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[Silence] The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "The Power in Peace." I have been told that there are places in Europe where when a farmer is plowing his field,

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it is not unusual for him to discover beside one another in the earth a prehistoric weapon and a modern day shell casing. He might find just side by side an arrowhead and a bullet. In a sense, this gives a sweeping summary of the history of Europe.

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So, whether you're speaking of the world of the first century and before, or of anything from that time until this, when Jesus says, "Happy are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God," he is speaking to a world at war.

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Why do we fight wars? The Holy Spirit teaches us in the letter of James in the fourth chapter, the reason behind conflict. He says, "What causes wars and what causes fighting among you?

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Is it not your passions that are at war with your members? You kill, you fight, you wage war, because inside you are in battle with God." What James is saying is that the maladies of history

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are the direct result of the maladjustments of humankind. Most people are at war with God. Some are fighting a cold war. They don't think God cares about them, and so they do not care about God.

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Some are fighting a losing war. They are afraid that God is a God of wrath and judgment, and they are aware of their own sin, and so they hurry and hide from him to the best of their ability.

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And some are engaged in a hot war. And these are those who are hostile toward God, who rebel against something or someone that has occurred within their life. These are the people who oft times will shake a rebel fist in God's face and say,

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"Thank you, but I will be my own God." Now the great tragedy in all of this is that God is not at war with any of us. The New Testament says to us again and again that God came in the person of his Son to make peace with us.

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You remember what the angels sang when Jesus was born, "Peace on earth to men of good will." You remember Christ's words, "Peace I leave with you. My peace give I unto you." You remember what the Apostle Paul said about Jesus,

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"He is himself our peace." And God's peace with us is not because he shuts his eyes to our infirmities or weaknesses. It is not because he lays aside any sense of justice or sense of sin and the requirement of repentance, not at all.

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It is because he has taken upon himself the bearing of the burden of sin. In the person of his own Son, he has allowed to be visited upon himself, the triune perfect God, upon himself, the wrath properly apportioned to all the people of the earth.

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I wish very much that everyone who feels that God is pursuing them in anger would take a moment to look back over their shoulder at this one who is chasing them. He carries no weapon. His brow is bleeding. His hands are wounded. He stumbles as he hurries because his feet have been pierced.

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His side has been stabbed. And he wears no battle helmet but a crown of thorns. This one who chases after us is a wounded lover, and he asks of us only two things. First, that we accept the peace which he has won for us through his own suffering. And secondly, that we will offer that peace to others.

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Christ is our peace, and Christ says, "Happy are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." Notice he does not say, "Happy are the peaceful." He does not say, "Happy are the peacekeepers."

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He says very specifically, "Happy are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." What then are the ingredients in a peacemaker? Well, first of all, a peacemaker is one who gives no offense. A peacemaker does not have an abrasive and an insensitive personality.

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Some of you, I am sure, have attended at one time or another a Jewish wedding ceremony, and you know that as part of that ceremony there comes a moment when the bride and the groom both drink wine from the same cup. And then that cup is wrapped in a white cloth and placed upon the floor, and the groom steps upon it, crushes it, smashes it flat.

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Now, I do not know all the symbolism that is involved in this, but I do know that one of the messages being demonstrated is this, that it is harder to repair something that is broken than it is to keep that something whole from the beginning.

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The person who gives no offense is the person who seeks no opportunity to fracture relationships. One of the most famous shrines of the ancient Greeks was the place of the Oracle of Delphi. And on the walls of that temple were the two words, "Know thyself," the words which Socrates made basic to his own philosophy,

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and the words which have become in due course the touchstone of psychotherapy as we know it today. What is being said in those two words is that we are to understand our own natures so that we can control them, so that we can keep them from wounding, from penetrating cruelly the lives and experiences of others. Paul Shearer, the great Lutheran pastor, has said that when you seek never to give offense,

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you find yourself oft times confronted with people who are very much like rattlesnakes. But even so, he said, you must love with authenticity. Even though you stand with your hands gripped behind you and biting your lips, you still are to demonstrate a tough and a tolerant love.

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It's easier for us to do this, of course, when we think of how far God has gone in being willing to love us. He calls us to the same kind of patience with others that he has shown with us. Paul says of this kind of love, "It is not arrogant or rude. It is not irritable or resentful. It keeps no score of wrongs, but rather rejoices in the right."

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I remember very vividly the television broadcast in which Mother Teresa of Calcutta was shown receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Her speech was a memorable one. From it I lift a portion of one sentence. She said, "Peace is learned in order to give it to others." Peace is something you can learn. Peace is some control which you can bring upon yourself.

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Peace is understanding yourself so that you know yourself well enough to have yourself in the discipline of your own spirit. And that kind of peace is what we are to give others. A peacemaker does not give offense. Secondly, a peacemaker is one who does not easily take offense.

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We run into people every day who are veritable cauldrons of conflict. They are filled with all kinds of rage. Someone says they have rabbit ears and elephant brains. They hear too much and they remember everything.

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Well, what I am suggesting is that when we encounter those who attack us, we are going to find it harder to be true to our mission as peacemakers than it ever was to deny ourselves attacking anybody else. In other words, it's easier not to speak or to do ill about anyone

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than it is to tolerate that circumstance in which someone else is speaking ill and deprecating you. There was a Texan visiting on the campus of Princeton University, and he said to one of the students, "Would you please tell me where your library is at?" And the student replied, "A Princeton man would never end a sentence with a preposition."

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And the Texan said, "Oh, all right. Would you tell me where your library is at, jerk?" Well, there is this desire in us, you see, when we're hit, to hit back. But what we are to do is, even as we give no offense, we take no offense. The Scriptures teach us, "A soft answer turneth away wrath."

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I have shared this with you before, but it is so apropos that I share it very quickly again now. Not too many years ago, it was discovered in maternity hospitals that when one baby would cry and excite another baby who in turn would cry, and then those two would start another crying until the whole maternity ward was full of crying infants,

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the way in which they now quiet those infants is to play a phonograph record. It's not a phonograph record of any calming, soothing music. No. It is a recording of the heartbeat of a mother as heard by the fetus in the womb. Well, just so, when we get into those situations, when we are attacked unfairly,

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when people come at us, we are to tune in to the heartbeat of God, who took what people had to give even to the cross. And listening to that heartbeat and knowing it was for us, we find the strength to persevere. After all, there is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us

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that it ill behooves any of us to have nothing to do with the rest of us. When we are offended, we need to recall the cost of the cross and the words, "We love because he first loved us." Finally, a peacemaker is one who tries to reconcile people who have offended one another.

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Now, this is the hardest kind of peacemaking, for you put yourself as a mediator between two individuals who are at battle with swords drawn, and it's very easy in such a circumstance to be sucked into the struggle. Even Hunter, in his book, later made into a movie, "The Blackboard Jungle,"

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talks about people who make mistakes in trying to heal difficulties between other individuals. He says some people try to force compliance. He calls them "clobberers." Some people try to pretend that the difficulty is not there. He calls these people "slumberers." And finally, he says there are people who try various things that do not work,

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and he calls them "fumblers." We are not called to be clobberers or slumberers or slobberers or fumblers. We are called to demonstrate to others what the Holy Spirit has made evident to us. And where are we taught this? We are taught this in the pages of Scripture,

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very specifically in Galatians, chapter 6. There, the steps of being a peacemaker are set out for us. First, we must, in such a situation, speak from the Spirit and not the flesh. That is, we quote the words of God. We don't focus only on what we have to say about them.

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Second, we must be gentle. We have to love these warring people, not lambaste them. Third, we must be willing to bear their burdens. The emotional strain of the moment, the time it takes for the ministry, or perhaps even physical pain might be visited upon us,

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but we must be willing to bear a burden, to suffer for other people. And finally, we need to enable these people and to encourage them for each to look at himself or herself and not at one another. The point is to get them into a position of self-examination,

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not of the accusation of the other. At the end of World War II, the Allied nations who had defeated the Germans met to draw up the peace treaty at Versailles. There was one of the national leaders there who suggested that mercy be extended to the German nation.

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I'm proud to say that that one who stood for mercy and for the things it makes for peace was the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. But the other people there, people like Georges Clemenceau from France or Lloyd George from Great Britain, these people wanted revenge.

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Once when Wilson was pleading for understanding and forgiveness, Clemenceau replied to him, "You talk like Jesus Christ." And he did. And so the nations, being in majority, got their revenge.

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They did to Germany what they wanted to do, and Wilson was not able to prevent it. And twenty years later we had World War II, far bloodier, far more costly than the war which preceded it. And those nations paid a much greater price than they had paid in earlier years. What I am suggesting by this historical reference is that no matter how hard we try,

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there will be some who will accuse us of being insincere. There will be some who will say that we are not sufficiently spiritual. There are some who will be ready to charge us with a lack of willingness to sacrifice. But remember, when you hear those kinds of accusations,

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that that kind of thing, that kind of hate, did not stop Christ. He heard that all, aimed at him. And even as it did not stop our Lord, so we who walk in his path should not be stopped by it either.

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Robert Frost wrote a long time ago now, "Something there is that does not love a wall." And he's right. God does not love walls. He does not love walls between him and us.

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He does not love walls that are erected by one of his children against another. And so he has his son say to us, "Happy are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." And incidentally, that phrase, "the children of God,"

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really means, "for they shall be called God-like." So as we come now to this table, we need to recall the words of the one who instituted this sacrament for us. It was at this table that he said, "Peace I leave with you.

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My peace give I unto you, not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. For happy are the peacemakers, they are God-like." And what could be better than this?

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What could bring more happiness to a spirit than this? To bring peace with God and peace with others to a hurting heart. Pray with me. Our Father in the person of thy Son, thou hast called us to be instruments of peace.

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Now at thy table may we confess to thee those instances in which we have not been agents of peace, but agents of discord. We beseech thee to inflood us with thy Holy Spirit, so that as we partake of the bread and the wine, we will be receiving within ourselves thy forgiving mercy. And may we go forth from this place so encompassed by thy Holy Spirit,

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that we will be those who do not give offense, those who do not take offense, and those who seek with all their hearts to be agents of calm and peace wherever there is offense. May we, our Father, be like our host at this table. It is in his name that we pray.

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Amen. .