This week among all that has been on my heart, and yours, I have been recalling to my heart the many people I have been blessed to know through the years who are people that have dedicated their lives, wholeheartedly, to the labor of making the world a more peaceful place. These are folks from all kinds of walks of life, who would not call themselves extraordinary, but for me and many others are the kinds of people with the kind of living faith we need to learn from and be led by. I want to share with you what I have learned from them.

I have been recalling to my heart the military veterans I have been able to spend time with and work with, many of whom are combat veterans, who have dedicated themselves to the work of healing, of reconciliation, of addressing the soul-wounds of collective violence. 

I have been recalling to my heart the many folks from all kinds of walks of life who have been involved with an organization I’ve done trainings for, called Creating a Culture of Peace. Creating a Culture of Peace is dedicated to better understanding the dynamics of violence and nonviolence, and strengthening the powers we have to address conflict in peaceable ways, to cultivate our capacity to turn from the ways of violence and exercise the ways of peace. 

I have been recalling to my heart the amazing people I met in El Salvador who work with Cristianos por la Paz, “Christians for Peace.” These are Salvadorans and North Americans in the legacy of the recently Sainted Óscar Romero, who for decades have been working together to address the causes and consequences of civil war and state violence and criminal violence. 

And then I have been recalling to my heart all the people from many walks I got to work with and witness when I served as a resident chaplain with the trauma team at Einstein Hospital in North Philly. I got to bear witness to countless extraordinary souls who care for each other in times of violence, who tend to the forces of faith and community in the midst of heart break, often very courageously, like the folks who used to run the streets but now are organized to intervene to de-escalate the cycles of retaliation. 

What I’ve found is that all these peace-workers from so many different walks of life all have in common something very profound. They all have the strength of heart that has allowed their heartbreak to break their hearts open. And with their hearts broken open, the eyes of their hearts are open to the fierce and burning knowledge of the reality that it does not have to be this way. They all see very clearly that it does not have to be this way. This burning knowledge fuels the forge with which they do their work for peace.

We all feel this in the moment of heartbreak when there is shocking violence: An enormously forceful “No!” What I’ve learned is that the people who then become committed to working for a more peaceful and less violent world, are able to stay with that “No!” and see that it is grounded in a firm moral truth. This is not how the children of God are supposed to be treating each other, therefore we can do better. When you stay grounded in that truth, whatever storms of insanity may fly around you, you can stay rooted in what is true and good and right and just. This is available to all of us, the truth that roots us, grounds us, strengthens us, and nourishes us, the truth that surges up the life-force and love-force that can animate and sustain the work of peace.

This truth is rooted in the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus taught us to pray in our regular prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is the reality of the Realm of Heaven that seizes our hearts in times of moral clarity. It is already here, if only we have eyes to see it and courage to claim it. 

San Oscar Romero said, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have wept.” 

Jesus wept over Jerusalem, saying “If only you knew the ways that make for peace. But now it is hidden from your sight.” (Luke 19:41-42)

 “There are some things in our society,” in the words of Dr. King, “some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted.” He called for “creative maladjustment” so that “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.” 

         We can see that bright and glittering daybreak with the eyes of our hearts that open in our heartbreak.

         When we turn to the scriptures for wisdom in times of heartbreak and tribulation, the scriptures show us time and time again what the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls “The Prophetic Imagination.” The gift God gives through the Hebrew prophets is to see beyond the walls erected by corrupt powers that benefit from dominating others, to see beyond those walls to the vast horizon of what is possible what our hearts are liberated into God’s will for us and for all creation. The Prophetic Imagination.

This is what the prophet Micah shares with us in this famous vision of all nations reorienting their ways into the way of God, turning from their addiction to the tools of death, and turning them into tools for life. Everyone beneath their vine and fig tree, at peace and unafraid. 

Jesus embodied this prophetic imagination unto death. And its enduring power pushed through into resurrected life. When the resurrected Christ ascended into heaven, his followers received the message to turn their gaze down from the heavens and back to the earth, where the Spirit of Christ is manifest, so that they too may embody “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” 

We know deep down this is possible. It’s possibility is packed into the “No!” we cry out against violence. 

This is not naïve. The people who best embody this Way of Jesus in their work for peace, are people who are very well acquainted with suffering. All the humble saints I have been blessed to witness through the years have a toughness as well as tenderness. What makes them inspiring is that they have allowed their suffering to break their hearts open into the enduring reality of God’s realm as it is yearning to be born among us. 

This takes labor. This takes hard work that is more than one generation can accomplish. 

When Jesus said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” the Greek word in the Gospel of Matthew is not actually “maker” but “worker,” “laborer”: those who labor with their hands and their hearts and the marrow of their bones, teams of striving workers hewing and hauling, and resting to rise again another day to keep on working on behalf of the Peaceable Kingdom, the Beloved Community. 

When we are confronted as we have been this week, and last week, and far too many times before, with unspeakable violence, it takes hard work to stay with the heartbreak in such a way that does not collapse into despair or shrivel into cynicism or harden into hate, but rather is a heart break and breaks open to the Love Supreme in our midst, the tremendous life-force that flares in fierce defiance of the forces of violent death, the Love Force that fires the forges of the work that is ours, to melt down the tools of death and recast them into the instruments of peace, on behalf of the Realm of Heaven on earth.

There are many fellow workers in this work, handed down through the generations; and we all can have our role. 

Thanks be to God. 

(Delivered Sunday, May 29, 2022, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)

Micah 4:1-4

In days to come
    the mountain of the Holy One’s temple
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
    and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Holy One Beyond Name,
    to the house of the God of Jacob,
that God may teach us God’s ways
    and that we may walk in God’s paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
    and the word of the Supreme One from Jerusalem.
God shall judge between many peoples
    and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
    neither shall they learn war anymore;
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
    and no one shall make them afraid,
    for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

Jeremiah 6:13-14

From the least to the greatest of them, 

Everyone is greedy for unjust gain;

And from prophet to priest, 

Everyone deals falsely.

They have treated the wound of my 

People carelessly,

Saying “Peace, peace,”

When there is no peace.