A Sermon by the Very Reverend Peter Eaton
Dean of Saint John’s Cathedral
Denver, Colorado
for the Opening Eucharist
for Journey into Peace: Creating a Culture of Non-Violence
sponsored by the Episcopal Peace Fellowship,
Jubilee Ministries of Colorado, and Saint John’s Cathedral
The Feast of the Transfiguration
6 August 2010
7:00 pm
It is an honour for me to welcome all of you here this evening for this liturgy at the beginning of your weekend of workshops and training in this gathering Journey into Peace, and we are delighted that you have chosen to make the cathedral your home for this crucial work. We are also delighted that Mishkhah has created this evening’s worship, and I want to thank everyone who has made this evening and this weekend possible. For a very long time, the work of reconciliation has been at the heart of this cathedral’s ministry, and I hope that you will have future meetings here.
I have a certain personal interest and commitment beyond my role as the Dean. I became involved in, and committed to, the Church’s ministry of peace-making a long time ago, and I had a small part in encouraging the Church to add Bishop Paul Jones, the great pacifist Bishop of Utah, to the liturgical calendar back in the early 1990s.[1] In the context of that work, I had some contact with Bishop Bill Davidson, who was, by then, a past President of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and whom I was to get to know so much better after I moved to Denver. Bill was a great leader in the Church, and passionate about peace-making. It is hard to believe that he has been dead for 4 years, but I know that he prays for us, and, in a special way, I remember him with deep affection at this Eucharist.
All of you know much more about peace-making that I do, so in these few moments I simply want to highlight three things that the Christian tradition says to us about the imperative of peace and reconciliation. As we attend to these reflections, we do so in the context of the Feast if the Transfiguration, a feast of the breaking in of God’s glory into our human life, and on the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
The first understanding to which the Christian tradition bears witness is that peace is what we call (in technical theological language!) a “messy reality.”[2] The Christian faith is full of “messy realities,” because Christianity is about a God who becomes a baby and about people who have a hard time growing up – all of that a messy business indeed.
Fortunately for us, the baby in whom God was pleased to dwell did grow up, and our grown-up God calls us to the same human and divine maturity that shone through the life of Jesus. But the mere fact of the need for the work of this weekend testifies to the messy reality of peace: there has been no consensus in the tradition about what peace actually is, and about the best ways for us to build a world of peace in God’s creation. We enter into the task of peace-making best when we understand that it is a “messy reality.”
The second observation that I would like to leave with you tonight is related to this first understanding, for in the Christian tradition there is no one word for peace, and none of the many words we use is straight-forward.[3] The meaning of the idea of peace has changed often in the tradition. Often. The Presiding Bishop has made the word shalom fashionable again (it has been fashionable before, but it is nice to see it back), and the concept of shalom is indeed an important one, especially in the post-exilic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures. But we should not forget that to “return from war in shalom” means simply to return victorious.[4] Not quite the concept of peace with which we associate the word shalom.
We have other words as well. The Greek word for peace, eirene, is harder to pronounce and less pleasant on the ear than shalom, and has therefore been less popular, but it is a word that attains great richness both in the Christian Scriptures and in the Greek liturgical tradition that continues to live in our own day. Then there are the pregnant Latin words pax and tranquilitas, which mean so much more than the wooden cognate translations “peace” and “tranquility” and which take us beyond Scripture into the formative traditions of Christian thought established by Saint Augustine, who speaks of “the peace of the earthy city” and “the peace of the heavenly city.”[5] Nor should we forget that the word jubilee has as much to do with what we think of as “peace” as these other words do.
By all of this I am not trying to complicate the picture. I am simply reminding myself of the multi-layered reflection and experience of the Christian tradition. I am also reminding myself that we, who struggle with what peace means and how to make peace happen, are not without the greatest possible theological, spiritual, philosophical, and liturgical resources. We do not have to start from nothing.
Finally, of course, we must always remember that the peace for which we long is not a human creation or achievement, but a divine gift, a divine attribute. God is love, certainly; but God is also peace. This is not an excuse for our inaction; but it is an encouragement, especially when the going gets tough. Peace is a gift into which we are called to give ourselves, for peace, even the divine gift of peace, cannot exist unless it is inhabited. We participate in a peace that pierces our human existence from the kingdom of God, as this Feast of the Transfiguration attests; we ourselves do not create it. Just as we do not create love, but give ourselves to it, and learn to live within it.
By baptism, whether we like it or not, we become the ambassadors of the Prince of Peace.[6] And, since peace is not just personal, but social, and since the peace that passes all understanding is for all, we have to remember, as Robert Frost reminded us, that “to be social is to be forgiving.”[7]
That is where all peace-talk and peace-making has to begin. With forgiveness.
And why not? For the same One who is the author of our peace is also the author of our forgiveness.
Amen.
[1] Peter Eaton (ed.), Bishop Paul Jones: Witness for Peace (Cincinnati: Forward Movement 1992). This was an edited version of John Howard Melish’s brief study of Bishop Jones, Paul Jones: Minister of Reconciliation, originally published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1942. See also Peter Eaton, “Paul Jones: The Makings of a Saint” and “Utah’s Fourth Bishop Proposed for Church Calendar” in Diocesan Dialogue (The Diocese of Utah), February 1991.
[2] I owe this concept in this context to Eric James, Collected Thoughts: BBC Radio 4Thought for the Day Broadcasts (London; Continuum 2002), pp. 28-9.
[3] See the especially helpful overview of the subject by Andrew Shanks in Adrian Hastings et al. (edd.), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (OUP 2000), pp. 524-6, to whom I owe especially the reminder of the word shalom in relationship to victory in war and other points here. There are also good reflections on various websites.
[4] For example, Judges 8:9, “So [Gideon] said to the people of Penuel, ‘When I come back victorious [ i.e. in shalom], I will break down this tower.”
[5] Augustine, The City of God Book XIX Chapter 17.
[6] See Robert Runcie’s characteristically thoughtful article, “Ambassadors for the Prince of Peace,” in Robert Runcie, Windows onto God (London: SPCK 1983), pp. 172-4.
[7] In his poem “The Star-Splitter.”
