Last Sunday at St. Paul’s, we joyfully sang the verse, “When Christ is throned as Lord, men shall forsake their fear, to ploughshare beat the sword, to pruning-hook the spear.” This good old hymn, written by the Anglican priest George Briggs in 1933, echoes a radical vision of peace in the Hebrew Bible. The prophet Isaiah envisioned a world without need of war, in which people followed the guidance of just and peaceful God and had more need of gardening implements, ploughshares and pruning-hooks, than tools of death, swords and spears. Later in the writings, the prophet (translated in the King James Version) called such a world a “peaceable kingdom”.
As we sang the upbeat tune, I felt a wave of grief between the dissonance of the hopeful song and the beautiful church and my heavy heart at the state of the world. There are ongoing armed conflicts with thousands of fatalities this year alone in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Colombia and Venezuela, Somalia and Kenya, DR Congo, Uganda, Nigeria, the Maghreb region, Iraq, Mexico, Sudan and South Sudan, Mali and Mozambique. Here at home, our community joins with others across the country in grief over the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa. These events make us wonder if or when our own neighborhood and towns will turn into war zones; civilians being killed by terrorists in grocery stores, elementary schools, and hospitals is hardly the mark of peace.
I’m not an international or domestic policy maker, and I don’t presume to have detailed answers and solutions to the horrific violence in our world and country. What is clear to me, as a spiritual and religious leader, is that the vision of the prophet and the hymn composer has not yet fully arrived, and people of faith and good will have much work to do in order to put away our fear and choose flourishing over harm, tending over destruction, care of the earth and community over vicious preservation of our own interests and power. Occasionally when I talk or preach about peace, I’m met with patronizing pity or scorn. “Peaceable kingdom? What a quaint fantasy.” “How naive; you’re young and you’ll see.” “You must be living on another planet.” Perhaps, but I’m not convinced by quick dismissal.
Practically speaking, peace accords have been reached in history that procured long periods of stability. Other countries have responded with swift change to isolated mass shootings to great effect. Another way of walking through life together in our cities and across the world is quite possible when there is a will to change. Spiritually speaking, hanging on to the vision of a peaceable kingdom puts us in good company. We can choose to join in the legacy not only of Isaiah of Jerusalem and George Briggs of York, but also Mohandas Ghandi, Sophie Scholl, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and thousands of other faithful souls who have dedicated their lives to peace, justice, equality, and disarmament.
And of course there is Jesus himself. He understood that the way of love, the way we walk toward a peaceable kingdom, required committed refusal to take part in violence, self-protection, or retribution. Each of the four gospels includes the account that on the evening Jesus was arrested, when the soldiers and crowds came for him, one of his friends cut off a man’s ear, prepared in a posture of defense to fight back with weapons. “Am I leading a rebellion?” Jesus says, healing the wounded. “Put away your sword. Enough of this.”