How Can I Live Peacefully with Justice?. Mike Angell
McLaren, and many others have written, we are facing a turning point for the church in North America and Western Europe. “Christendom” is coming to an end, the scholars tell us. Shrinking Sunday attendance is the primary data. For the first time since the early centuries of the Christian movement, Christians may not be the gatekeepers of power. Christians may find themselves on the margins. Aren’t the margins exactly where the followers of Jesus belong?
It is hard not to greet the news as a loss. But, in the counterintuitive logic of faith, loss can also be gain. Christianity’s marriage to power also meant that the faith was used to justify the structures of that power. Christianity was used to bless a particular constellation of identities: whiteness, maleness, European, heterosexual, land-owning, able-bodied, etc. Losing an attachment to patriarchal, homophobic, racist, ableist, xenophobic power structures could bring us back to the heart of Christianity. Losing our marriage to unjust power might indeed take us back to our roots as followers of a first-century Palestinian Jew.
If the scholars are right, we are beginning to know something like the reality of the early disciples. The Gospels, the Epistles, all the writings of the New Testament were written by a people who counted as outsiders. The peace that Jesus proclaimed stood in contrast to the officially proclaimed Pax Romana, the supposed peace of Rome. Jesus and his followers witnessed to a different kind of peace.
As Christians this moment may represent a chance to go back to our roots, to be known as the Church was in the early centuries, as a movement engaged with the disenfranchised. The Romans mocked the Jesus movement as a religion for women and slaves. If our movement knows those on the receiving end of injustice, Christianity can be a resource for folks who seek justice, who question the status quo. But asking these questions is difficult: because asking questions about power, asking questions about structural change, requires a willingness to question relationships with the current power structures.
I moved to St. Louis from Washington, DC. I had served a parish in the heart of our nation’s capital, and at the heart of our idea of a Christian nation: St. John’s, Lafayette Square sits across from the White House. President Madison wanted a church close to the president’s base of operations. Every president since Madison has attended services there. Bright yellow St. John’s, the church of the presidents, is one of the most vivid symbols of my denomination’s historically close relationship with the power structures of our society.
That closeness comes with both difficulty and responsibility. Asking questions of justice can be difficult when you are close to power. Upsetting the status quo might jeopardize budgets and buildings. But proximity to power also means that sometimes our church has the capacity to focus attention. We have the ability to influence the conversation about the meaning of peace.
What is Peace?
What is peace? What do we mean by the word? When we slow down and ask the question, the answer can become surprisingly difficult. We might think of peace in the way our nation’s founders thought of the truths of human rights. We might think of peace as “self-evident.” We know peace when we see it, when we feel it.
But the meaning of peace can be fearfully contextual. What one group in society experiences as the dream of peace, another may experience as a nightmare. In the suburbs of Denver, where I grew up, the police are often called “officers of the peace.” But a few miles from where I live now, on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, Black parents worry about police officers as dangerous. Parents teach their children to keep their hands in full view around police, teach them to say “yes, sir” and to answer questions politely. When protests erupted after Michael Brown’s death, municipal leaders called for “peace.” But chants echoed from the streets in response, “if we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace.” The word “peace” can have a contested definition.
Jesus makes a distinction. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:27). The world in the time of Jesus claimed to be at peace. But the Pax Romana, the so-called peace of Rome, was a violent and fearful reality for Jesus’s people. Rome’s “peace” relied on the repression of the people of Galilee, Palestine, all the Roman colonies. The Roman armies were funded by the taxes of the colonized. Those without Roman citizenship knew terror. Their hearts were troubled. They lived in fear of uniformed officers of the Roman regime. They lived with anxiety, that their neighbors might be collaborating with the empire. In the midst of this so-called “peace,” Jesus preached a different sort of peace.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34). Jesus then tells his followers he will set father against son, mother against daughter. Jesus divides the family quicker than a discussion of the current presidency at the dinner table. “Do not think I have come to bring peace,” Jesus says, at least not the kind of peace you know.
The Southern poet William Percy penned perhaps the most artful distillation I know of Jesus’s definition of peace. One of his poems is included in the 1982 Hymnal as Hymn 661: “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” The poem tells of the call of the disciples, and the final stanza measures the cost of following Jesus:
The peace of God, it is no peace
But strife closed in the sod.
Yet let us pray for but one thing —
The marvelous peace of God!4
Percy describes peace theologically. Peace is a gift, but it is also a challenge. Christ’s peace is costly. The “marvelous peace of God” requires a willingness to engage in conflict, a willingness to know the ways our neighbor’s hearts are troubled. God’s peace requires we become willing to uncover the strife buried just beneath the topsoil. Peace requires the courage to stir up the status quo. God’s peace is relational. God’s peace demands work to uncover hidden injustice. We witnessed an uncovering in the streets of Ferguson, and in conversations between neighbors discussing Ferguson. Working for equitable peace is disruptive. That disruption will be met with practiced opposition by those the unjust systems benefit.
When we talk about peace, too often we speak in the negative. Peace, we assume, is the absence of violence. We also describe peace as the absence of other things: of noise, of distraction, of conflict. We are all looking for a little peace and quiet. Such negative descriptions of peace ask us to carve small islands in our calendars and in our cities. We talk about “peaceful neighborhoods.” We create “peaceful places” = libraries, churches. We look for peaceful time as well. I defend the twenty minutes in the morning after my husband, Ellis, has departed and our son, Silas, is dropped at day-care, before my commute begins. In an overbusy and hectic culture, such spaces and pauses are important, for sure. But we treat peace like a resource we can protect.
That we treat peace as a resource helps to explain why this definition of peace does not play well across divisions of class and race. In the years since Michael Brown’s shooting, I have heard the chant I mentioned earlier again and again in the streets of my city. “If we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace.” Peace in the negative, peace as an island of comfort and quiet, is a luxury in this city. Not everyone can afford the luxury of peace.
Peace described in the negative also protects the status quo. City leaders in St. Louis have called for peace each time folks have taken to the streets. “If the protestors would just settle down, if ministers would stop asking questions, criticizing police, if we could all just go back to the way things were, we could have peace.” I have heard similar pleas again and again from folks who look like me. Since moving to St. Louis, I have heard friends and family members, many of whom grew up in majority white suburbs like Golden, Colorado, where I grew up, wish that the protests would just “settle down.” “We just want peace,” they say. I have learned to question that understanding of peace.
Learning from the Modern Saints: Dr. King
Martin Luther King Jr. knew peace and quiet did not necessarily go hand in hand. In a lecture