The things that make for peace: A sermon for August 8, 2010, by Susan Daughtry

[Click here for today's readings.]

The Things that Make for Peace

One of the most haunting moments of my trip to Israel/Palestine in July was the day we went to the Mount of Olives. It's a hill just next to the hill that the Old City of Jerusalem is built on. The two mounts are separated by a valley, and the Mount of Olives is in fact full of olive trees in places. At the bottom of the hill is the Garden of Gethsemane. It might take 20 minutes to walk, nowadays, from the Mount of Olives to the city walls. It's not far away.

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus does his teaching in Galilee and then ‘turns his face toward Jerusalem,' heading toward the city as he teaches, knowing that when he arrives he will be killed. And on the way, in the procession that we celebrate on Palm Sunday, he stops on the Mount of Olives and looks at the city and weeps and says, "If you had only recognized the things that make for peace!"

On the day that we went to the Mount of Olives, it was a beautiful clear day. We stopped at a church called ‘Dominus Flevit,' which means, ‘The Lord wept.' And we dutifully followed our tour guide into the church and sat down facing front like the good pilgrims that we were. And there before us was not a stained glass window, but a perfectly framed a view of Jerusalem, with the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock perfectly centered. 

In the place on the Mount of Olives where Jesus stopped to weep over the city, what he was looking at wasn't a general distant view of Jerusalem. It was a clear level view of the Temple. If you, he said, you at the Temple, had only recognized the things that make for peace!

Since then I have been wondering what he meant by that. What are these things that make for peace, the things that Jesus thought the priests of his day were missing?

In first-century Israel, and for years, the people of Israel came to the Temple in Jerusalem to worship God. It was the holiest place, and they believed that God actually resided there somehow, that somehow, in the most inner sanctum of the Temple, was God's address. And all the prescriptions for animal sacrifice described in Leviticus were to be enacted there at the temple. Hundreds of priests worked there to fulfill all the sacrificial rules. And around the temple were all kinds of people who made their money profiting from the pilgrims-you couldn't use any money but the temple's currency to make your offering, so there were moneychangers at the door. There were people there to sell you the biggest animal you could afford-a dove, a goat, or even something bigger-- in order to have it killed and cleanse yourself from sin. And everyone who was an Israelite was supposed to come at least three times a year to make their sacrifice.  And to make it worse, many of the ruling elite of Israel were collaborating with the Roman Empire, working to keep the people of Israel as good, safe, compliant vassals of Caesar-which involved further taxation and oppression of an already poor peasant class. Those ruling elite were often the same people who were priests and officials at God's temple.

In Luke's Gospel, the very next thing Jesus did after weeping over the city was to stride into the temple and turn over the tables of the moneychangers. And in that moment he says, ‘This house is supposed to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.' Jesus, on the Mount of Olives, looked into the huge Temple, the center of Jewish practice, and weeps over their failure to know God.

Today, the temple is gone, but the platform still stands, now supporting Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. The exact location that was the most holy site for the people of Israel is now the 3^rd most holy site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. Looking at Jerusalem today, those words, ‘the things that make for peace,' are just as evocative now as they were then. What are these things that make for peace?

There is at least one answer to that question in the readings today. When Jesus looked back at the temple and criticized it, he was not doing something new. He places himself squarely within the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, who saw it as their role to reign Israel back in to its deepest identity as the people of God. The reading we just heard from the Old Testament, from the prophet Isaiah, is a perfect example of this tradition. Now that you've heard what was going on at the Temple, listen to these words again:

            ...

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?

says the LORD;

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams

and the fat of fed beasts;

I do not delight in the blood of bulls,

or of lambs, or of goats.

When you come to appear before me,

who asked this from your hand?

Trample my courts no more;

bringing offerings is futile;

incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation--

I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

Your new moons and your appointed festivals

my soul hates;

they have become a burden to me,

I am weary of bearing them.

When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan,

plead for the widow.

All of the animal sacrifice done at the temple, all of the liturgical bureaucracy of the Jewish elite, the festivals and rule-keeping and rituals, according to Isaiah, the people were using as a hideout.  Seven hundred years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah wrote that the Israelites were using their religion to hide their greed and violence and injustice from God. What God wants instead of ‘religious' rituals at the temple is just this, a truer kind of religion: seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow.

According to the prophets, Judaism had become a failed religion when it served to  disguise and legitimate the injustices of their society. And when Jesus looks out at the Temple from the Mount of Olives, saying, ‘You have refused to recognize the things that make for peace,' he stands squarely within that prophetic tradition, calling the people of Israel back to doing justice and loving mercy and walking humbly with their God.

There is little doubt that Christianity has failed just as much as the Judaism of Jesus' day. The list of ways in which the Church has used religiosity as a hideout to legitimize evil is long and shameful. Despite all that, you blessed people are here. And you blessed people are too smart to ignore that list of ways in which the church has failed. And yet here we all are, in the fold at least for today. If we are here with any integrity, it is because that prophetic tradition has called us back, has called the Church back to a truer kind of faith. And I really hope we are on the path toward getting there. The reading from Hebrews today says, "they confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, seeking a homeland, desiring a better country, a heavenly one." Those words about longing for something better, longing for something more of God and less of destruction-that is evocative of so much of what I hear you saying about why we do the food pantry and why we send socks to the Richmond Jail and why we want to be involved in Boaz and Ruth. We look out over the city with Jesus and weep.

According to Isaiah, these are the things that make for peace: Justice. Rescuing the oppressed. Defending the orphan. Taking care of the widow. And if these are not the things that we are about, here at St. Thomas, then all of this is a game we are playing at.  If you want to know what holiness is, and what makes for peace, then justice is what we must practice and what we must be about. Otherwise all of this on Sunday morning is not religion but a way to hide from God.