A growing, widening breach exists between the dominant values of American society and the claim of the gospel. It has been held for a long time - and with some truth - that there was a congruity between America and the gospel. It did seem that in important ways American values had been shaped and informed by Christian faith. But no more.
There is now a sickness (or madness, depending on how deep you cut it) in American society that receives no sanction or legitimacy from biblical faith. That madness may go by many names, but I shall call it consumerism - the notion that life consists in having and getting and spending and controlling and using and eating. This value system places stress on accumulation and believes that meaning and security come by "more."
Such consumerism in which we are enmeshed requires militarism to sustain it. Our consumerism, our excessive standard of living, depends on our having a disproportionate amount of goods, of access to markets, on our having while others do not have. Indeed, it is not a great over-simplification to suggest that our militarism exists to support our consumerism, so that we may identify the disease of our society as consumer militarism, which means an endless effort to gather more of the world around us for our benefit.
These dominant values have received much support from religion, but in fact the values of consumerism and militarism cannot, in any way I know, square with Jesus' embrace of death and Jesus' Resurrection into new power for life. I believe that this growing tension, this collision course between the two sets of values - consumer militarism and Christian faith - is the central religious fact of our contemporary situation. Our dominant cultural values are in deep conflict with Christian faith and will lead us to death.
The central promise of the gospel is peace that is God's good gift (John 14:27). But it is clear upon any reflection that the ways of consumerism do not lead to peace, but only to anxiety. The ways of militarism do not lead to security, but only to destruction, violence, and dehumanization. And in the midst of this mad scramble toward death are Christians, the church, with this conviction that the crucified risen One matters even here, because this One, and only this One, is Lord and Savior.
AS A WAY TO THINK about the issue of peace and our commitments to death, I will explore two scripture passages. These are God's living words to us, which may illuminate our situation and the choices we must make.
The first is Jeremiah 6:13-15. The poetry of Jeremiah seems peculiarly appropriate to our setting. Jeremiah lived in a time when destruction was very close at hand. Yet he lived among people who did not seem to notice, did not seem to care, or were unable to act. The poetry goes like this:
"From the last to the greatest of them,
every one is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
every one deals falsely.
They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace.
Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
No, they were not at all ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
at the time that I punish them,
they shall be overthrown," says the Lord.
There are four points in this text that we may notice.
First, at the center of the text the leaders say, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace. The poet insists that the kings, priests, and leaders in Jerusalem are engaging in an enormous deception.
The Hebrew word for peace, shalom, means a harmonious, properly functioning, life-giving order to society. The leadership asserts in its policies and propaganda that society is harmonious, properly functioning, and life-giving. But, says this poet: "It is a lie. It is not so."
The opposite of shalom is not war, but chaos. The poet wants his community to notice the chaos, to experience the destructive disorder that is everywhere in the life of the community.
Christians are people who must tell the truth. Christians are people who reject the lie, the deception, who refuse the propaganda. This text is a summons to face the chaos among us that destroys, chaos evidenced in hunger, violence, unemployment, and land loss.
Second, at the beginning of this poetic passage is the poet's judgment about why this is happening among his people: It is because everybody has sold out. The prophets in Israel had always been hard on the leadership, not the common folk. It is the leadership who use position for self-advantage, who use office to feather their own nest, who form alliances for personal gain.
The poet makes no exception in his indictment. It includes prophets who say what must be said and priests who pray too easily. And it is, says he, for economic gain.
We are back to consumerism, to the ground of the lie in verse 13. Until this society comes clean about its economic fascinations and pursuits, we will not have peace. The political issue of peace is tied to the economic issue of greed and gain and injustice, to the benefit of some at the cost of others.
THE THIRD ELEMENT in verse 15 cuts underneath policy to attitude: "They do not know how to blush." What is required, first of all, is not a big disarmament program, but the simple capacity to be embarrassed. Blushing and embarrassment depend on moral sensitivity, on being aware that our actions and our policies are in the presence of the Holy One. Shame and blushing refer life back to God, remind us that our public life is accountable to the God of healing and justice known in the Bible.
Jeremiah's prophecy comes to life now in a crucial question that the world of poverty and hurt is asking Americans and U.S. policy: Have you no shame? Can you not blush?
The economic resources of our great nation are used on foolishness in a world of fear - have you no shame? Violence and terror grow, because we are so fearful of our markets and our affluence in the world - have you no shame? Our country supports tyranny and torture in the name of democracy - have you no shame? We have our enormous well-being, and yet people live in poverty and hunger, without homes - have you no shame?
We have gotten so used to the barbarianism of word and act that we no longer notice. What might have been an act of shame and a moral affront now becomes standard operating procedure. Jeremiah, of course, was called a traitor (38:4) because he refused to go along with the mindless celebration of his government, which claimed a "moral right" to do anything it wanted. He asked not about guns and arms and policy, but about shame and blushing and moral sensitivity.
You see, the real issues about peace are, in fact, religious. And religious voices must not be silenced by the "realism" of policymakers, because now the real issue is what is happening to our humanness and what will happen when we have a new generation of young people who are incapable of blushing over the inhumanity. But Jeremiah's contemporaries called him traitor because they were cut off from noticing and feeling and caring and being transformed.
The passage culminates in verse 15 with a massive, ominous "therefore." The word "therefore" always means that a judgment is coming: therefore a time of fall, of overthrow, of punishment. In downtown Jerusalem it was thought that Judah would always be safe because it was God's people and God's city. In our society, we imagine we are immune because we are the "leader of the free world."
What Jeremiah asserts is that the real danger is not Babylon or Assyria or Russia or China. Finally the threat to our way of life is the sovereign God who will be pushed only so far and then not mocked any further (Isaiah 37:23).
Now, let me acknowledge that this text is only a poem. It is not theology, and it is not a political program. The poem invites us to see the world differently, not in terms of our ideology or our precious habits, but in terms of a poetic vision that tries to get underneath our usual assumptions.
There is another voice in our life. It is not the voice of ideology or propaganda. It is not the voice of left or right, or hawk or dove. It is not an echo of our pet projects. It is rather a holy voice that asks us about life and about blushing and about selling out for gain. It is a harsh voice, but it is an honest voice. If we are to think seriously about peace, we shall have to listen to this other voice.
As it happened, the poetry of Jeremiah was true. The end did come. In 587 B.C.E. Judah was harshly assaulted. The city ended, the temple burned, the walls crumbled. It did not seem like it could happen, but it did. And when it happened, everything that seemed so secure, so promised by God, so guaranteed, turned to ashes. There was an exile into Babylon, where the Jews lived under imperial rule. They were robbed of their freedom and much of their dignity. Their faith ebbed, and God seemed weak and distant.
Good News
Then there comes this second poem, 60 years after Jeremiah. It is from second-generation exile in Babylon. In Isaiah 52:7-9, the poet speaks this way:
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the one who brings good tidings,
who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good,
who publishes salvation,
who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."
Hark, your watchkeepers lift up their voice,
together they sing for joy;
for eye to eye they see
the return of the Lord to Zion.
Break forth together into singing,
you waste places of Jerusalem;
for the Lord has comforted the people,
God has redeemed Jerusalem.
The scene is the forlorn, hopeless, abandoned city of Jerusalem. According to the poet, hopeless Jerusalem has been in smoldering shambles for two generations. There seems no way to turn things around.
The Babylonians have their ruthless way about everything. The Babylonian armies are powerful; the Babylonian rules are harsh; the Babylonian gods prevail. All things Jewish are diminished. The city of Jerusalem is gone and its glory departed.
The covenantal tradition is terminated. The God of Israel is driven from the field. It all turned out to be a bad gamble with God. The Jews are indeed the people who walk in darkness.
The gloominess of the scene is one we might feel if we try to think about peace in our world. One can despair if one looks carefully, for one cannot imagine how the foolishness of fear and brutality and arms can ever be overcome. We are all so trapped in it.
Yet if peace is to come, it will come on the tongues of evangelical poets who, out of uncommon faith and nervy speech, dare to say something new; because poets do create new realities.
SO THIS POET speaks, this poet so enmeshed in exile, surrounded by defeated Jews who had lost heart. In such a situation, the poet constructs this imaginative scene. There is the waiting, hopeless city of Jerusalem. It has waited for news for a long time and there has never been any news. Watch after watch, there is nothing - waiting for a runner, waiting for news, waiting for a break, waiting for an announcement that the Babylonian armies have fallen.
But then the watchkeepers on the wall start to sing and shout and dance. Because as they look over the hills to the north toward Babylon, they see a runner coming, a messenger. They do not have to wait until the messenger gets there. They can tell by the way the messenger runs that there is good news. They had hoped while there was no real hope. And now the messenger has come. How welcome the messenger, and what a sight for sore eyes.
Verse 7 is of interest because it has the words "publish good tidings," from the Hebrew word gospel. Three times it appears: good news, good news, good news. The messenger arrives breathless all the way from Babylon with a stunning piece of news. The watch-keepers who have been waiting in long years of despair say, "Yes, yes, spit it out!" The whole message is reduced to three simple phrases, which are words that can change the world. They are the words that matter most, which speak the very center of biblical faith: Your God rules. Your God is king. Your God has just become king.
Your God, the God of Israel, the Lord of the Exodus, the one who fells cities and gives offspring to barren women, the one who seemed to be defeated by the Babylonians in 587 - this God has now gone back into the dispute and won. That is the heart of the gospel, that this God, who seemed to be defeated, in fact, is the God who governs.
I MAKE FOUR observations about this remarkable text. The first is that the announcement in verse 7 that God reigns is in substance peace, good, salvation, or liberation. They assert together that this God has reclaimed power and what this God is about to do is restore community, well-being, and life-giving order. That peace is specifically characterized as the rule of God which entails well-being and liberation. Peace is derived from the affirmation that God governs and will have God's way.
Second, the precise context of this poetry is that the God of justice and freedom and liberation has been in deathly conflict with the gods and imperial power of Babylon. For 50 years it had seemed that Babylonian power was to have its way. Babylonian authority, technology, intelligence, and hardware seemed beyond challenge. People were docile and obedient and passive and hopeless, because it seemed that Babylonian modes of reality were absolute and eternal.
According to this poetic scenario, the rule of God's peace turns out to be more powerful and more decisive than anything Babylon can do. It has always been so in the Bible. As early as the Exodus, the power of Egypt seemed stronger, but Moses and Miriam assert the rule of the God of freedom and justice (Exodus 15:1-18, 21).
It is not different in the New Testament, where the power of Roman oppression or the power of harsh law or the power of guilt and death seem always to dictate our life. But then there is the gospel which, in a most subversive way, announces that all of these powers that rob us of our humanness have lost their legitimacy and their clout and their credibility, and we are free to go home. That is why the watchkeepers danced and sang and the messenger hurried, because God's power permitted Israel to go home.
What I find so stunning about this is that this gospel of poetic alternative ends the fixity of the world. Is it not assumed among us that there will always be terror in the Near East and religious war in Northern Ireland? Does it not seem in this country that there will always be a rapacious Pentagon and an underbelly of poverty? Of course it seems it will always be so.
But we are privy to another cast of characters. We know about the watchkeepers on the wall who do not cease to expect. We know about the breathless runner who brings the news of the gospel, who says, "Good news: Our God lives and rules and has won." We know about the power of this God. And wherever "Your God rules" is blurted out breathlessly, there the fixities of the Pentagon and terrorism and fear and hatred are dismantled. The world is made available again for peace, and new life is possible.
But new life and peace are not possible unless there are those who watch, unless there are runners who run, unless there is news of victory, unless there are moments when the fixities are shattered. Peace is not a policy of deterrence and repression and control. Peace is an act of God's rule that shatters all the tired ways in which we have organized the world.
MY THIRD OBSERVATION is that this assertion of peace is a liturgic, poetic act of imagination. The scripture of Isaiah 52:7-9 is poetry. That is all. But peace is, first of all, a poetic, imaginative, liturgic enterprise. It depends on having the freedom and imagination to speak the world differently.
We grow so old and so tired and so accustomed to the way we habitually speak the world. We speak the world into armed camps. We speak the world into good guys and bad guys, into winners and losers, into haves and have nots. We speak of the world as though it were an adversarial place, as though there were no one in charge, as though we had to decide and manage it all, as though we could have it our own way, on our own terms, if we claim it that way firmly enough.
But we are baptized, and because we are baptized, we discern the world differently. Because of our baptism, we trust a different poet and we believe a different poem. We speak the world differently. I am not engaging in naivete or romanticism. I am pointing to the fact that peace comes as we participate in liturgy.
Characteristically, Christians speak differently, which thus shapes the world differently. When we say, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you," or "Praise God from whom all blessings flow," this poetic speech asserts that the world is indeed under the rule of this other God.
We must start speaking seriously to each other about the rule of God over the troublesome, peaceless parts of our life, in order to find out if we believe our own poems. To be able to say to each other "Your God reigns" could be the beginning of a new way in the world. It asserts that we do not need to take with excessive seriousness the rulers of this age. We do not need to concede too much, nor trust too much, nor be intimidated too much. Because if one starts with very poetic speech, such as "Your God reigns," then one finds oneself publishing peace and good and liberation.
The foremost peace action of the church is to recover our own language of God's governance to find out if we mean it. To assert the rule of God is not to be stupid in a dangerous world. But it is to begin to turn loose of the fear that immobilizes.
It is a dream and a hope. But it is a subversive peacemaking activity, because it announces that the empire is finished. At a liturgical level, we shall have to decide if we believe enough to make such a remarkable claim in the face of enduring imperial power.
MY FOURTH POINT is that powerful poetry can lead to new action. Or, in other words, worship leads to ethics. New imagination leads to fresh obedience in the world.
The poetry of Isaiah 52 was not just liturgical entertainment. It was a permit, an invitation, a summons to depart the empire and go back home. Peacemaking requires that serious people go back home to the places from which we have been exiled. Going back home means to return to our places of obedience with new liberty and imagination.
We have lived so long in this competitive, adversarial place, defined in terms of empire, that we have come to think it is where we belong. We are so alienated from our true life, so habituated in this other world, that we no longer notice how alien it is. We are children of the language of Cold War, of the rhetoric of competition and the ideology of individualism, of the practice of fear and hate and greed, so that it feels to us like normalcy.
The poet comes to people like us to say that this is not our home. We have forgotten our home. We don't belong to the military system that tries to find security through armed strength. We don't belong to the consumer ideology that believes more is better. We don't belong to the propaganda of Cold War that believes the world is divided up into camps.
So, where do we who have been baptized belong? Home is not heaven. It is not life after death. It is not protected church space. Where actions of peacemaking, deeds of love and mercy, decisions of justice and liberation are taken - that is our true home.
To go home, as we can when we hear the poetry, is to become who we are baptized to be. Home is to be engaged, wherever we have access, in the chores and tasks of peacemaking, to become peaceable people who know that the world is ordered and willed by God toward peace.
Imagine the nerve and freedom and power of the Jews who believed the poem. They stood tall in the face of the empire. They mocked the fears and hopes of the empire. They disengaged from all of those administered ways.
Peacemaking depends on believing we have the power to stand tall in the face of the empire. We are now all caught in the war machine. The baptized disciples of Jesus disengage and stand tall and refuse to have our hearts and imagination administered, because we know our place is not in the midst of the war-making energies of our society.
This poetry says to all believers who are exiled in the empire: The war machine is not your place. It's not your place politically and economically, not your place psychologically, not your place liturgically, not your place morally. Let the poets of the church make our true place real and available, because it is a gift to come down where you ought to be.
IT IS IMPORTANT to look at the relation of these two texts. The first speaks a hard truth which asserts that peace is not present, not available, and that the community is engaged in a big lie. Jeremiah announces to the city that peace is not available and there will be only punishment and devastation. On the other hand, Isaiah, in joyous celebration, announces that God's sovereignty is sure and that peace is now to be announced as the present gift of God. The interesting question is how to move from the negatives of Jeremiah to the affirmations of Isaiah, from no peace to real peace, from the judgment of God to the gift of God. Indeed, I judge that hard move to be the one we are working to embrace in our society.
How do we move from "there is no peace" to "publish good tidings of peace"? The answer is that peace, which is impossible and not available, becomes possible and available when, and only when, the holy city is dismantled and God is driven back to square one to create a new people and to rebuild a new city. Peace could not be announced to the Jews, God would not rule in power, until their idolatrous organization of public life had come to an end. Peace is not possible until there is a dismantling of the holy citadel and an embrace of exile as the place of God's newness.
I do not know how literally or how drastically this must be taken. But what seems very clear is that peace is not possible in our world, anywhere in the world, until modes of domination and control are given up. I sense that the main flow of God's governance is to take these powers of domination from us, and as God takes all of that from us, it is painful and scary. But it is what is required if we are to have peace, to be peacemakers, to be children of God.
In Mark 6:7-13, we are given a glimpse of peacemaking. The disciples preached repentance, cast out demons, anointed the sick and healed them, had authority over unclean spirits.
The gospel puts disciples at the places where humanness is at issue. There were many forces in that society like ours that wanted the unclean spirits to have authority, that resisted repentance, that supported the demons, that perpetuated the sickness. But the gospel is about the transformation of all of life toward humanness. The gospel frees us to act in human ways.
So what should we put at the hard place between "no peace" in Jeremiah and "Your God reigns" in Isaiah? I suggest that right between these texts we place the story of Jesus in Luke 19:41-44:
When he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that even today you know the things that make for peace. But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you and hem you in on every side and dash you to the ground, you and your children with you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."
The scene presents Jesus approaching the same Jerusalem about which Jeremiah spoke. This is the city where the new age is to come. It is the city from whence may come the new king and the place where God's presence is promised. But now it is a place of grief and loss.
I take Jerusalem here as a metaphor for every concentration of political-religious power that is self-serving, including our own. Jesus grieves over such a city, because he knows that such a city will be destroyed.
Perhaps Jesus weeps over our country also, even as Jesus weeps over Moscow and Beijing and Havana and Johannesburg and Belfast and Beirut and all those concentrations of power and money and security and hate and fear which prevent and deny peace. I do not know if it is too late. It is always a debate to know if it is too late, or if there is yet time.
But I do know it is very, very late. It is very late for a society that does not know how to blush. Jeremiah and Jesus weep over a city that does not know the things that make for peace.
Against the dominant value system that does not blush and that keeps on lying, it is the task of the peacemaking church in America to grieve, to speak the truth, to dismantle, to turn loose, to face the exile, all for the sake of peace. The only way from here to there, from despair to hope, from death to new life, is by way of weeping, of grief, of exile.
Life comes differently when read through the gospel, when heard as being crucified and raised to new life, of dying with Christ to be born again. The primary peacemaking work of the church is to consider the story of crucifixion and resurrection again, to see in what ways it really is our story, to see what must be given up to death in order to be surprised by God's new life.
Thus, I believe the first, dangerous, difficult, and urgent issue is to reshape our imagination. It is the central vocation of the church to reshape our public imagination around different images. The real issue is that we must learn to discern all of life, personal and public, around the truth telling of Jeremiah and the surprise of Isaiah, around the strange cost of letting go of the city and the equally strange gift of receiving a future from God.
The church tradition knows something unshakably true about peacemaking. It goes like this: "Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses her life for my sake and the gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35). That is as true with public policy as with prayer. It is the strange central insight of the gospel.
In our baptism, we know of no alternative to this truth. Peace begins in communities of bleeding that will give their life. That bleeding may indeed lead to repentance, then to healing, and finally to homecoming, and with it, peace.
Walter Brueggemann was a professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, when this article appeared.
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