As Jesus followers we are called into the Kingdom Life. This blog will help us converse and learn what that means. It will contain thoughts on Scripture, Sermon Reflection, Leadership Training and interesting reads. -Pastor Jeff

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Practicing Holy Irresponsibility - Peace-Making as Active (Part 2)

Read Matthew 5:1-12
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."

Those committed to an ethic of peace-making are often accused as idealistic, weak, or passive.  It's been my experience, however, that those committed to "making" peace are for more active, creative, and engaged, then those that passively sit by and cheer on conflict and violence.  Too many of us have simply accepted that conflict is just the way things are.  Therefore, we passively await its arrival in our lives and then react to its onslaught.

Peacemaking is not reactionary.  Peacemaking it the proactive, preemptive work of consistent faithful living.  Yesterday, I challenged you to consider the call to peacemaking but left you with the question, "What does it look like?"  The following eight practices are by no means an exhaustive list.  However, as we continue to lean into our Lenten journey, the following practices are those that you can consider for your own life.


  1. Confrontation:  Peacemaking begins in the heart.  To become a peacemaker, you must first confront the hate in your own heart, before you can confront those that hate with love.  Each of us have deep places in our souls where the rotten seeds of anger, malice, prejudice, and hate reside.  Only when we come to terms with those places are we equipped to encounter those with similar seeds in their souls in a way that offers grace and love.  
  2. Escalation Refusal:  Conflict like I stated above is born out of reaction.  In a very practical way, our day to day conflicts are often the result of escalation.  You see this in marriages all the time.  One spouse offends the other, but to gain the upper hand, the offended spouse "one-ups" the other with a more wounding insult.  The game of returning evil for evil is on.  However, peacemakers have through the Spirit gained a discerning patient spirit that refuses this process of escalation.  They refuse to be driven by hurt feelings and instead breathe sanity into a powder keg of explosive potential.
  3. Preemptive Kindness/Bridge Building:  How much conflict is the result of misunderstanding or a failure to really "know" those that threaten us.  I have found that one of the greatest ways to avoid the possibility of conflict and violence is through crossing bridges, engaging people with kindness.  Does my tone, my body language, my attitude invite conflict?  Do I live in such a way that others I come into contact with feel better having been in my presence?     
  4. Critical Self-Awareness:  Those that make peace are often very aware of their role in the creation of conflict and violence.  They understand the limitations of their own righteousness and rightness.  They recognize that the brash arrogance of my agendas and opinions invite the hostility of others.  Those committed to making peace seek humility.   
  5. Angled Vision:  Conflict is often the result of our inability to see things from multiple perspectives.  We see an issue or a person from only one angle.  Once that angle has recognized them as a threat or enemy, we move into justifying our violence, anger, or hate towards them.  However, peacemakers move around.  They opt to stand in multiple angles, looking at the lives of others from different places, trying to get a fuller picture of who they are, why they choose to do what they do, and why their actions cause me such anger.  
  6. Prayer:  Peacemakers don't trust their power to make things right but invest themselves fully in the power, grace, and Spirit of God that is the result of a faithful prayer life.  Prayer is the means through which I am able to see more clearly what God sees, through which my heartbeat for others aligns with God's heart beat for the world, and through which I divest myself of self-preservation and instead opt for God's faithful will.  Prayer is the means through which I am sensitized to the struggles of others.  As I pray God grants the discernment to see beyond and behind those issues that others seem to see so clearly.  
  7. Forgiveness:  Peace cannot be maintained where forgiveness is refused.  When a situation is wrapped in the hurt feelings and bitterness of prior offenses, our actions will be determined by a desire for revenge or wall-building.  Only as the history of wrong doings is taken up into the grace-filled, mercy-offering life of God through forgiveness can those at odds with one another come to a place of  understanding and reconciliation.
  8. Baptism:  I can't emphasize this enough.  Baptism signifies a change, a new allegiance, a throwing off of old ways and old practices for ways and practices renewed in Christ, and a citizenship in a global-historical community that crosses all ethnic, racial, national, economic, and political divides.  Baptism isn't a sentimental moment of private faith.  It is a public proclamation that I no longer belong to this world and it's methods of behaving.  I am new in Christ.  As Paul claims, "I have been crucified in Christ and no longer live." 
Peacemaking isn't a good idea, it is the result of heeding the call to a New Lord...who comes as Prince of Peace.

Which of these practices might you work on in your own life throughout this season of Lent?

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