SEPTEMBER 21st is the United Nations International Day of Peace, created in 1981 as an opportunity for ‘commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.’ Two decades later, in 2001, the UN General Assembly designated the day as a period of non-violence and cease-fire.
The World Council of Churches calls on its members around the glode to mark the Sunday nearest 21st September as an International Day of Prayer for Peace. The aim is that by taking time each year to focus on peace, churches locally, nationally, and internationally will feel strengthened and challenged to be more active in seeking peace.
The theme of this year’s Peace Sunday is: Make Time for Peace, based on resources from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which includes the Methodist Peace Fellowship. Today, as part of my training as a Methodist minister, I shared this reflection for Peace Sunday, based on readings from Jeremiah 8: 18-9:1 and 1 Timothy 2: 1-7.
What does peace mean to you?
A simple dictionary definition might describe peace in one way, as:
‘a situation in which there is no war, violence, or arguing’.
Academics who study peace think more broadly. Johan Galtung, the first Director of the Peace Research Institute in Norway, thought of peace in two ways:
- Negative peace: the absence of violence, direct physical harm, and war,
and
- Positive peace: the presence of just and equitable social conditions that prevent violence from arising.
Promoting negative peace is like stopping the bleeding in a wounded body: ceasefires, disarmament, policing, conflict mediation.
Promoting positive peace is like building a healthy body: fair institutions, economic equity, education, healthcare, and social cohesion.
Lasting peace efforts usually combine both: ending violence and addressing the injustices that could reignite it.
What does peace mean in the Bible?
The biblical vision of peace is not about one way or two ways but a multitude of ways that help create and sustain God’s reign of peace.
The Hebrew word for peace, ‘shalom’ can also mean ‘wholeness’. Theologian Walter Bruggeman thought of ‘shalom’ as
‘the flourishing wholeness of creation into the purposes of God’.
This flourishing is created through
- an absence of conflict,
- a just sharing of resources, and
- the care and nurture of creation.
The prophet Jeremiah’s vision (Jeremiah 8: 18 – 9:1) suggests God looking over a world that is broken and dying. People have closed their hearts to God, breaking Jeremiah’s heart, and God’s too.
Jeremiah wishes his eyes were
‘a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!’
How do we lament, weep and express our pain at the war and violence in the world?
Do we edit our prayers to God?
We may speak frankly to friends, mentors, ministers, even paid professionals, but do we speak frankly to God?
Jeremiah holds nothing back from God and models a prayer life of both praise and lament.
It’s easy to recognise the brutal and intense imagery the prophet conveys.
How often have we seen a community broken by violence?
Or looked for God in the earthquake, wind and fire, as the prophet Elijah did (1 Kings 19:11-13), and not the ‘still small voice of calm?
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed thousands across 14 countries, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked in a radio interview if God could be seen in the waves. His reply was simply that God wasn’t found in the waves, but in the response of the world to this outbreak of suffering.
As we seek to make time for peace, how do we each create time to reflect and share together in the pain of the world?
Today, as war and violence create waves of displaced peoples, it’s understandable to feel powerless. Even those in power may think peace seems impossible.
As Paul’s first letter to Timothy (1 Timothy 2: 1-7) reminds us, peace, shalom is the heart of the Christian message. Our gospel, our good news, is Jesus’ message of the reign of God for everyone.
Paul repeats ‘everyone’ twice, to emphasise that all are included in this prayer for peace, the gift of shalom, even (perhaps especially) ‘all who are in high positions’, whether we agree with them or not, perhaps especially if we don’t!
Paul reminds us that prayer can mould our hearts, so we can become peace-makers.
Our prayer can shape our attitudes towards ‘godliness and dignity’.
Prayer can open hearts – however cold or hard they may seem – to the well-being of ourselves, others and our world.
Prayer can be an anguished heart-cry amid the terrors of war, AND at the same time a cry for peace.
In Paul’s first letter to Timothy, peace also means ‘salvation’, from the Hebrew word yasha (from which Jesus –Yeshua – takes his name, meaning ‘salvation’ or ‘deliverance’). In Hebrew, salvation means to bring people to a place of safety, openness, and freedom – so much more than an absence of conflict.
This peace is God’s grace, a free, universal gift for everyone. Shalom and yasha require all physical needs to be met, justice in relationships, and integrity in character.
‘Knowledge of the truth’ is vital. Realising it is our work as peace-makers.
Paul’s first letter to Timothy may help us see what it means to be a peace-maker, taking Jesus and Paul as our examples. Paul offers six models of peace-making to guide us:
- The mediator: who brings opposing sides together.
- The ransom: the price of peace – even life itself, as for Paul and Jesus.
- The herald: who proclaims peace and calls a fearful world to another way.
- The witness: who lives so others can see that ‘a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity’ is possible for everyone.
- The envoy: representing the one who sends the message, carrying God’s message and presence of peace.
- The teacher: who helps all people, especially ‘outsiders’, to live in peace.
Paul is not just a teacher to the Jewish people, but also to the Gentiles, the ‘outsiders’, who are not ‘outsiders’ to God. There are no ‘outsiders’ in God’s peace.
Are we just ‘preaching to the choir’, or are we reaching beyond the church walls to model peace to others, even and especially those with whom we profoundly disagree?
Paul’s first letter to Timothy makes clear that this call is for everyone, without exception, to live ‘a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity’, and that’s not something we can wait for others to bring about for us. I wonder:
- What builds and sustains peace in this place?
- What are the challenges and sources of conflict?
- How are we called to respond?
As you can tell, I have lots of questions about what peace means for me, and for us. I don’t profess to have all, or any, of the answers.
Here are a couple of examples of what peace-making, both positive and negative, has felt like for me in the past week.
I travel a lot as part of my role as the Director of the Open Table Network. I often get asked, by a taxi driver or a fellow passenger on a long train journey, about what I do.
I have a choice – to tell the full story and ‘out’ myself as a Christian and a gay man, which may promote understanding and connection, or risk a negative, even hostile response.
Or I can say something vague and move on. How I respond depends on how ‘at peace’ I feel with myself, and with the person and place when the question is asked.
Last week, when a young man on a train asked me, I started vague and said I work for a charity. When he asked more questions, I said it was a charity supporting LGBT+ people in churches. He put it in language he understood and asked if it was about creating safer spaces.
Without no need for further explanation, we had found a connection, and he shared he was on the way to visit his gay uncles.
If I had played safe and retreated into my laptop, I would have missed a small but significant moment of positive peace building.
Then there are unexpected moments when I am challenged to respond to what others need. Like when I was travelling from London on the day of the most inappropriately named Unite The Kingdom march, a large, far-right, anti-immigration rally in central London.
I had been visiting my mother in hospital and missed the news. I saw people draped in England flags at Euston station and wondered if there had been a football match.
I overheard conversations on the train and read the news which brought me up to date by the end of the journey.
As the train approached Liverpool Lime Street station, I was standing in the corridor near the exit. Close behind me was a White man with an England flag badge on his jacket. To my left were a woman with a male companion, both apparently White British. To my right in the doorway was a younger Asian man.
The man in the doorway looked at me and said repeatedly
‘Liverpool? City centre?’
It became clear that English was not his first language, that he was in an unfamiliar place, and that he needed reassurance. I confirmed that he was arriving in Liverpool.
The woman to my left did not look at either the Asian man or me. She turned to her companion and said, loud enough for us all to hear:
‘I would have told him he was in Manchester’.
I wanted to ask her why she would do that. Would she want someone to deceive her if she were lost in a strange place?
I didn’t – it didn’t feel safe enough. There was no immediate clear threat of conflict or violence, so it was a negative peace. But it was not enough.
I wonder, in the week ahead, how might you, and I, accept this challenge and make time for peace?
What action might we take to promote peace – not just the absence of conflict?
The answer may be different for each of us, in different times and situations.
It may depend on who we are, and on how much power and privilege we may have – our gender, our sexuality, our economic wealth or poverty, whether we are from the global majority or the White Western minority, our abilities and advantages or disadvantages, and the combination of all these and more which makes us unique.
It may also depend on whether we are at peace with ourselves and feel safe enough. It’s important to recognise when to challenge ourselves to do more, and when to have compassion for ourselves, and others, when we cannot.
So, how might you make time for peace this week?
Maybe:
- speak with neighbours to build community,
- volunteer to support those facing injustice,
- create a prayer space to help people come together to lament the war in our world,
- learn about how international budgets shift from development to arms
- or, in this Season of Creation, simply walk in nature and let it inspire care for creation.
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