2017-12-11
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13: Peace
What is it about a kiss? When I see a couple kissing, I instinctively look away. A peck on the cheek is one thing, or lips touching a child’s head. But there’s something so intimate about even a momentary kiss on the lips that I unconsciously turn away, to give the couple privacy, to let them have a moment to themselves. A wonderful elder in the last church I served told me that, after his wife’s death, every night before bed he would kiss the photo of her that stood on his nightstand. A kiss is a special, unique thing: love expressed in a tender and intimate gesture.
So there’s something beautiful and, yes, intimate, about that striking image in today’s psalm. “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet,” says the psalmist; and “righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (Psalm 85:10).
Righteousness and peace kissing each other! How cool is that! There’s nothing like a good poet to get us to dream!
Peace. When we hear that word, we generally think of the absence of war, or of rivals who bury the hatchet. Peace is what happens when hostilities cease, when animosities are buried, when people get along. And that is of course what peace is. When the word is used in the Bible, though, it has another layer to it, an earlier and more fundamental layer. “Shalom” is the Hebrew word for peace. And what it signifies is a core quality given by God. God gives shalom, and we receive it. Shalom, as the apostle Paul says centuries later, is the peace of God “that surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).
When we celebrate peace on this second Sunday of Advent, this is where we begin: with God’s shalom, God’s gift of what a favorite Christmas carol calls a “heavenly peace” (“Silent Night,” v. 1). This is not something we make happen. It is, instead, something God bestows. The first two verses of the psalm talk about the way God has been and will always be. “God, you smiled on your good earth! You brought good times back to Jacob! You lifted the cloud of guilt from your people, you put their sins far out of sight” (85:1-2, The Message).
The first thing God gives us is something we cannot give ourselves: forgiveness, assurance, peace. God reassures us in our anxiety and insecurity. And God lets go of all our failures and gives us a fresh start. If we really take that in, there is something mind-blowingly soothing and beautiful about it. No worry is worth the time of day. And nothing we’ve ever done is held against us. You dismissively teased your spouse? You’re forgiven. You treated your child cruelly? You’re forgiven. You made a monster mistake at work? You’re forgiven.
Shalom is the gift of God’s peace that lets us start over, even after the most egregious sin. Tell me your worst sin, your most flagrant failure. As your priest I say to you: it all starts anew this very moment. Begin again with the assurance that you are treasured just as you are. God’s gift. It’s free. As Jews say to each other, and as we have said earlier in today’s worship: Shalom. God’s peace to you. This is where it begins.
Now let’s recall the psalm, and remember that “righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (85:10). God’s peace and our righteousness: that’s what will do the kissing. One translation of the Bible calls the part we play “Whole Living” (The Message). Another calls it “goodness” (CEV). God gives us peace. We live in a way that’s whole and good in response. In God’s peace and our response is an intimate and holy kiss.
To live in a way that’s whole and good—to live righteously, in other words—is to live with the same kind of peace toward each other that God gives to us. And on the surface it may sound easy. But really, we know how hard it is to live in a way that’s whole, in a way that’s good. Honoring the way of peace means standing against some of the world’s ways. To be a disciple of Christ is not infrequently to resist some of the wisdom of the world. It’s to ask: is it possible there’s a better way?
Given that, I want to explore briefly this morning one of the quandaries in which our culture finds itself mired year after year. This Thursday, Federated will host an interfaith vigil to remember the victims of the shooting in Sandy Hook, CT, five years ago. It’s a vigil that will implicitly and explicitly ask the question: what does it mean to be a faithful follower of Jesus in a nation in which so many people are killed by gunfire every year?
Let’s say some things at the outset. First, I am not unaware of what a loaded subject this is in this country. For decades, mere mention of the subject of gun deaths has caused tensions to rise and tempers to flare. We have walled ourselves off into camps and seem hardly able to talk about the subject in a thoughtful and reasonable way. So I want to encourage conversation on the subject. After worship, feel free to grab a cup of coffee and come tell me where I went wrong! First: conversation.
Second, this morning we’re attempting to come at this, not so much ideologically or from the standpoint of public policy or the Constitution, but primarily from the angle of Christian discipleship and faithfulness. So when you come and tell me where I went wrong later this morning, I’m going to invite us to talk less about the Second Amendment and more about Jesus.
This whole discussion is driven by one relentless fact: that gun deaths are stupefyingly high. “More Americans have died from gun violence, including suicides, since 1970 (about 1.4 million) than in all the wars in American history going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.3 million).” I’m hoping and guessing we would all agree that God is dead-set against any death caused by another human being. The sheer number of such deaths must at least give us pause. How might we approach this whole issue such that it conveys something of the shalom of God?
I have found my thinking influenced recently by an extended piece written by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. In order to honor both sides in this ferocious debate, Kristof suggests that we think of the crisis of excessive gun deaths as a matter of public health. Beyond the horrifying massacres in Las Vegas and at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, almost every day we hear news of another shooting death. The U.S. has more than 300 million guns, about one for every person in the country. And with those guns, six times as many people, per capita, are killed yearly in the U.S. than in Canada. Thirty times more are killed here than in Australia. In light of such alarming figures, Kristof suggests that we think of guns the same way we think of automobiles.
If we were to treat guns the way we treat automobiles, says Kristof, we wouldn’t ban guns, but we would “work hard to regulate them—and limit access to them—so as to reduce the death toll they cause.” As he says, “This has been spectacularly successful [with cars], reducing the death rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent since 1921.”
Kristof is critical of both sides in the gun debate. He says the so-called “liberal approach is ineffective,” and he urges “a public health approach instead.” He says “The left sometimes focuses on ‘gun control,’ which scares off gun owners and leads to more gun sales. A better framing is ‘gun safety’ or ‘reducing gun violence,’ and using auto safety as a model—constant efforts to make the products safer and to limit access by people who are most likely to misuse them.”
Kristof urges several policy changes, among them universal background checks, since 22 percent of guns are obtained without one; protection orders, so that people with a history of domestic violence can’t have them; banning people under 21 from having guns; storing guns safely, under lock and key; and banning bump stocks which mimic automatic weapon fire. He even suggests the possibility of making “smart guns,” which will fire only after a fingerprint or PIN is entered, so that if your gun is stolen, no one else can use it.
Kristof readily admits that none of this would have prevented the shooting in Las Vegas. But he goes on to say that there is no magic wand for this problem. And what his suggestions would do is limit the kind of gun death that kills most people in this country. Mass killings get most of the attention, but “they are not the main cause of loss of life.” Much more frequent is “a friend who shoots another, a husband who kills his wife—or, most common of all, a man who kills himself.” Just as with cars, regulating access to guns can cut down drastically on such deaths.
“Look,” says Kristof, “we all agree on some kinds of curbs on guns. Nobody believes that people should be able to drive a tank down Main Street, or have an anti-aircraft gun in the back yard. . . . So the question isn’t whether we will restrict firearms, but where to draw the line and precisely which ones to restrict” (The Plain Dealer, Nov. 12, 2017, p. E5).
While Kristof is critical of the left for what he sees as its overly-zealous eagerness to rid society of guns, he is at least as critical of the National Rifle Association for its relentless advocacy of unfettered gun freedom. He urges that we adopt a reasonable managing of gun access.
As much as I value the U.S. Constitution, I’m not sure a minimally regulated access to guns is in society’s best interests. At the heart of our faith is Jesus, who calls us, not first to private freedoms—that’s not what Jesus is primarily about—but centrally to hospitality and generosity and an embodied peace. As God has given us an abiding peace, so the living Christ calls us to embody that peace not in minimally restricted access to guns, but in an unrelenting care for life and creation. Jesus talked at least as much about responsibility as he did about freedom. When freedom leads to such excessive loss of life, my read on faith is that a cherishing of human life needs to temper and moderate that freedom.
Underneath it all is that incessant drone of God’s promise of peace, kissed by the righteousness of our living out that peace in our world. If we’re to live in peace, what does that peace look like? We need stories that shine the light of God’s kind of peace in our lives. We’re going to shift gears a little from what we’ve been talking about as I tell you a story I heard the young church theologian Shane Claiborne tell recently. “On February 12, 1993, Mary Johnson’s only son was murdered. He was only twenty years old. Devastated beyond words, filled with rage, even hatred, Mary was paralyzed with the anguish of it all.
“The perpetrator was sixteen-year-old Oshea Israel, who eventually received a twenty-five-year sentence for second-degree murder.
“But something spectacular, one might even venture to call miraculous, happened. Mary was reading a poem entitled ‘Two Mothers,’ [written by an anonymous writer].
“The poem is about two angelic figures meeting in the heavens. As they meet on the streets of gold, they can tell by the stars in each other’s crowns that they were both mothers on earth. And they can also tell by their blue-tinted halos that they have both known the deep sorrow and despair of losing their sons. As they describe their boys to each other with deep joy and motherly affection, the one mother realizes that she is talking with Mary, the blessed mother of Jesus. Mary describes the cruel death of her son, and how she would have gladly died in his place. The other mother falls to her knees, but Mary raises her back up, kisses her on the cheek, wipes away her tears, and says, ‘Tell me the name of the son you love so . . .’
“The other mother, looking straight into her eyes, says, ‘He was Judas Iscariot. I am his mother.’
“When Mary [Johnson] read that poem she was moved, compelled, to meet with Oshea, the man who killed her son, and eventually his mother . . . and the healing began. As she first met Oshea, she laid it all out there. ‘You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. You didn’t know my son and he didn’t know you . . . so we need to lay down a foundation to get to know one another.’ They talked for hours. Oshea couldn’t believe Mary could forgive him, the power of that forgiveness beyond words. He asked for a hug. And they did. Mary knows the power of her story, and she knows how scandalous it seems to our unforgiving world. When he left the room, she says she cried in disbelief, ‘I’ve just hugged the man who killed my son.’ But as she got up, she felt her soul begin to heal.
“Years later, in March of 2010, Oshea was released after seventeen years in prison. And Mary helped throw him a welcome home party. In fact, they ended up living next door to each other on the north side of Minneapolis.
“As he returned home, Oshea said he was blessed to have ‘two moms.’ Those two moms now claim each other as sisters and share the role of motherhood to Oshea. Mary Johnson went on to start an organization, called From Death to Life, to support moms who have lost their children, and moms whose children were responsible for taking life. . . . [N]ow they have two support groups that meet regularly each month—the moms whose kids were killed, and the moms whose kids have killed—and both groups meet together whenever they can. They know all too well their healing is bound up together—they need each other” (Executing Grace, pp. 267-269).
God gives us peace—shalom. And we give that peace shape and form with our care and kindness and forgiveness—righteousness. And it’s when the two kiss—God’s peace and our righteousness—that all is well and God is alive in our midst. May we embody that peace always.