By Reverend Laurie DeMott

But what disturbs me just as much as the war itself is that although I may be against the war, no one who has any real power to change the course of this war is asking my opinion. In saying this, I am not trying to make a political statement against the Bush administration because during the original debates about invading Iraq, I wrote letters to my Democratic senators protesting the possibility of war and those went unheeded as well. As a Christian I know that Jesus calls me to be a peacemaker but how do I really put that into action in my world when I am just one person living a quiet little life in a quiet little town and no one in power is calling me up to ask my opinion?

A peace activist would say, “The answer is to protest and agitate for change,” and accordingly many have marched on Washington and written persuasive letters to the editor and called their congresspeople and worked constantly to try to make their voices heard in the halls of power. Some of our own church members have dedicated hours upon end trying to live up to Jesus’ call to be peacemakers by engaging in these acts of social protest. And yet, I would guess that they are as frustrated as I am by their sense of powerlessness. Social protest can be effective – we have seen its effectiveness in the past when it helped bring an end to legal segregation and the Vietnam War – but the problem social protest always faces is that it takes time. Because it requires a critical mass of people in order to capture the ears of those in power, social activism is necessarily always a movement of reaction rather than prevention. So while a President can go to war in the blink of an eye, most protests to that war will take months and years to build. Consequently, peacemaking through social activism will almost always find itself trying to stop wars that have already been set in motion. Even today, when it looks like that critical mass of voices against the Iraqi war may finally have been reached, we are discouraged by the reality that the protest for peace has taken so long to achieve that the tangle of war is not so easily unraveled now.

What does it mean to honor the call of Christ to be peacemakers in our world? Are peacemakers always fated to be following behind the warhorses cleaning up the mess in the streets they have made? Does making peace always mean the retroactive unmaking of war or was Christ calling us to something different, something deeper?

I have come to the conclusion that when Christ calls us to be peacemakers, he means peacemakers, not the unmakers of war, and to be peacemakers I think means that Christ is calling us to change the very underlying assumptions of our society. Christ was constantly challenging us to turn our thinking around, even stand our assumptions on their heads. “Bless those who curse you,” he said, “turn the other cheek. The prostitutes and tax collectors will get into God’s kingdom before the righteous, forgive seven times seventy times.” These commandments all rotate our thinking 180 degrees, and like all of these other commandments, I think Jesus’ call to be peacemakers was also a call to flip on its head the foundational assumption of our society to bring us into greater accordance with God’s vision. And what is the foundational assumption that peacemakers are called to challenge? We are called to question the belief that the natural state of human society is to be in a state of war.

The philosopher Plato once wrote a fictional dialogue between a resident of the island of Crete and a resident of Athens. In their conversation, the man from Crete argued that the natural state of humankind is the state of war, and that, in fact, Greek civilization was grounded on that fact. “Look at the island of Crete,” Plato’s fictional man said to the Athenian, “and compare our society to the city of Athens. The Cretes have developed a good network of runners because their ground is so uneven that cavalries are ineffective. And because they have runners, they in turn use lighter bows than the men of Athens. And their meals and their customs and their regulations are different from those of Athens because all are designed with a view to war.” In this dialogue, Plato went on to argue that the technology and customs of Crete developed in preparation for war determined the type of society they experienced even during peacetime, and that this was true for all societies. War and the preparation for war, Plato said, allows for the flowering of human civilization because it necessitates the birth of governments, creates technological advances, and strengthens personal virtue such as courage and sacrifice.

To see war as the natural state of things and peace as the exception is to believe that a society must spend most of its time, energy, thought, and resources on preparing for the next war even during times of peace. To believe that war is the natural state of humankind is to say that societies will always want to be at war with one another and peace is at best the levee holding back the inevitable tide of conflict. 3000 years may have passed since the time of Plato and now we may use guided missiles instead of runners with light bows, but I think our society still accepts Plato’s declaration that war between people is the natural state of things and peace is always the exception. Just look at the evidence:

I read an article recently on medical research that is currently being done on the regeneration of tissue which may have promising benefits to burn victims. The author's conclusion was that this research will be of major importance to the military.

I read another article about scientists who have developed an experimental drug that seems to prevent muscle fatigue in mice enabling them to engage in physical exercise for hours longer than mice that have not been given the drug. The author noted that this research could be very useful to the military.

I watched a commercial on TV encouraging young men and women "to be all that they could be", a familiar slogan that suggests that the fullness of the human experience, the flowering of our best selves, will be found by joining the military.

I am not criticizing the existence of the military nor am I denying that the discipline and challenge that the military life can give to young people can be a very valuable experience. What I am saying, however, is that all around us we can still see evidence of Plato’s argument; namely, it is as if we accept that war is the natural state of the human condition and it is war and the preparation of war that will lead to civilization’s advance and the strengthening of human virtue.

Jesus calls us to challenge that assumption and create a new kind of society in which peace, and not war, is the natural state of things; in which peace, and not war leads to the advance of civilization; in which peace and not war is what strengthens human virtue and creates our best human selves.

In 1979, Dr. Samuel Hines, an African American pastor from Washington, D.C., attended a conference in South Africa calling for an end to apartheid. One Sunday morning, he spoke to to a local congregation in that country, urging them to pursue the way of love rather than retaliation, and he called on this Black congregation to turn the other cheek as a strategy of freedom and to extend the liberating power of love in every way possible. A young man jumped up in the back of the congregation and shouted, "That is too soft. What we need is revolution."

Dr. Hines said,“So, you are a revolutionary?"

The youth replied, "Yes, I am."

Dr. Hines said, "Let me see if I understand you. A revolutionary says, 'There is a problem out there, and I'm going out to solve it, and it you get in my way, I'll kill you.' Is that correct?"

The youth said, "That is it."

Dr.Hines said, "Well, I'm also a revolutionary and I also say there is a problem out there and I'm going out to solve it and if you get in my way, I'll lay down my life for you. Now which of us is soft?"

A society that believes that peace and not war is the natural state of things would be a society that believes in peace as a fundamental value that inspires the best in us, and so would organize its thinking and its teaching around that value. In America, for example, we believe democracy to be a guiding principle and so we teach our children the bill of rights, we spend money on voter registration, our media devotes inordinate amounts of time covering election campaigns, we ask one another, “Who are you voting for?”, and when elections are too close to call, we spend weeks patiently waiting while hanging chads are analyzed and courts debate the winners. And if there are sometimes extreme circumstances that might call for the suspension of some of our rights, we debate the issues hotly, and if we finally agree to suspend rights, we do it carefully and dubiously and only until circumstances change that allow us to go back to the norm of the democratic ideal.

And so too, a society that believes peace is the norm would spend most of its time and resources preparing for peace: engaging other cultures so that we can share ideas among different people, teaching our children the skills of conflict resolution in our schools, learning history not as a series of wars but as stories of how people engaged one another in their daily lives and how civilizations developed, spending money on educating its people, feeding the hungry, and improving the lives of those around the world. And so too a society that sees peace as the natural state of things would not necessarily be a rigidly pacifist society: it would understand that there may be times when war is a necessity, but going to war would be seen as a temporary suspension of all we value, and it would be publicly and carefully debated and engaged in with a profound sense of humility at our inability to find the preferred peaceful way. It think that this is the kind of peacemaker Christ calls us to be – we are called to the work of moving our society from assuming that war is the norm to acting on the assumption that peace if the norm, that peace is the underlying value which informs everything we think and do in America.

And at this point, there are those of you who are thinking, “Dream your dreams, Laurie, but such idealism will never happen.” And, I must be honest, a few years ago I would have agreed with you but something has happened to make me think that such a dream is a real possibility.

And that something is that after a lifetime feeling similarly discouraged about our attitudes toward the environment, I am now witnessing a shift in the country’s underlying assumptions when it comes to the environment. For generations, Americans have thought of nature as a commodity to be exploited. Trees were for cutting down, mountains were for mining, and rivers were handy places to dump excess chemicals. If there was any sense of environmental stewardship, it arose only out of a fear that we didn’t want to run out of that particular resource. Today, however, people are willing to talk about the value of nature for its own sake and not just for what it can give us. While my generation chucked cups and napkins and all kinds of trash thoughtlessly out the car window, children today would never think of rolling down the window to throw out their McDonald’s bag. Instead, they litter the car floor with their trash which is annoying but a lot easier to clean up. Today, people give money to save panda bears that are of no earthly use to them, and people are debating if it is really necessary to chop down a tree just so that we can read the newspaper. We still have a long way to go when it comes to environmental issues, but there has been a real fundamental shift in the underlying assumptions that inform our conversations on the environment: namely, we have decided that we would like to see a healthy environment as the norm and we have begun to view human life as part of a larger ecosystem rather than as separate and set apart. Although there have always been voices calling for such a vision, it is only in the past decade or so that those voices have gained a real hearing leading Americans to include ecology courses in elementary schools and talk about “green lifestyles,” “green businesses,” and “green values”.

So too, I think that Jesus calls us to be peacemakers who work to “shift the paradigm”, to see peacemaking not as the unmaking of war but as the unmaking of the foundational values of our society that falsely believe war is inevitable. I believe we are called to continue the work of generations who would have us devote our resources to preparing for the next peace instead of always preparing for the next war. I believe Christ calls us to teach the next generation the skills they will need to resolve conflicts peacefully. Maybe we will not see the shift from war to peace in our lifetimes, but if we keep insisting on an alternative vision, I believe there will be a day when the world is so weary and so battered from its fighting, that people will be ready to listen, and change will come. And on that day God will say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are surely my children.”