The Basin and The Peacemaker
Sermon Eight in The Upside Down Kingdom Sermon Series at First Presbyterian Church, GJ
Because sermons are meant to be heard, you can watch/listen to my sermon as it was recorded during the 9:30 service on March 3, 2024 at First Pres here:
Today we get to explore the 7th beatitude found in the Sermon on the Mount. If you’ve been following along for the last seven weeks you’ve heard these blessings from Jesus – these acknowledgments of people living life on the right track. (and if you are new or visiting or you’ve missed one or two - you can always get those online) For seven weeks, we’ve contemplated how these make a person blessed even though they quite often feel “upside down” by cultural standards – in Jesus’ time and today.
One thing I appreciate about this 7th beatitude – the one about peacemakers – is how interconnected it is with the first six:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourning and the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are merciful and those who are pure in heart.
Will you stand and read with me the 7th beatitude?
Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God. (NRSV)
And now from The Message: You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.
Will you pray with me?
God, the one in charge of all wholeness, all Shalom – enter into this space with us this morning. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be what is needed for those listening today. Move us from being learners to being active participants in your invitation to peace.
In Jesus’ Name, Amen
You are blessed, on the right track, living the good life when you participate in making peace happen here on earth. An upside down way of life – to make peace. Let’s take a few minutes and consider the Biblical definition of Peace explained here by Tim Mackey and the Bible Project: https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/shalom-peace/
Peace:
Make complete.
Restore to wholeness.
Reconcile and heal broken relationships.
Make right all wrongs
Peacemakers are reconcilers. The ultimate peace maker? Jesus. He showed up to reconcile the human relationship with God. The Son of God blesses peacemakers as God’s children. In the next sections of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes onto explain how this upside-down version of peacemaking will look and he goes on to provide an example of upside-down peace making through his healing, teaching, death, and resurrection.
Jesus, God’s beloved child has reconciled us to God. Now, we as the sons and daughters of God are invited to live the good life by accepting the invitation to become peacemakers.
So, what does it look like to be a peacemaker in the 21st Century?
Here’s one story that came to mind while I prepared for the sermon:
Imagine with me: A beautiful gray-haired woman sits upon the folding chair placed in the shaded back lawn of the church. She slowly places her shoes to the side of the white basin filled with water. This woman knows about peacemaking: non-violent resistance and loving your enemy were concepts spoken from the pulpit at her church and discussed at her dinner table throughout her life. Her father helped write legislation to legalize conscientious objection in the United States in the early 1900s. Her husband and her son became conscientious objectors in the wars of their generations. The choice of peacemaker came with pushback. She felt the sting of being called a traitor and cleaned the spit from their clothes. The legacy of Mennonite peacemaking was woven into every fiber of her being and memory.
Now in her 70s, the woman placed her foot in the basin and nodded to her granddaughter sitting at her feet. A young and spunky twenty-year-old new to foot washing, the young woman longed to follow in the footsteps of the peacemakers before her. She picked up the towel and she gently caressed her grandmother’s always painted toes. These same feet had helped lead this young woman to a relationship with Jesus. The two women changed places. The grandmother, achy from arthritis, knelt upon that grass, placed the girl’s foot into the basin, and began to gently wash the toes she had once scrubbed in the kitchen sink.
This was my first foot washing. I was 20 years old, and I washed my grandmother’s feet in an act of remembrance for when toward the end of his ministry, Jesus sat at the feet of his disciples with towel and basin in hand. He washed feet and issued an invitation, “So if I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example.” John 13:14
How might the symbolic act of foot washing help us better understand peacemaking?
The life work of Jesus was reconciliation. The story of Jesus – from conception to resurrection is the story of an active repair for an ancient rupture that first happened in the garden of Eden.
In his commentary on Matthew, Dale Bruner says “The way Jesus does peace shapes the way we do it.” When he took the servant’s seat, Jesus demonstrated God’s generous mercy for his people.
The after dinner foot washing was perhaps a transitional moment in the story of God and people. The command – “wash one another’s feet” – a passing of the towel. The expectation for the disciples of Jesus to take up the basin and to apply generous mercy in the most unclean places. The basin – a primary tool of the peace maker.
Jesus’ life gives us many examples of peace making. Bruner explains that Biblical peace is “communal wellbeing in every direction and in every relation.” Bible scholar Kenneth Bailey adds that Biblical peacemaking “includes good health.”
Let’s consider a few stories of Jesus’ basin ministry within each of these contexts.
Peace through good health seems like an easy place to start. Miracles of healing pervade the gospels stories.
Peace through relational well-being can also be seen in the way Jesus lived his life. Jesus had to discern how to interact with his family members and friends just like you and I do today.
What about relational wellbeing in his community? Jesus’ choice of companions and recipients of healing miracles and how he spent his time depict reconciliation on repeat.
What about how Jesus’ life promoted right relationships beyond his local community?
Jesus’ inclusive storytelling, personal cross-cultural encounters and even his great commission teach us that he was for all people: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) Kinda cool to look around this room and see faith that started from the ripple effects of Jesus’ actual life and commands.
The same summer I washed my grandmother’s feet, I was assigned a book called The Upside Down Kingdom by Donald Kraybill for one of my required faith formation classes. When I learned the title for this sermon series, I had to revisit that book. After more than 20 years, the book was surprisingly easy to find. I opened the book to search for a quote on peacemaking and I was reminded of why I kept it close at hand all these years.
Donald B. Kraybill writes, that three symbols represent the Christian life. The basin, the cross and the empty tomb. The basin… a symbol for an upside-down kingdom. I love the basin as a representation of Jesus’ earthly ministries. Humbled and self-less serving.
In my Mennonite faith heritage and at my Mennonite undergraduate university peace-making at the national and international level was and is still of high priority. As I prepared this sermon I began to reflect on the pressure to change the world instilled from a young age. I wondered if that might have led me to burn-out.
Often, what I claimed was activism was actually busyness – my attempt to feel empowered, to avoid feeling helpless and to feel in control of my life.
Honestly, the problem wasn’t in embracing the invitation to peacemaking and actively trying to be an agent of change in the world, my problem was that I hadn’t ever learned how to be still and know who God is – a God who both stops wars and stops to wash feet.
If you’ve taken Emotionally Healthy Spirituality or Emotionally Healthy Women, you likely remember the story of the rabbi who learned too late how to change the world. Upon his death bead the spiritual leader realized the greatest change begins within oneself. “If I had started with myself, maybe then I would have succeeded in changing my family, the town or even the state – and who knows, maybe even the world!”
Jesus also provides an example for what it looks like to let peace making begin in this way – in the inner workings, inner shalom, wholeness, integration of self. Before Jesus begins his public miracle making, between miracles and even on the evening Jesus washed the disciples’ feet he intentionally spends time alone with God.
Time alone with God, participating in the spiritual practices of silence and solitude, is one way to engage in peacemaking. I’m finding that practices of silence and solitude create space for me to better discern – to listen for God’s will – which places are my places to enter into conflict and which causes are not mine to pursue.
At a recent Wed. Bible study, we discussed the tricky nature of entering conflict. We acknowledged the fact that many of us would rather be peace keepers – avoiding conflict, often choosing people pleasing over God pleasing because entering conflict is – well hard.
In the Bible Project’s current podcast series on the Sermon on the Mount, Tim Mackey suggests that to be a peacemaker you and I must enter into arenas of conflict, bringing with us the ethic of Jesus – generous mercy saying, “generous mercy will do it’s most important work in arenas of conflict.”
Spending time in silence and solitude might help you discern how to enter into conflict with generous mercy.
Is it hard for anyone else to do this well? Too often I feel like I’m either all fight or all flight. I’m still studying how Jesus could consistently hold boundaries with compassion.
Perhaps the time alone with God can help you learn to let go of being right or to let go of having the last word. I am learning that it is in Psalmists’ declaration for stillness, the act of stopping and slowing down long enough to remember that you and I are not and were never meant to be God - where most clarity can be found.
Be still and know, be still and trust that God is in charge so that in your discernment and in your entering of conflict you can rest in the fact that though you may partner with God in peace making, God alone is the true reconciler.
The other peacemaking practice for us to consider today originated in a conversation with Megan Babaco, co-pastor of Monument Presbyterian Church. Megan said this, “in order to seek peace we have to first recognize our brokenness. Confession is the practice that helps us to recognize our brokenness and need for a savior.”
Confession? What does that mean and how does that tie into peacemaking?
It took me some time to warm up to Megan’s suggestion that confession was a place to start.
I wonder if any of you can relate to the uncertainty of this practice like I do?
Honestly, outside of our community prayer of confession – the one we read each week, I’m not sure how much I confess any of my own brokenness. I might take something that feels really big to God in a journal, but sharing those most challenging thoughts, words or choices with someone else? It hasn’t been something I practice.
I think there are relationships in which confession might feel safe, sacred and necessary – these relationships need trust because they endure high levels of conflict. For me, that relationship is my marriage. For you it might be a parent/adult child, a best friend. (Side note - a counselor might be the best place to start if this is all super new to you). Until recently, I didn’t realize how confession could be the key to unlock reconciliation and to increase wholeness in a relationship. Isn’t’ it fun when God speaks right into our questions in ways we didn’t even know we needed?
This year, my husband Sam and I decided to do a marriage study called New Marriage, Same Couple. Though the challenges faced by co-authors Katie and Josh Walters are different from those Sam and I face, a particular chapter in the study showed up with God’s perfect timing: (maybe for this sermon, but definitely for my marriage). It is the chapter called Confession Therapy.
I read the chapter one morning following a horrendous night of sleep – my thought life the source of my distress. I woke up feeling like the Psalmist, “when I kept it all inside, my bones turned to powder, my words became daylong groans.” (Psalm 32:3 Msg) Confession Therapy is a way to bring the hardest thoughts, words and deeds into God’s light with a safe person. The chapter provided a step-by-step guide for two people to try:
1. Ask to be heard with your most vulnerable brokenness.
2. Trust that the person who agrees to listen will hold space for your truth telling
3. Commit to listening and holding space for the hard conversations
4. Give a reward for the confessor
Until reading this I didn’t realize how much I needed those steps to be able to as Psalm 32 continues “come clean about my failures.” The reward step was critical: both the script provided by the Walters, “Thank you for telling me that.” and the bigger reward of feeling that at my most vulnerable, I was heard. My choice to confess was a choice to enter an arena of conflict (the arena in my mind). Sam’s choice to hold space for me was a choice to enter into that arena with compassion and generous mercy as a listening friend. Let me tell you something. Peace, Reconciliation, Shalom were created in that sacred conversation.
Latasha Morrison, author of Be the Bridge, Pursuing God’s Heart for Racial Reconciliation–claims that confession is where healing begins, saying that, “confession requires awareness of our sin, acknowledgement of it and the desire to move past the shame and guilt.”… she goes onto say that “confession also requires great humility and deep vulnerability. While this might feel risky, consider the risk of not confessing our sins.” She goes on to teach about the connection between confession, generous mercy and reconciliation.
James 5:16 says, Make this your common practice: Confess your sins [faults] to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. (The Message).
It’s been over 20 years since I read The Upside Down Kingdom and since I washed my grandmother’s feet in that sunny churchyard. The lessons learned then continue to influence my peacemaking path today.
You are living the good life when, like Kraybill concludes in The Upside Down Kingdom, “love replaces hate among us. Shalom overcomes revenge. .... Basins replace swords... We share power, love assertively, and make peace… and behave like children.”
Like God’s children.
Which I think is what Jesus said, didn’t he? Blessed are the peacemakers because they will be called the children of God.
Will you join me as I pray:
Heavenly Father,
Thank you for this conflict riddled life. Lord, let our souls be anchored in you and let us find contentment in this season, whatever it holds. Help us to recognize misguided battles, causes that are not ours so that we can enter conflict where your merciful generosity is most needed. Let the peace that comes from you – harmony, health, and wholeness – shine from our spirits – that we might help expand your kingdom of light.
In Jesus name,
Amen