honourable calling in redeeming work. That may involve making the job or the
conditions better, if we have the power to do so. It may include working for
reconciliation and justice among the staff.

For me, that meant a surprise calling from God when I worked
at an office to become the office union secretary. It wasn’t all about conflict
with the management, although that happened occasionally. It was also about
caring for, and representing staff who were in difficulties.

Here is one story that became public knowledge. It involved
a young woman whose work was suffering. She asked to see me. What had affected
her work was this. She had been dating a young man from the office, and they
had gone on holiday to Majorca. While there, she discovered he was bisexual and
was seeing a man as well as her. When she confronted him with this, he beat her
senseless. She woke up in a local hospital where the staff knew little English,
and she knew hardly any Spanish. No wonder she couldn’t work well when she got
back to the office. The (now ex-) boyfriend was still there. It was my duty to
go with her to see a manager. Once they knew, they reduced their expectations
of her while she continued to recover.

There is far more to the Christian duty at work than to work
conscientiously and not steal the paper clips. We can be peacemakers, seeking
justice and reconciliation in what can be a stressful and even demoralising
atmosphere.

5. Peace In The World
If there is any allusion in Genesis 3 to the issues we commemorate on
Remembrance Sunday, it is when Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden by God. They become
refugees from one location to another. The arrival of refugees and the forced
displacement of peoples (or worse) are of course prime causes of wars. Movements
of peoples need not cause frictions, but such is human sin that they do. The Nazi
treatment of the Jews, and their invasion of Poland and other countries, is not
far from our minds today.

It is the Christian peacemaker’s calling to counter these
acts of hatred. But how we should do so is where we differ. There are many
shades of opinion about war and peace in the Christian community. (Moreover, it’s
what makes today so hard for those who lead worship: whatever convictions we
hold, there will be others who not only have come to different conclusions,
they are associated with painful real-life experience.)

You might hold that the words of Jesus expressly prohibit
all Christian involvement in war. You might not think they refer entirely to
that, but to personal relationships, and you might say that there is a case for
defending your nation against unjust attack. You might argue it is morally
acceptable to attack another nation or group in order to prevent them doing
evil. Most of those Christians who believe that war may sometimes be justified
generally agree that it must be a last resort, not a first resort, that the
response must be proportionate, and that care must be taken only to engage with
those genuinely involved in the war – not an easy matter.

There are other shades of opinion, too. And I confess I am
setting out some of the different ideas, because over the years my own views
have changed. At heart, I am probably a pacifist, although there is something
in my head that thinks a just war – such as the Second World War – may well be
acceptable biblically. Yet I can’t imagine myself killing an enemy combatant,
although I might feel differently if I thought my own family were threatened. And
that probably makes me a hypocrite: why defend my own family this way, but not
others? However, perhaps my struggles with this theme are echoed by some of
you.

However, I am convinced of this: we all who are followers of
Jesus need to acknowledge that it is central to our discipleship that our peace
making means we oppose injustice and violence, and that we are on the side of
the poor and oppressed. We may honestly disagree about strategies and tactics,
but we may not un-church each other on this issue. Our unity is in Christ, who
has reconciled us to God and each other through the Cross. It is that
reconciliation which leads us not only to campaign in the world; it is also a
reconciliation that we, the children of God – God’s family – need to model as
the community of his kingdom. Christian peace making is not merely something we
speak about: it is something we show by the way that we live. ‘They shall know
we are Christians by our love.’ ‘See how they love one another.’

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