Lent 2
Matthew 5:9 Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
By schisms
rent asunder…
This will date me, but I remember
watching the Johnny Carson show one night when John Denver was a guest. In and of itself that doesn’t sound like
much. But what I remember was John
Denver, sitting in the chair next to Johnny’s desk, picking up his guitar and
starting to sing one of his high tenor hits and hearing his voice crack. There was no mistaking it. It was obvious – one of those harmonic
hernias that every vocalist dreads when the melody line unexpectedly pops out
of its channel.
Years ago, while a freshman music
major, I had the privilege of sitting in on the Van Cliburn piano competition
taking place in the Fine Arts auditorium at TCU. The international competition, founded and
named after the famed pianist, occurred every four years, I believe, and
attracted top level contestants from around the world. One by one they stepped out onto the stage,
seated themselves at the concert grand piano they had selected, and unleashed
their considerable talents on one or another composition from piano’s great
literature. The pressure was immense –
money was at stake, recognition and tours.
Emotions were high and taut. Throughout
the days, the Fine Arts building was buzzing with excitement and lay reviews of
how the various performers had done; people sat in the auditorium with tablets
taking notes or keeping a score card – I couldn’t quite tell which – listening.
But listening for what? I couldn’t help but get the impression,
listening to all the hallway twitter and watching the breathless cock of ears
in the audience, that, whatever the beauty and elegance and exquisite artistry
of the musicians, the real pregnancy of the performances was the possibility
that one of them might crack – a tangled finger, a mental blank, a wrong note –
and they could say they had been there when it happened. Watching, lurking, waiting for a musical
catastrophe.
Last week we placed our hand in the
leading grip of the third verse of Samuel Stone’s familiar hymn, The Church’s One Foundation, which will
lead us throughout the season of Lent.
That powerful verse begins with the uncomfortable awareness that the
secular world is watching the church and its internal struggles with a kind of “scornful
wonder” – a contemptuous disdain surprisingly joined to a marvelous attraction
of hypnotic fascination. Derision and
desire intermingled; the world laughing at our foibles but somehow hoping we
will rise above them.
This week, the hymnwriter leads us
further in order to afford us a better view.
Though with a scornful wonder the
world sees us oppressed, by schisms rent asunder.
What is a schism, and why do they
occur?
The word technically means a “formal
breach of union.” It is disunion,
discord. It is, perhaps, appropriate then
that there seems even to be a schism over how to pronounce it. Is it “sKism” or “Sism” or “shism”? For those whose lives are built around
correctness, you’ll likely want to avoid the last of those options. In a recent usage survey, only 8% indicated a
preference for “shism,” while “sism,” originally the strongly preferred
pronunciation, now ranks second with only a 31% preference, leaving “skism” with
the roses at 61%. So, skism it will be
in this sermon – the body sundered by being many rather than one.
Wednesday evening, in the high school
LOGOS Bible study, we were talking about integrity, and learned that the root
of the word is shared by the related descriptor “integral,” which refers to
something essential for completeness, “integrated,” which refers to separate
elements mutually interacting, and the mathematical term “integer,” which
refers to a whole number. What we
learned is that integrity has to do with wholeness, being undivided – in
contrast, for example, to someone who speaks with a divided tongue, saying
different things to different people. A
person of integrity is one who is whole – whose words and deeds agree, who is
ONE person regardless of the context.
True, undivided.
And unlike the church: “dis-integrated”; by schisms rent
asunder. So what are we fighting
about? The wag might respond, “almost
anything we can think of.” But it really
is more serious than that. Through the
generations it has sometimes been theological, testing the lines between
orthodoxy – or “right belief” – and heresy.
More on that next week.
For Samuel
Stone, writing hymns while serving a poor Anglican congregation in
Since 1985, a
group of Bible scholars known as The
Jesus Seminar has been meeting a couple of times each year to renew the
quest of the historical Jesus. The media
savvy Seminar has garnered a lot of attention and no small amount of criticism
over their practice of using colored beads to vote on the degree of
authenticity of the words of Jesus recorded in the four gospels. There are those who view not only the methodology
of the Seminar’s research, but the very notion of questioning the authenticity
of scripture as heresy, and destructive to the faith. Their supporters counter that the scholars
are contributing a watershed gift to the understanding of the church. Which side is correct depends on which side
you are on. There is discord, in other
words – a schism.
I have a
tragically simple poster in my office that offers what it describes as, “A
Modest Proposal for Peace: Let the
Christians of the world agree that they will not kill each other.” The fact that such a proposal could be made
suggests that such a practice is not currently taking place – that Christians
are indeed killing each other – a fact that would no doubt cause Jesus more
pain than his own crucifixion. That
which binds us together has become less central than that which drives us
apart. We have become, in other words,
schismatic.
When Jesus
commented that “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children
of God,” I doubt that in his wildest imagination he anticipated that the
church, itself, would become the peacemaker’s most desperate field of endeavor. But there you have it. Through the generations, we good Christian
brothers and sisters have consigned each other to Hell over the volume of water
required for baptism, over the appropriateness of musical instruments in
worship, over the expectation of Jesus’ pre-millennial return or post, the use
of a prayerbook or ranting subjectivities of free-church disorder, the priority
of the word or the sacraments, form or intent.
And if such controversies seem
archaic and irrelevant, I haven’t even gotten to those more contemporary issues
over which we have quite literally been killing each other – such as abortion
or homosexuality – or those congregational debates that currently tear church
families asunder, like whether to use an organ or a guitar, a Powerpoint
presentation or the more traditional sermon; like whether we should emphasize
spiritual growth and depth or do whatever we have to do to grow and attract new
members; like whether to have one service or two. Blessed are the peacemakers, indeed!
It must seem tragically ironic to the
one about whom one New Testament author described as “the peace between us,”
the one who has “broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us”[1]
that he would now be the foundation of a building known less for its single
address than for the multitude of its separate rooms.
But there is a reason Jesus called
peacemakers blessed. It is because they
are accomplishing in their lives the very will of God. It is not the cantankerous or the belligerent
that Jesus blesses; it isn’t the divisive nor those quick to take offense. It isn’t the combative, nor the coercive, nor
even the compliant. It is, instead,
those who heal rather than wound; those who reconcile rather than alienate;
those who stake their lives on the unity we share rather than simply the
diversity we assert; those who not only speak the truth, but speak it in deep,
respectful love. “God,” the apostle Paul
wrote, “was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their
trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”[2]
The world is well-acquainted with
discord. It wears within its heart and
displays on its very skin the battles between management and labor, southerners
and Yanks, urban and rural, races and religions, politically red and blue. It knows by name the face of disquiet, and has
settled restlessly into that routine.
But deep, deep down, I believe it continues to hope for, even ache for
something better, and to wonder, in its scorn, just what the church has to
offer.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called – what? Naïve, perhaps; delusional, wimps or even
dangerously soft and gullible. But to
the only one whose opinion finally matters, they shall be called…
…the
very children of God.