Transcript
Let me introduce to you the final member of our board who was able to be with us today who will then introduce Frida Gardner. Reverend Bruce Gillette is the pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Sussex, New Jersey. He said make this short, but I'm going to tell you these few things. He earned his degrees including M.Div and Th.M. from Princeton Seminary. He is a member of not only the Shalom Fund Board, but the Executive Committee of
the National Inter-Religious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, and also the National Committee of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. He is looking forward to his becoming a daddy in May, and I thought you ought to know that. And that's the best part. And I would like to say a special word of thanks to Bruce for all his work here in location to prepare for these lectures. The publicity that most of you saw for today's events was due
to Bruce's efforts, and I have really appreciated all his work. Bruce. I asked Gail to make it short because Frida told me to make it short. I could say a great deal about Frida. I give you a quick rundown of this wonderful servant of the church. She is a member and elder of the Nassau Presbyterian Church. She has served the church as a commissioner to General Assembly. Thankless job of being on New Brunswick Presbyterian's Committee on
Ministry. And right now, I think she's been on the steering committee of Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament. And she's taught here, I think, longer than Bill Thompson served as stated clerk, so. She is a teacher par excellence, one of the best teachers here at the seminary, one of the best teachers in the church. And I think we have put her in a very difficult job. I'm reminded of an ordination or an installation service where you've heard a
sermon and they start getting to all the charges and you're waiting to hear something new and refreshing by the end of the service. I think Frida will give us many new and refreshing ideas. Frida Gardner. Well, the light will keep me awake if nothing else does. We will end when we said we were going to end, so if you can just keep it together, fine. For weeks now, people on campus have been saying to me, some
of whom are my friends and some of the friends are students, wow, Frida, are you moving in big company, Coffin, Fife, Dwyer, and Gardner. Well, what are friends for, right? I am moving in big company, but I'm mostly honored by being, having any part at all, even the last part in this Connor Symposium. I didn't know John in the same way that many people in the room knew him, but I did learn a great deal from
him. And one of the things I learned from him was that in a number of presentations in which I was a part of the audience, he kept quiet for stretches of time, disconcerting the audience, whoever heard of a public speaker, keeping quiet. So I'm going to take a leaf out of his notebook and ask you three questions. I was going to ask you to write the answers, but in the face of the time factor, I'll just
ask you to think about them and I'll keep quiet for just a minute or two while you do that. I want to ask you to, first of all, what are, what do you wish that you were doing for peace and justice that you are not doing or haven't been able to get around to doing yet? That's the first question. And the second question, which some of you in this room will not have time to answer in
its entirety is what are you doing in your life for peace and justice? And the third question, what vision motivates your hope and your action? Try to put that into words for yourself. Judith Dwyer and John Fife have spoken, at least to me, eloquently about the whys and the hows of resistance. They've talked about what it means to resist and how, in some cases, to do that. Resistance is one response to caring about peace and justice.
John used a phrase in just the preceding hour about getting to the place where truth can and does speak to power. The focus question that I have tonight is how do people get to the place where they speak powerfully? In truth, I'm going to say a word to the students in this room. There are a lot of people in this room whom you do not know. I know two-thirds of them. I want to tell you
that there are some very ordinary people in this room who are doing incredibly extraordinary things for peace and justice, day in and day out. And when they sat where you sit now, I doubt that any one of them knew that this would be the shape of their lives. I'm going to start with that, and I want to end with that. John Fife seems, for example, to be a little extraordinary to me, but I believe him when
he says he's an ordinary human being, just an ordinary pastor. And you all got possibilities, and that's what I want to talk about. Last fall, Bishop Gumbelton said here in Princeton at a conference, war is not the result of sin. War is sin. I don't want to paraphrase that to say that injustice and violence against humankind and against the creation are sin, not the results of sin. And the church knows or pretends to know what to
do about that. The church responds to the reality of sin in our midst by proclaiming the gospel and living as those people who are freed from the seduction and the power of sin. That's what we keep saying about ourselves. We know how to take steps against violence and abuse and indignity and injustice, and we know how to take steps toward peace and justice. And how do we do that? Well, at the risk of saying what you've
already heard and what you already know, let me suggest a couple of images to you. First of all, the church, I think, and I do believe it's a kind of first of all, works faithfully and imaginatively and enthusiastically with the vision of shalom, with the vision of a just peace. And people don't know that by drinking the water in your church. They don't get it that way. None of the ordinary people in this room found out
about that just by being. To do that faithfully means, to me at least, to do it consistently with the word of God, to consistently attend to scripture's vision of a just peace, and to attend consistently to the word Jesus Christ, to be persistent, to have a dogged loyalty to that which is but is not yet, and not to give up on that. That every sermon and every class, whether the class is for four-year-olds or
for adults, holds that vision forth faithfully to all the people who are gathered in the congregation. And it does that imaginatively. Now, not all of you in the room are Presbyterians, but when Presbyterians get ordained, either to the ministry of the word or as lay ordained leaders of the church, one of the questions says, will you serve with imagination? I've watched some people get ordained, and I thought, they don't have an imaginative bone in their body.
How can they say yes to that? But we're all supposed to say yes and then get on with being imaginative. Well, what that means in the congregation, I think, is that we have to be creative and imaginative about the way we hold up that vision of shalom. We don't just say it. What if you never heard that word before? What if you never thought about just peace? Those are just nice words until that vision begins to
take shape in drama and music and poetry and literature and banners in every way we can think to lift that vision up. In painting, like for the first time in the history of the world at Princeton Seminary, we have colorful paintings in this room. It's a wonder it's still standing. This kind of thing that suggests to you as we sit in this room, this is kind of what we mean by just peace. People learn in different
ways, helping people of all ages and of all learning styles to see and feel and touch and smell and hear what God is inviting them to be a part of. It sounds like a burden if we just talk about working for shalom. We're invited to participate in something, the greatest something that anyone could be invited to. And we've got to make that vision live in every way possible. And we have to do that with enthusiasm, I
think. We have to live with zest. And that doesn't mean we walk around saying, praise the Lord, everything's good. It means saying in the midst of everything, God is good and is working for good. Praise the Lord. It is to face directly the kind of statistics that have come out in this conference today. It is not to turn our backs on the number of people who are being oppressed, who are homeless, who are suffering terrible indignity
or terrible torture. It is to take those facts, put them in the midst of our life together, and then say, but there is something else, and we believe in it. There is another who is in charge. Those corrupt officials do not have the last word, and neither does the media have the last word. One of the things I wish I did for peace and justice more often was to resist joining the doomsayers of the world. There
are enough people in the world today wringing their hands and saying the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Christian people dare not say that. Our God has gone to the cross in order that that would not be true. And when we walk around, and I do this, I'm a number one at that kind of stuff. That's one of the things that I wish I could change in my life. I wish could be transformed. In
the church, I think we speak too often with a forked tongue. We also speak too fast, and I'm going to keep speaking fast, okay, so I can get at least half of what I intended to say in. But education that just allows the speaker to go on is no education at all. So if I don't make sense to you, will somebody say, Rita, I haven't the vaguest idea what you're talking about, and stop me right then
and there. If I don't get through my agenda, it's okay with me. Please stop and ask a question. In the church, I think we speak to people with a forked tongue. What do we mean when we say God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed? And how does that sound to someone who isn't? Who isn't poor and oppressed? That is, if we don't succumb to the temptation to spiritualize that and say, well, we're
all poor and we're all oppressed, and therefore, the word is for everyone, which takes all of the juice out of what we just said to begin with, how does it come to the ears of the person who does not identify with the poor and the oppressed? Do we mean when we say that that God does not care about other people? Oh, no, we'll hasten to say, oh, no, no, no, no, we don't mean that, but that's
what we say. And that's how it's heard. The biblical vision of Shalom is something different from what the world calls winning and losing. And that's what it sounds like to the ears of many people when we say God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed. The vision of Shalom is a vision of life promised by a God who says, I will provide everything needful and who also says, what does it profit one to
gain the whole world and lose one's soul? It is not a picture of some losing all they have while others acquire that. It is a vision of everyone letting go of what is not needed or important and being able to take hold of what is. Don't let us talk to children and young people and adults in terms of you sacrifice everything and you gain everything. We are equally standing, those of us who are oppressed and poor
and wealthy and needing in many ways, we are equally standing before a God who says, this is the vision. It is a vision of just peace. And I think we need to be very careful about our hidden curriculum. The context in which all other responses will find their place is found, I think, in participating with the spirit's efforts to transform my too small picture of life and then speaking and singing and praying and attesting to that
vision wherever we are. And such activity takes as much planning and as much discipline and as much courage I would submit as many overt actions of public resistance that are undertaken. It's hard work to be consistent with the gospel Sunday after Sunday, Monday after Monday in the workplace, in the school, in the home. It takes courageous activity and consistent effort to do that. The second image that I want to lift up for a context of education
is that I think we need to reclaim the Pauline body imagery for the church. There are not a lot of things I agree with Paul on, but this one I can sort of go with. I think we need to teach each other again that different gifts and functions within the body are to be celebrated and accepted with gratitude. Some of you are old enough to have grown up in churches where they used to be missionaries sent
out by congregations to far places that most of us back in the good old days had never heard of, let alone seen on television. And that was our missionary who was going to that place. And we claimed that missionary and celebrated that missionary. And in a sense had the feeling that I can't go or I won't go, but that person goes on my behalf. I think a church school teacher needs to be commissioned and sent out
with exactly the same kind of attitude. That person is teaching over there on behalf of the body of Christ. And because that person is doing that, some of the rest of us can do some other things. We are so put down and challenged and threatened when somebody does something publicly for peace and justice. We immediately retreat to, well, I bought a cow or I just married me a wife or I'm having a baby or whatever and
I can't do that kind of thing. As though we had to defend ourselves against everybody else's activities for peace and justice. We need to transform that. Not everybody, not everybody does the same thing in the body of Christ. We need to be able to rejoice that this person goes to Washington and this person stands on the picket line and this person writes letters and this person does this other thing. Not to feel that that is a
judgment against us, but an occasion for the community to rejoice that some are doing that on our behalf. I hope you understand what I mean by this. The challenge goes out to everyone, but if we truly believe the biblical description of what it is to be gifted for service as Christ's body in the world and if we truly believe that there is a diversity of gifts, then not everyone does the same thing. And we have to
be consistent about teaching that and living with the results of that. I am very glad in my congregation that there have been some people for 20 years working for equitable housing in Princeton. I am very glad that there are some people who have hung in there with peace efforts in education and in political action. I am very glad for that. I hope that those people can be very glad for the things I do in the church
and not feel that because I do this, they must also do the same thing. Well, I think you get the notion. I'm trying here to look at the resistance to a just peace movement that occurs inside the church. People who give cognitive assent to a just peace and then spend all of their psychic energy defending themselves because they're not doing everything that's suggested. I am suggesting that that gets transformed when people can celebrate with one another
what it is that the other is doing. I love that little portion of scripture which I think is in the Gospel of John. I know it's the 66th verse in some chapter. You can look it up. It'll give you something to do. In which the disciples are following Jesus and one of them turns around and says, but what about this guy? Well, probably doesn't say it that way, but what about this one? And Jesus says, what
is that to you? Follow me. We spend an awful lot of time wondering about the other guy and defending ourselves because we are not doing it or we don't understand. We are each called for faithful response and I think for faithfulness to the creation of a just peace. But we must be prepared for people to do those, to do that work in different kinds of ways and doing it whatever it is motivated by that vision and
helping one another to try to hang on to that vision. You know the story. It's been passed around so long I don't even remember where I read it the first time of the person who kept appearing again and again in protests and vigils and was asked if such actions were really going to matter in the long run. And the person replied, I don't do it to change the world, but so the world won't change me. I
hear that voice every time I hear the portion of scripture in Romans which says, do not be conformed by this world, but be transformed. I do these things not because I'm sure that the action is going to make a big difference in the large scheme of things, but to keep myself from being shaped by the world's vision of life and a world. Now give me 30 seconds. I need to cut out a whole bunch of stuff
and see what else I want to say. Don't go to sleep though. I want to suggest thirdly that another strategy for congregational response is to face directly the question of what we are trying to get people to be or to do. And I think in many congregations we have taken too small and too narrow a vision of that question. Sometimes there's more pressure put on people, say, to vote in one particular way or another on a
local or a national issue, and when they have to turn away from that because they can't do it for any number of reasons, they are forced to turn away from peace and justice as issues in themselves. Because they can't do the one thing, they turn away from the whole thing. And I think we need as pastors and educators, as lay leaders in the church to say, do we want to win this small skirmish and lose the
larger battle for the transformation of these people into a people who love mercy and do justly and walk loyally with their God. Sometimes I think we transform ourselves means into ends. And a vote or signing a petition or standing on a picket line may represent to some people they're out from the whole encounter. And I think we've got to be very careful about that. And one of the ways we can be careful about that is to
offer to people options for their responsibility, to say here are several things which you can do. Do the one that fits your circumstances and yourself the best. I think, and those of you who are not Presbyterian, let me just speak Presbyterian for a minute. I think that our peacemaking efforts in the denomination have done a good job at this because I think they have continually set before us a wide variety of options so that people can
feel themselves a part of peacemaking endeavors because there's some place that they can fit. Now, what are some other ways that we can get to that? I call this indirect directness. That's double speak, but that's what I mean. I think we need to do a lot more work in the congregation on training for consensual decision making and conflict resolution. And not because that makes for better meetings or not because they thought about doing that in Esalen
20 years ago and some of us are just catching on to doing it now. Not because some organization in the secular world knows that you get more production out of a company if you get into this kind of activity. But because consensual decision making and conflict, confrontation and resolution are at the heart of living the vision of Shalom. Shalom is not a Pollyanna vision of the world. The God who creates the vision of Shalom is the
one who faced directly the sin and agony of the world and dealt with it on its own terms. And we can do no less, but we can find ways to help people. People don't know how to do this. I dare say there are some of us in this room who don't know how to do this. I mean, you get things done faster if you just tell them what to do, right? Or pseudo-democracy, we'll have everybody
say what they think and then we'll turn the flip chart over and show them their conclusions that have been written before the discussion, of course. We play the game of inviting people, but we do not know how to play the game. And we need to train ourselves on that score. We who take leadership positions in the church. And I really have to ask us the question, are we clergy and lay leaders in the church ready for
consensual decision making? Don't hear me as saying, as long as we come to a conclusion that everybody's happy with, it's just fine. I'm talking about hard-nosed facing of reality and working our way through to the place where, as a community, we can stand for something. That's what I mean by consensual decision making. I think we need to help, we need to train people for critical awareness. I'm not talking about students now, I'm talking about everybody.
Everybody. We need to help people to learn how to read and interpret what's going on in the world. John Fife knows an awful lot about the refugee situation in Central and South America and Africa. I don't think he got that by sitting under a fig tree. Do you have fig trees in Tucson? No. That represented really hard work on his part and the part of his community to know what was true. Some of that was done
by reading and attention to reports. Some of it was done by putting themselves in the situation where truth was revealed. We need to help people learn how to read the signs of the times. If you don't know this little book, let me recommend it to you. It's called, What Do You Think? Teaching Critical Thinking on Critical Issues. And it's written by Susan Williams and comes from the McGinnis Institute for Peace and Justice. It's not a very
big book. I mean, it's not, you know, as big as Calvin or Bart or any of those kind of things. But it's got some very good pointers on how to make people more acutely aware of who is saying what about whom and who is being served by the statistics that are quoted. We need more people to find that out for themselves. You know, there are some people in our congregations who would listen to John Fife or
listen to Jim Laity or listen to the student who's now left who spoke about his experiences in Texas. And they just say, oh, I don't believe them. I don't believe them. And to hear him say he doesn't trust Elliott Abrams would be, you know, some of them would get up and leave and even though if they were polite Presbyterians, they'd still sit in their seat and smile. But they would have left. They wouldn't be listening any
longer. We need to help people to develop that critical ability for themselves because it's harder to discount yourself than it is a speaker who comes and tells you something. We need to give them that kind of skill. It seems to me we also need to institute or reinstitute in the church a study, a biblical study of the meaning of gifts and of calling. I think we've lost this in the church. What is it to be given
gifts by God and what is it to be called by God into particular ministries? What is stewardship of the gifts that we have been given? And what does it mean to test one's gifts in the community and in the world? When I talk about being gifted for something, one of the characteristics of gifts as I see it is an awareness of, a sensitivity to, an appreciation of a particular phenomenon in the world that God has created.
This person is aware of the plight of homelessness. This person is sensitive to the need for supporting people who are taking courageous stands. This person is sensitive to something else. To be gifted needs to be explained to our people. It's not, I'm sorry for those of you that have heard me expound on this before, it's not a whole lot of help to read Paul in either version of the epistles where he lists the gifts that are
given. Most people I know say, well, that's not me, you know, give with liberality, prophesy, teach, administer, all that kind of stuff. There are a whole bunch of people in our churches who don't identify with any of those kinds of words. We need to unpack what those gifts of the spirit are in terms of the lives that are being lived in our congregation and to say to them, you have the gift for asking good questions. You
have the gift for confronting someone who has power. You have the gift for ferreting out accurate information. You have the gift for supporting people who are taking risks and we, as leaders, have to be ready to support that diversity of gifts once people find out that they are gifted. I said that before. The testing part of gifts means that I think we have to invite people to join us in the creation of a just peace, but
to give them time to test their gifts. We like people to be moved by a sermon or moved by a rally or moved by a video and immediately to say, I'll go to Washington, I'll do this, I'll do that. People need to have an opportunity to find out if those are the things that they do best. Now, that's disheartening if you've preached a really rousing sermon. Of course, my own contention is that most preachers, if the
congregation stood up and said, yeah, we get it, we're going to do it, would die. I mean, I think preaching is based on the fact that only a few will get the message and only a couple of those will act on what they heard anyway. So, we're kind of set up not to respond, but I think the testing part of this means that we can invite people to join us in creating a just peace and let
them know that if this form of activity is not for them, that there are other forms that they can take up. That if they discover that they simply cannot do this kind of thing, that they do not have to slink away from the church or hide from the notion of shalom or resist the congregation's efforts at creating a just peace in order to protect themselves. Testing, as I'm using this word, means putting hands on hammers to
build houses. It means putting prayers on lips for the oppressed. It means putting feet into protest marches. It means going to public meetings and asking questions. It means a whole lot of activities which work toward the establishment of just peace. Action can lead our hearts and minds and wills where the spirit is already leading us. We can actively move in that direction. But we have to ask ourselves first, are we ready for that kind of thing
to happen? I was reading the report that's going to the General Assembly and it struck me that one of the things we need to look at educationally in all of our congregations is how very difficult it is, and John said this in his, in the last hour, how very difficult it is for one person all by him or herself to do something for just peace. It's tough to be a parent if your kid is the only
one on the block that doesn't have a bazooka or an annihilator. It's tough to be that parent. And the congregation needs to provide support for those parents. It's hard to say, no, you can't have those things. It's hard to be the only person in your family who yearns for an alternative to consumerism kind of Christmas. It's hard to say to your gathered relatives, this year I'm making a contribution to the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament instead of
giving you a gift. Well, guaranteed to ice you out of the will right there. Those people who even have the slightest inclination in the direction of altering their lives toward a just peace need to be supported by the congregation. They need what the church has always had to offer people. They need the rituals of confession and of forgiveness, the promise of forgiveness. They need to be assured that if they can't do it in Christmas '88, here
are some things that they can do between '88 and '89 that might help it be a little easier next time. They need to be supported in that kind of thing. We need to help our children and some of you may disagree with me at this point and that's fine. Better people have disagreed with me. We need to have programs in the church in which our children are given real visions of the world's life so that the
vision of a just peace can also be real. We need to let our children, along with us, hear the words of children who have lived through war. We need to let our children and our young people and ourselves look at the paintings of people who have suffered. I think we forget we want to shield our children. We are not shielding them from anything. We are making them unfit to live in the world as disciples of Jesus
Christ. We are making them unfit to be participants in the invitation that God is offering. What we need to say to our children is, yes, this is very true. Guns kill people. Children walk around without limbs because of war. That is hard and hurtful and painful and it makes us sad but we can do something because God is already doing something. If you are secure in the vision of a just peace, your child will be secure
in his or her world. And it's a fairer thing to do to our children, a more honest thing to do with our children than to keep all of that reality from them. The questions I asked you were, what aren't you doing, what are you doing and what's the vision that empowers you? If we can't do everything, we can do some things. I want to read you a quote from Parker Palmer and I'll give you another good
book to read, you know, in that day in the far off world where you're going to have all the time in the world to read all the books that you want to read, right? That's got to be part of what eternal life is like, right? It's called The Promise of Paradox by Parker Palmer. And I want to just read you something. Some of you know who Parker Palmer is. I won't take the time to tell the
rest of you. It'll just be my little secret. Parker Palmer says, I believe it is God's will that I devote my whole self to the establishment of peace on earth. But how I struggle against that will, how I try to bargain with God arguing that other claims on my life must be honored too, the claims of family, of career, of limited time and energy, of my prudent fears about the consequences of responding too fully to what
the Lord requires. But as I live in that resistance, his own resistance to the vision, as I acknowledge it and confess it to myself and to others, slowly my life is pulled open. As I live in the tension created by my fear of confronting war taxes, slowly my life is pulled open to other ways in which I can witness for peace. I look within my family and find ways of living in harmony. I look at my
career and find ways of using my gifts toward the creation of a peaceable kingdom. My very resistance, my contending with God, stretches me to discover what I can do to witness to the light. This is one reason to attend to our own resistance. And to stay with it until it opens us to something new. I just bet if there was time for each one of us to speak tonight that we could tell stories like Parker Palmer
tells of things that we didn't do, things that we would have answered in question number one, what do you wish you could do for a just peace that you're not doing? The presence of that vision and that reality in our lives keeps us attentive to many other sectors in our life where that can be realized. It is a step in the right direction. I want to stop. We'll probably have eight minutes for questions and that's good
because I probably don't have eight minutes worth of answers. We need to be confronting all the time one another with reality, both the sin of the world and the victory of the cross. We need as a congregation to do that in every way we know possible. We need also, I think, to step out of the congregation so that when some people, 2, 3, 10, test their gifts and set their sights on an order of witness to
Shalom, how wonderful it would be if already there was in place in the community, the larger than the congregation community, an association of people who have made peace and justice issues a focus of their lives. Something beyond the congregation where individual gifts that do not find support in the congregation can find support out there. We need to reach out, not just because somebody 25 years ago said it would be good if we were an ecumenical church,
that's not the reason why we do it. We do it because we share common calls to ministry across many lines, across denominations and even with people who do not say, Lord, Lord, who can support the gifts and the vision and the expression of it that we have and are there in place, which is to say that a congregational response is inward in the congregation and outward in building a community of just peacemakers in the world in
which we live. I'm going to close before you ask questions with something that I just read last night in a Lenten devotional book, which I thought because I read it last night and today was today, seemed like a good thing to read. The scripture reading is from Mark and it's a familiar story, so I'm not going to take time to read the whole thing, but it is the story of the mustard seed, the smallest of seeds
in all the world planted and becomes the greatest of all shrubs and puts forth large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. It is a miracle that from a tiny mustard seed, a tree can grow big enough for birds to nest in. Can God use us to make visible a new age? Is it possible that a conversation of two women can lead to abused children finding a haven and justice?
Is it possible that a church council can make a difference in a city where most people have forgotten the homeless? We dare not discount the small places where God's vision of justice, mercy, and peace are emerging. In our world, the places where God's rule is visible seem small and unimportant, but we do not yet know what God will do with such beginnings, how God will bless and prosper and multiply small happenings. You are invited to look
around your community for small mustard seeds that have great possibilities because in weakness and vulnerability, God can bring power. That's all I have to say. Thank you.