Rev. Dr. Beth A. Donaldson
United Church of Christ in New Brighton
December 8, 2013
A Persistent Pursuit of Peace
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
When I was a sophomore in high school, I
remember the day I learned that my
childhood best friend, Tandiwe M., had
become a guerilla. In those years, the late
70s, every few months we would get word
that another family in the UCC mission
villages at Chikore or Mt. Selinda where we
had lived, in what was then Southern
Rhodesia, had had one or more of their
children leave to join the fighting for
freedom, until every family in the villages
had at least one child gone. These kids were
called “guerillas.” And it was never certain,
of course, whether they would come home
again. And if they did, what shape they
would be in. But they went to stand up and
fight for freedom and democracy and racial
justice in a country that was ruled by the
white minority, just like South Africa.
I was just fifteen when I heard about
Tandiwe, which meant she was fifteen too,
maybe sixteen. Just seven or eight years
earlier we had been making mud-pies
together, and playing house in the
bougainvillea bushes. If we had been
children in America together, we might
have made snow angels in the winter –
delighting in the clean, sweet fun of such an
innocent joy. We HAD known peace
together. We had lived in a community that
was intentional about sharing what we had
and who we were – and we, as friends, had
known a deep and abiding peace in the
safety of our village and families, and in our
love for one another.
Of course we were very young, and didn’t
really know much about the dynamics of
the world in which we were being raised.
We didn’t experience the racism and
classism that existed outside of our villages,
where black people and colored people
(people of mixed race or Indian heritage)
were required to use different facilities and
sit in different sections of public places. And
we didn’t, in our childhood, experience the
violence that many would experience then
and later. What we experienced was a
happy, peaceful world.
When I asked the Bible Study members
about what peace meant to them, we went
through a lovely kind of brainstorming and
process of free association that yielded
some wonderful images. They mentioned
things like nature and babies and quiet and
reading a book; things like the purring of a
cat and a cup of tea. They included a full
moon, listening to music, reading scripture,
and reflecting on God. And then, there was
this moment when snow came up. And the
energy in the conversation increased quite
a bit, and they named how clean and new
everything appears when it snows… and
how sounds are muffled by the snow… they
mentioned the joy of feeding birds when it
snows… and then came making snow
angels. One person shared that she still
does this at least once every winter – even
though she is no longer a child. And when I
asked what about it brought her peace, she
reflected that it reminded her of the many
angels in her life… that it was a quiet
moment… that it caused her to look up…
and it reminded her of childhood. She said
it connected her to all of these things, and
brought her peace. It seemed to me that
A Persistent Pursuit of Peace
Rev. Dr. Beth Donaldson
everyone around the table understood this
very well.
When they shared this love of snow with
me and the peace it brings, I remembered a
poem by Joy Gresham, who had become
C.S. Lewis’ wife, and that is included in the
movie, Shadowlands. It is entitled: “Snow in
Madrid,” and it was written during the
Spanish Civil War. I’d like to share it with
you now:
Softly, so casual;
Lovely, so light, so light;
The cruel sky lets fall something one does
not fight.
Men, before perishing,
See with unwounded eye, for once,
A gentle thing fall from the sky.
—Joy Gresham
This has been a week of many emotions for
all of us. We have lost Cheryl Wilke, a dear
member of our church and friend and loved
one to many of us, and we, along with the
rest of the world, share in grieving the loss
of a great leader in Nelson Mandela. Earlier
in the week protests for minimum wage
increases happened in many cities around
the country. And the constant wrangling
over health care reform, peace in the
Middle East, airspace battles in Asia, and
many other issues threaten to wear us
down and make us somewhat numb to
feeling anything at all, which some of us
sometimes confuse for peace. In the midst
of all of this, Christmas approaches. There
are programs to attend and packages to
wrap and parties to enjoy. It is a busy time,
and peace can sometimes feel illusive.
And in the church, we are in the season of
Advent, a season of preparation and
anticipation. And we are in a season of
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hearing scriptures that tell of a leader who
will come to save the world – a Messiah
who will bring peace. But if we look
carefully at the texts, we will see that the
peace that will come will not come without
great challenge! John the baptizer calls it
“the wrath to come!” and describes a
winnowing process that includes burning
chaff in unquenchable fire! Isaiah says the
Messiah “will strike the earth with the rod
of his mouth and with the breath of his lips
he shall kill the wicked.” Wait a minute – I
thought we were talking about peace
today!
This week I heard one of our erstwhile
pundits say, about the minimum wage,
“Putting aside that people claim they don’t
have enough money to buy food to eat…
what implication does this have on our
economy?”
A grave sadness hits me when I realize that
the peace some people feel comes because
they are able to “put aside” the suffering of
others. We don’t actually live in peaceful
times if we are paying attention.
There are, of course, many kinds of peace.
The “Aloha Peace Project,” an interactive
educational program that the Kapaa United
Church of Christ took on in my later years
there, worked at teaching peace at four
levels. Peace within me: self-esteem; peace
with others: anti-bullying; peace with the
world: learning about different cultures;
and peace with the planet: learning about
ecology. And as I have been thinking about
these four levels of peace this week, while
also holding the scriptures in my mind, I
have come to realize that an essential
aspect of peace at ANY level, is enough. We
have peace within when we have enough
sense of self-worth that we are able to
accept who we are and celebrate the gifts
A Persistent Pursuit of Peace
Rev. Dr. Beth Donaldson
God gave us. We have peace with others
when we feel enough sense of belonging
that there is no jealousy or insecurity. We
have peace with the world when each
nation has enough of the resources it
needs, and is enough of the economic and
geographic pie, that there is no need for
battling. And we have peace with the planet
when we recognize that we have enough
stuff, and there are enough sources of
alternative fuels, and that there are enough
people on this planet already and we don’t
need the population to continue to increase
all the time, to keep us going for a long,
long, time.
We live in times, however, when many do
not have enough! Some people not only do
not have enough income to buy food, but
also many still do not have enough
opportunity to work. Many are not treated
equally. Many do not have enough love and
community to feel safe. Many do not have
enough, period. And therefore, there is
actually some good news in the strikingly
harsh words of the prophets Isaiah and
John. I don’t know about you, but I long for
a leader to come and speak so clearly and
so strongly that their words do strike the
earth and their breath does help the wicked
see their errant ways. I long for more
people like Nelson Mandela to come along
and be so clear and confident in what they
stand for and live for that they are willing to
die for it as well. People like Nelson
Mandela who turn prison sentences into
opportunities to educate and train his
compatriots so that the revolution for
which they were jailed is transformed into a
movement toward true independence and
democratic process. I long for a leader who
will not be so afraid of offending someone
that they will help us to see that much of
our comfort has come at the cost of other
people’s discomfort. I long for a leader who
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will challenge the keepers of the status quo
– those who guard their privilege with the
kind of ignorance that can off-handedly
brush aside hunger itself – challenge them
so profoundly that they will wake up and
truly struggle with their own realities
enough to care about their neighbors!
O Come, o come, Emmanuel! Come and
challenge the keepers of a peace that is not
true peace. Come and liberate not only
those who suffer – but also those who do
not suffer because of their bulwarks of selfprotection and selfishness. O Come! Come,
Emmanuel, and help us all to know peace.
Help us to create a world where ALL HAVE
ENOUGH, so that the wolves of our world
will stop causing the lambs to starve by
casually denying their suffering, but will
welcome and join them at the watering
hole of plenty. Come, Emmanuel, and help
us all to speak and stand up for, and be
jailed for if need be, and devote our lives to
the ways of peace, so that people of every
race stand in true dignity without
resentment and hatred and fear. O Come, o
come, Emmanuel, and ransom the captives
– all captives of hunger, racism, suffering,
injustice and cruelty – and help us, like
Mandela, to glean from our captivity such
profound compassion and wisdom as to
emerge from it able to smile, forgive, and
create new life for others! Come,
Emmanuel! Come, Christ among us. We are
preparing for your birth! O Come,
Emmanuel, we need you.
In these later years, we would see picture
after picture of Nelson Mandela smiling and
almost impish in kindness – his wise eyes
glinting in compassion. And we saw him
dancing, because (he once said) music and
dance brought him peace. I think of that
music and dance like the snow we talked
about in Bible Study – reminders of God’s
A Persistent Pursuit of Peace
Rev. Dr. Beth Donaldson
greatness and God’s gentleness and God’s
presence and God’s ability to renew us. The
humor, the dance, the music, the snow…
they are food for our spirits and
nourishment for the journey – they provide
peace for our souls so that we can do the
work of peace for the world.
Because the companion to peace – the only
way peace can ever really come – is if we
first have HOPE – the candle we lit last
week. And hope is delivered in so many
ways. Hope comes when we have that
physical, real, experience of renewal –
whether through music, or dance, or a
gentle snow fall. Hope comes when we can
look up and be reminded of the angels in
our lives and believe they will not desert us,
even when we feel imprisoned by our
circumstances. Hope comes when a sky that
is so often full of violence in war and
turmoil suddenly drops something so
gentle… so soft… so light, so light. Hope
comes when we can listen to the scriptures
and truly believe that a leader CAN come
and change the world through their words,
and their lives, and their passion. Nelson
Mandela, through a life-long persistent
pursuit of peace, did it. Why can’t it happen
again?
But hope can also come when we realize
that within each of us – every one of us – is
the call and capacity to be what one
commentator called Mandela – “The
embodiment of an Ideal.” When we lie in
the snow and create angels, we embody the
shape and outline of a spiritual presence of
peace and renewal. But then, when we
stand up again, when we rise from the snow
and look around at the gifts of our lives, and
the great capacity there is for more justice
and more peace for others, we are then
also called to embody our ideals and
become the angels of the future – We can
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speak truth to power. We can stand up for
the oppressed and fight for fair wages! We
can continue to fight against racism in all its
forms. We can welcome the stranger and
help the most fragile among us. We can
deny the kind of peace that is paid for with
pure ignorance. We can become the
embodiment of ideals worthy of God’s
greatness and generosity to us. We can
persistently pursue peace!
Tandiwe survived the war that led to the
independence of Zimbabwe. I saw her when
I returned 26 years later. She had four
children and lived in a township of very
modest homes. She worked hard, and told
me she had functioned as a nurse when she
had joined the freedom fighters. She is not
as great a figure as Nelson Mandela - she
will never become famous. But SHE IS, to
me, the embodiment of many ideals! And
the peace that we knew together as
children is still a part of both of us, part of
the “enough” that exists in our spirits, so
that we can continue to contribute to the
peace of this world.
Friends, as followers of Christ, we are called
to persistently pursue peace. We are called
to stand tall and embody the ideals of
justice and righteousness. We are called to
work for enough… and then, to gather with
all of God’s angels, at the watering holes of
life… at the banquets of glory, and to
rejoice. In this season of preparation for the
coming of Christ, let us persistently pursue
peace.