Such an important part of the project we are up to here as a church is to be a school of love, a community where we all can be formed and reformed by receiving and sharing the universal love of God. The Way of Jesus helps to school us into love. 

One really important dimension to church as a school of love has to do with peace, learning to receive peace and share peace and make peace. “Blessed are the Peace-makers,” right? The word really is work, labor – Blessed are the Peace-workers, those who labor for peace. 

A few months ago, I shared a story with the kids for the children’s message about an experience I had with an angry driver while I was biking, where we managed to resolve a conflict peacefully. I also shared this story on social media, and people responded in such a strong way – I was surprised, I had hesitated about whether the story was even worth sharing, and I don’t like talking about myself.

The way folks responded made it really clear to me that we have such hunger and thirst to know that there can be a way out from all of the conflict that’s been ratcheting up and ratcheting up in our society. We hunger and thirst for peace, and for justice. We need to know that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Our culture by and large does not give us the tools to become peacemakers, quite the opposite. However many quotes from Dr. King fly around on MLK day, the fact is that we live in a culture that constantly models and encourages violence, aggressive conflict, dehumanization, exploitation. We can come to feel that there is no other way.

But there is another way, and there has been for a long time. We can find it in the Way of Jesus. 

This Way draws us into a transformed way of being. This takes some schooling. It takes practice, it takes persistence, it takes a lot of grace and grit. This is peace work. But it is a way that flows from a more free and open relationship with the reality of God in all of our lives and lives together. 

It’s important to share and to learn from the stories, big and small, as we experiment with living a way of peace. 

So, let me tell my story again, and reflect on it:

Late autumn this year I was riding my bike back home from the church. 

I was a couple blocks from our house when a guy in a car behind me lays on his horn. He passes me and glares through the window. 

I wasn’t exactly in the mood to deal with some nonsense, so my reaction was to throw up my hands, like, “What!? You gotta be kidding me.” 

The car screeches to a halt at an angle against the curb. I hop onto the sidewalk so I don’t run into him. As I reflect on it, a lot happened in that moment within me. My attitude was like, “Oh great, does this guy want to get into a fight? I don’t have time for a bunch of nonsense.” And I had a kind of inner resolution: I’m not going to let him get into a fight with me. 

I pull alongside on the sidewalk. He rolls down the passenger-side window. And he yells at me for not giving him room to pass. 

It’s a bunch of nonsense, but I keep my cool. 

I say in a way that’s calm but firm, “Look, I gotta deal with parked cars and leaf piles, what do you expect? I can’t be hugging the curb all the time.” 

“Well, when I ride my bike, I go on the sidewalk.” 

“Yeah, but that’s illegal, because you can hit people walking – kids and dogs. I’m not going to do that.” 

He was still exasperated. 

So, I said, “Look, you’re the one in the car, not me. You’re the one who can kill me, not the other way around. I got my lights on, I’m doing what I can.” 

That’s when things shifted. Suddenly his whole demeaner changed. 

He said, “Oh man, I’m sorry.” 

And I said, “Thanks for your apology.” 

But he kept apologizing. He was shaking, in fact, through his arms and hands. It was like he had been possessed by anger and it was leaving his body. 

I said, “Hey, we’re cool. We’re actually talking with each other.”

He apologized again, 

And I said again, “Thanks, man. We’re cool now. We’re talking. What’s happening now is great. This is a whole lot better than just flipping each other off and tearing off angry. We both now know how to be a little safer, and we know we can deal with our anger differently.”

We parted ways. 

I thanked God I was safe. I thanked God that he was open to letting my perspective in. And I prayed that he may find some peace with whatever it was in his life that had put him into such a state of anger. 

Now, effective practitioners of violence are very smart about analyzing conflicta to learn how to fight better. Practitioners of nonviolence need to do the same. So, let’s think through, why did this work? It wasn’t just luck.

When we are in a state of anger or fear, we can get locked into a fight / flight / freeze response. We can also get locked into treating the other person as either a threat or a victim. 

The spiritual practice of nonviolence is about becoming free from being locked into those reactive postures. This can free us to respond to the situation and to the other person in a way that preserves our dignity and integrity as children of God, and that can shift the conflict. If we are able to respond to a situation or a person in a way that is outside of the logic of fight/flight/freeze & perpetrator/victim, that can lead the other people involved to also shake free of their reactive stance. Now, it’s not at all guaranteed how the other person will respond. All we can try to have some freedom with is our own response. 

Prayer and self-awareness and preparation can help us to be responsive rather than reactive. 

When that guy blared his horn and glared at me, it made me mad. 

Now, the truth is that underneath my anger was fear. 

I’ve worked in ERs and ICUs and I know what can happen when it’s Bike versus Car. 

There’s also grief in the mix for me, to be honest. A good friend of mine was killed on her bike by a truck in her early 20s. That sticks with me.

So, there were big feelings behind my initial anger. That was probably true for him too. But we weren’t being honest about the fear and sadness.

He was angry, I was angry, we both were in fight mode. Roll script.

But prayer had prepared me to manage my anger enough that I didn’t react in a way that would feed into the logic of the conflict. And I thank God I was able to access that safety and expansiveness of the soul in that moment – I don’t always, that’s for sure, I spend plenty of time in a petty mode of being.  

I didn’t flick him off or curse him out. But I also didn’t flee or freeze. I stood up for myself in a way that was firm but calm. This didn’t play into the script.

To his credit, he was willing to engage with me. As soon as he rolled the window down and yelled at me, I was relieved that he was at least trying to justify himself to me. I knew I was dealing with a fellow Child of God who was angry about something else, and who had become blinded from correctly seeing the situation right in front of him. 

We had our back and forth. And the whole encounter shifted when, to his credit, he was able to see the situation from my perspective, as I had been insisting. He was able to shake free of the locked-in logic of conflict. He was able to see that I was a fellow human being worthy of safety and dignity. 

Thank God. 

It doesn’t always work out that way. 

But the way of peace is about insisting that it is possible. 

Jesus teaches us to bless those who curse us, and pray for those who persecute us, in order to keep our hearts open to the universal reality of God, and to the possibility born from that reality that people can become free enough from sin that there may be a peaceful and just resolution to conflict. 

It is a severe mistake to think that Jesus was teaching us to not stand up for our dignity, and for the dignity of others, as children of the living God. 

“You have heard that it was said – ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you that you must not react violently against one who is evil; but, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to them also.”

Why is it the right cheek? 

Those to whom Jesus was speaking to would all likely know what it is like to feel the sting on their right cheek. A common act of violence that social superiors used to discipline social superiors was a backhanded slap. This meant the back of the right hand against the right cheek. This is how masters hit slaves, how Romans hit Jews, how men hit women, how adults hit children. 

If the person getting hit on the right cheek hit back, that could well mean the end of their life. Do nothing and, well, that’s what the perpetrator wants you to do. Instead, Jesus says, turn the other cheek, and demand to be hit like an equal. 

For the person doing the hitting, this would cause their brain to short circuit. They would be stupefied. 

This is asserting one’s own dignity while responding outside the logic of fight, flight, freeze, perpetrator, victim. 

Jesus said, “If someone sues you for your shirt, let them have your cloak as well.” The situation here is someone who has been so reduced to poverty by predatory lenders that their creditor is demanding the clothes off their back. Which was something that happened. Jesus is saying, if this happens to you, strip naked before them. Show up before the judge in your birthday suit. In the culture at the time, this would bring shame upon all who witnessed it, the rich creditor, the judge, the whole filthy rotten system. 

Have you ever seen the documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell”? It’s about the civil war in Liberia in the 1990s. A movement of women, led by Leymah Gbowee, united Christian and Muslim women to use nonviolent methods to try to force the two sides of the war to stop the fighting. 

Finally, they got a UN brokered peace summit. But the summit dragged on and on. It became clear the leaders of the two factions didn’t want it to succeed. So Leymah Gbowee led the women’s peace movement to barricade the warlords into the building together. She said, we’re not letting you out until you make a peace agreement. When the men complained and were outraged, she started stripping off her clothes. The men freaked out.  In their culture, this was such intolerable shaming on them, that they said, “No, no, no! Okay, okay! We’ll do what you want. Just put your clothes back on.” And they hurried up and brokered a peace deal.

See, this Jesus stuff can work. This is what Jesus was talking about. Laymah Gbowee knew exactly what she was doing. And believe me, the women in that peace movement knew how to pray and how to rely on God. 

To conclude, let me share what I think is a helpful summary of Jesus’ way of nonviolence, this is by the biblical scholar Walter Wink. He calls this “Jesus’ Third Way”: not the way of violence, not the way of passivity, a “third way”.  (from “Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way”)

  • Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person
  • Recognize your own power
  • Break the cycle of humiliation
  • Seize the moral initiative
  • Find a creative alternative to violence
  • Meet force with ridicule or humor
  • Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position
  • Expose the injustice of the system
  • Take control of the power dynamic
  • Shame the oppressor into repentance
  • Force the powerful to make decisions for which they are not prepared. 
  • Be willing to suffer rather than to retaliate
  • Cause the oppressor to see you in a new light
  • Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force is effective
  • Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws. 
  • Die to fear of the old order and its rules. 

This all takes work, this all takes grace, this all takes courage, this all takes community, this all takes a school of love, guided by the spirit of God and the way of Jesus. Thank you all for being in this together. And thanks be to God