Peacemakers

Friday, January 3, 2025

Tenth Day of Christmas

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Peacemakers

If you consider that God is righteous, you also know that everyone who acts in righteousness is begotten by him. See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.

Jesus said he did not come to bring peace, but a sword. He came “to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother.”

And it’s true, much blood has been shed in the name of Jesus. Still, I think Jesus brings peace that is stronger than blood. I think of other peacemakers like Jimmy Carter, who earned his Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He insisted on conversation between thugs, kings, protestors and politicians. Already by 1986, President Ronald Reagan, his successor, gave him credit for his work bringing peace.

The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and when it is revealed we shall see him as he is.

Although soldiers died attempting to rescue hostages in Iran, no wars were fought during his four years in office, and the US began monitoring human rights practices around the world.

During his four years in office, no wars began. He ended support to several abusive leader of other countries, including Nicaragua. “Our policy is rooted in our moral values, which never change. Our policy is designed to serve mankind.”

Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980. This poem is about Jesus, of course, but as I read it I think of Jimmy Carter, along with many others whose “policies were designed to serve mankind.”

Vision

A peasant girl huddles in the winter night

in a crude shelter, holding her newborn child.

There are dangers and difficulties,

but her eyes are on the child.

She simply loves him.

Rough shepherds, manly and dirty,

jostle for who is the toughest.

But in this moment they’re not trying so hard;

they’re smitten by the child.

 

Great kings attend, laden with their kingdoms

and the duties and privileges appertaining thereunto.

But in this moment their eyes are on the child,

and his poverty. They are willing to kneel,

to share their treasures.

 

Zealots gather, who would gladly beat the kings,

but in this moment they stare at the child,

and are made gentle in simple wonder.

The father takes all this in, and might be frightened,

but in this moment they are not strangers, they are family.

For a moment, they are not rulers or rebels,

no one is responsible or resentful or reprehensible,

they are all simply beloved people.

For a moment the Realm of God is fulfilled,

and the child, even in the cold, is most happy. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes

President Carter lived an entire century; few of us have that privilege. But in our own time, all of us have one opportunity after another to love one another, do the right thing, establish a moral imperative and follow it.

Clarence Heller takes a longer perspective and then gets personal in his tiny poem:

It’s so completely silly,

so naïve,

so egotistical,

to even consider that the world,

particularly humankind,

is closer to the end of its evolution

than its beginning.

Yet I hope that my tiny part contributes,

contributes to progressing forward.

This is not too much to ask of myself, with the help of God. And as my own “tiny part” moves along, I am learning the joy of waiting, of wonder, and of silence in the presence of God, who created me and is always, every instant, inside and all around me.

This is love, not that I love God, but that he loves me, and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for my sins.

(1 John 2, Psalm 98, John 1)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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