Real Peace Shouldn’t Need Violence

Matthew 3:1-12

We are observing Advent here at Lakewood UMC and are in our second week. The second week of Advent has a traditional theme of Peace, and that is something I find so staggeringly ironic given what is happening in our country this week.

Now, I should probably acknowledge that every week has led to something happening in our country these days. We are living in intense times, and being an American can sometimes feel like bearing witness to a thrilling and dramatic television show if you pay attention to the news. And that would be fine—entertaining even—except for the fact that when our government seems “fit-for-television,” that usually means that a vast number of people are suffering, experiencing oppression or having their rights violated. Often simultaneously.

So this week’s episode from our nation’s chaos has focused mostly on the behavior of our Secretary of Defense (until Congress votes to name it the Department of War, I refuse to play along) who is in the hot seat after news has broken that it is likely he, alongside the military officials and soldiers who participated in boat strikes in the Carribean, egregiously violated the US and International Law. Week of Peace, indeed.

Frankly, and based on what I have read so far, I believe that they committed acts of indescriminate murder. Like I said, it just feels like a television show that wouldn’t be so horrifying if it weren’t completely real and actually happening in the world.

In America, I believe we have become quite used to a sense of “peace,” at least in the sense that we aren’t openly fighting a war. Our country hasn’t declared a war since World War 2, as a matter of fact. But since then, our nation has conducted warlike behavior, has occupied nations, has interfered with foreign elections, has invaded countries, to name just a few things. Seemingly in the name of peace, our country has invested 850 billion dollars for defense spending, an amount that is higher than the total of the next nine highest military spending countries in the world.

In the time of John the Baptist, when the land of Judea was colonized by the Roman Empire, “pax romana” was a boast of emperors and historians about Rome. I am reminded of an episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet waxes poetically, “Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words "Civis Romanis" - I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.”

But Pax Romana was an empty image of peace, a status quo that was held in place by overwhelming violence or the threat of violence. It did not last, nor was it a peace that was felt universally if you consider the rebellions that occured near Jerusalem near the time when Jesus was born. Pax Romana, and the “peace” we enjoy as Americans are not terribly dissimilar.

They both need violence to be sustained.

That isn’t real peace—not if it requires the bombing of fishing boats off of the coast of Venezuela or the threat of land invasions of Colombia. Violence cannot create peace. Nor can peace be considered real if it is not also simultaneously the presence of Justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. penned from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama these words:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”

As we ponder peace this year in anticipation of the coming Prince of Peace, let us consider a peace that does not require violence and is more substantial than just the absence of tension. Violence cannot create peace, and peace cannot exist without justice.