Peace By Trust Training

Last Tuesday night a tragic duet was heard around the world.  I listened as CNN and other news agencies carried live audio feeds of automatic weapon fire sounding against the background of church bells tolling in Manger Square in the town of Bethlehem.  For over a month now, 200 Palestinians have been barricaded inside the Church of the Nativity, traditionally taken to be the birthplace of Jesus.  That night the “Battle of Bethlehem” intensified.  Fires broke out, damaging the structure and killing at least one of those in the church.  The standoff has become a flash point in the latest round of vicious hostilities between Jews and Palestinians.  Yasser Arafat is said to be personally “controlling” the Palestinians in the church, 40 of whom are said to be “senior terrorists” wanted by the Israeli government.  He claims Israelis are using the standoff as a way to make Palestinians appear disrespectful of Christian traditions, thereby adding to the suspicion and hostility Christians have already toward Muslim believers since 9/11.  But Israelis claim the fires and explosions were set by Palestinians to make the Israelis seem the aggressors and seem disrespectful of Christianity, even showing video with glass exploding outward as evidence the source was internal to the church.  Both sides posturing for the North American audience.  Watching the orange flames shoot from the church, and listening to the outrageously dissonant sounds, I grew cynical reflecting on the hatred that has fueled this conflict for thousands of years!  This will never end. After agreements and summits and promises for as long as I can remember, nothing changes.  There’s nothing to be done.  Leave them to their hatred and killing.  It’s impossible.  And the sounds I heard echoed ironically against the harmonious memory of the Christmas carol: “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!” and “Silent Night, Holy Night, All is calm, All is bright…..Sleep in perfect peace, Sleep in perfect peace.”  Peace I thought to myself, can never come.  

That evening, somehow it seemed I wanted/needed to say something to you today about peace. Though it wasn’t clear at the time, seemed remarkably less clear last night at midnight, and is only somewhat clearer today, it seemed to me that there may be a few among you who at this time of the semester or at this season of your life, don’t have much peace.  My mind went especially to you seniors.  It is a difficult time of your life.  All week I’ve thought about you.  One of you even prayed in morning worship yesterday, “Lord give seniors a sense of peace in this difficult time, facing their future.”  You may be preoccupied with so many things that they disrupt your relationships, distracting you and burdening you.  But finally, I have a confession to make.  As I struggled to prepare speak to you about peace, I realized I didn’t have much peace myself.  I have been concerned about the college, concerned about my children, concerned about my wife, finding it difficult to enjoy the peace I know God promises to us all.  Sometimes I think God calls me to speak and especially to preach mostly because He has something he needs to teach me.  And He knows I won’t sit still long enough to listen unless I have to prepare.  It seems I myself may be among those most in need of hearing this message.  So I want to talk to you today about peace.  And as you might expect, it has a lot to do with character.  Will you bow your heads and pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

CHARACTER & VIRTUE
We talk about character a lot at Greenville.  We expect you to become people of character.  With God’s help, that’s our mission.  But after all, what is character anyway?  Every time I point out to my daughter that the stretching challenges she is facing at the moment are “good for her character,” she’s quick to reply, “Thank you very much Dad, but I think I have quite enough character already!”  Until it got too corny, I used to reply, “Well there’s no doubt you’re quite a character.”  But most of us recognize that ‘character’ refers to the deepest fiber of our identity.  In one sense the word could be used to describe just the set of personality traits that distinguish us from one another; the characteristics of our personality.  More importantly however, I think it means the “backbone”—or lack thereof—that holds all our personal characteristics and quirks together.  And like a backbone, it has a number of elements or components.  Some of these we call virtues, and some we call vices.  Either way, they are the principles at the root of who we are that provide the skeletal structure for our identity.  Though they are qualities of who we ARE, in turn they serve as the most important forces that shape our behavior; i.e. what we DO.  In other words, while we may have virtues or vices without acting on them at all, they are most easily known by what they produce.  They are “the tendencies in us to behave either for good or for bad.”

This close connection between virtues and behaviors, explains why at least since Aristotle, people have believed that the best way to build character, to cultivate virtues, is by practice.  Aristotle says that by repeated action, we form habits, the very tendencies to behave, the virtues, that comprise our character. So behavior shapes character.  For example, as C.S. Lewis put it, if you love others often enough, you will become a loving person.  But since the virtues are themselves tendencies to behave, clearly having a certain character also shapes behavior. If you are a loving person, you will tend to act in loving ways towards others.  Of course the same is true for the opposing vice of hatred too, as it is for the other virtues and vices of integrity, wisdom, self-discipline, anger, selfishness, and so on.  Act selfishly and you become selfish.  Become selfish and you will act selfishly.  It is a crucial cycle of reinforcement that is at once both obvious and profound.  In other words, we are what we do, and we do what we are. 

Usually when we are young we are not particularly aware of which virtues and which vices we have.  That’s partly because they are not yet well developed and partly because we are not particularly self-aware.  But as time goes on we begin to see ourselves more clearly. Our actions make our virtues plain…both to others and to us ourselves.  Keep watching yourself, as objectively as you can, and you learn a lot about your character.

Until the last fifty years or so there has actually been pretty good consensus on what those virtues should be.  Plato argued that there were four cardinal virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Self-discipline, and Justice.  By the middle ages, the church had added what they called the three Theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.  Today, in our post-modern world, it seems that the very notion of character virtues has disappeared.  That’s because the very idea of ‘good’ has disappeared except as a generalization about what people in general or some group in particular happens to choose to believe.  Virtue then is made relative to the individual or the group they choose.  

PEACE
So what does any of this talk about virtues have to do with peace?  Well bear with me and consider first what peace means and how it comes about.   It’s tempting to suppose that “peace” is a state of external affairs; a state of affairs characterized by the lack of conflict in outward actions and events.  There is no peace in the Middle East because there is open conflict, there is shooting, there are suicide bombers destroying innocent lives, there are tanks rolling in the streets of Bethlehem.  There is no peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan because American troops are still pursuing Al Qaeda and Taliban.  But if peace is merely the lack of outward conflict, then for the most part all of us should be at peace because most of us are not involved today in open conflict.  Yet the tensions and anxieties, the fears and hostilities we feel suggest we are not at peace.  So peace must be something more.  

Seventeen hundred years ago, St. Augustine, attempted to clarify this notion of peace from a Christian point of view.  Peace, he said, is not just the lack of external conflict, it is the presence of right relationships. Augustine made it clear that it is the well-ordered relationships of each part of our self that makes for peace.  Peace of the body, peace of the rational and irrational soul, peace of body with soul, as well as peace between man and man….  “The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.  [And] order is the distribution which allots things…each to its own place.”  But Augustine concludes ultimately, that because we are fallen, peace comes only as we subordinate all other relations to that of right relationship between mortal man and immortal God.

TRUST
How do these right relationships of peace come about?  Plato had argued that when each part of our self was in right relation to each other part, when each class of society was in right relationship with each other class, the result (he called it Justice not peace) arose from intensive knowledge training.  But Augustine’s key to peace, through right relationship between God and man, came from quite a different source.  According to Augustine, right relationships could come only from trust.  When the central right relationship is between two persons, it must be a matter of trust, not knowledge.  So Christians have long concluded that true peace begins not with knowledge training but with trust training.

But here finally is where the connection of peace to character emerges.  Peace depends on trust, but trust is a virtue of character.  So ultimately, Augustine is telling us that real peace, right relationships in family, friendships, society, depend on our cultivation of trust in God.  And like all virtues, it comes from practice.  

If right relations in the Middle East depend on trust, then there’s little wonder there is no peace there.  Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat have distrusted each other from at least as far back as the 1967 war when they fought each other.  Trust is missing.  At one time I hoped such trust might exist.  I remember the National Prayer Breakfast just a few years ago where I watched Arafat embrace Leah Rabin, widow of the assassinated Prime Minister of Israel with whom Arafat had won the Nobel prize for peace in 1994.  It seemed there was trust in that embrace.  Arafat also shared that peace prize with Shimon Peres the man who served then, and ironically also serves now, as Foreign Minister.  Was there trust then but not now?  Or had there never been real trust there at all?

There are people on this campus who do not trust one another; people you do not trust, people I do not trust; people who do not trust you and do not trust me.  More importantly, we often do not really trust God.  No wonder we often lack peace.

Trust training comes hard.  Over 20 years ago my son Jim and I walked across the street to the playground in our beach town of southern California.  He was 5 or 6 years old.  We’d been there many times before, and most times I had coaxed him onto the swings and climbing platform, but had never succeeded in persuading him to slide down the ten-foot fireman’s pole.  Many times I had tried, and each time before, I could see the fear in his eyes and could sense his distrust that he would really be okay.  Was my son really such a wimp? I remember the struggle in my mind vacillating between my impatience with his apparent fear and my recognition that pressing him too hard would only make matters worse. Could I really be patient?  Each time before, he had backed down and we had left with tension, not the peace of right relationship between us.    You see I couldn’t reach all the way to where he had to swing out of the platform and grab the pole.  For a moment he would be on his own.  You could see that he knew that, so the real issue was whether he believed I could or would catch him if things went wrong.  It seemed like hours, though I suspect it was only minutes.  He’d lean out, then back off, lean out then back off again.  I knew that once he had stepped out once, it would be easier to trust me and to trust himself the next time and the next time and the next time.  But pressure and impatience would backfire and make trusting again later all that much harder.  It became clear, that trust is a very difficult virtue to build and a very very easy thing to destroy. It depended as much on my trustworthiness as it did on his decision to step out.  Trust comes hard.  I remember the moment that day when he finally reached out, stepped off the platform letting go of his security and slid down into my arms.  His trust, produced such joy, such relationship, such peace between us.  

Don Richardson, in his book Peace Child, tells how as a missionary, he had sought to coax the Sawi headhunters of New Guinea to trust Jesus.  Their culture was based on distrust.  It was expected that people would deliberately build friendship relationships based on deceit in order eventually to betray one another in war. And the regular wars between villages brought tragedy and disaster to these simple people.  There was no peace, either in external events or in internal relationships among the people.  Richardson sought to tell them the gospel of Jesus Christ.  But in such a climate of distrust, the Sawi couldn’t understand.   Hearing the story of Jesus’ death, they saw Judas Iscariot as the hero.  He had cultivated a relationship with Jesus in order to betray him for personal profit.  By their standards, he was brilliant, and Jesus was the chump.  How would it be possible to teach these people about trust.  And without trust, how could they ever know peace.  The breakthrough came after many years when Richardson learned of an unusual custom.  At rare times, the chief of the village really wishing to make peace, would offer his own son, a tiny baby, who would from that time forward be raised by their enemies.  It was the ultimate sacrifice of a people who sought real peace.  The child would be raised in the other village, and right relationships could exist because the enemies could trust a chief who had shown himself trustworthy by such an expression of sacrifice.  Trust comes hard.  When Richardson described the initiative of God the Father in offering his son as a tiny peace child, the Sawi understood that this God could be trusted, and peace came to their lives not only by cessation of conflict between them, and by right relationships among them, but most importantly by right relationship between them and their Father in heaven.

Trust training, the cultivation of the virtue of trust, requires then an act of our minds in response to the evidence of a trustworthy object of our trust.  Whether it is a trustworthy earthly father waiting patiently for his son to choose to trust him, or a Sawi chief waiting for an enemy village to respond in trust to his trustworthy sacrifice, or an Israeli or Palestinian negotiator acting to trust or waiting to be trusted, or our trustworthy Heavenly father, waiting patiently for us His children to choose to respond to him with trust…the message is the same.  Peace comes only by trust, and trust comes only by the mental act of the one who wishes to trust, in response to the one who is Trustworthy.

In John 14:27, Christ promised to give us peace, 27Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.  But His peace comes only by the act of trusting in Him.  

Is there conflict in your mind today?  Does that conflict constitute a profound lack of peace?  Are you worried about tomorrow?  About examinations?  About a job for the summer or as a senior, about what’s next for the fall?  Do you want peace?  Peace is right relationship, and that ultimately comes down to right relationship with God.  But peace depends on that character virtue of trust.  

Listen to the wonderful assurance of this linkage found in Isaiah 26,  3 God will keep in perfect peace [those] whose mind is steadfast, because [they] trust in [Him].  Are you at peace?  Right relationship with your friends, your family, your Maker?   If not, is your mind steadfast in trusting?  Or are you vacillating in the emotions of fear and distrust, hesitant to step out until it feels right?  As Oswald Chambers asks (2/11), Is your mind stayed on God or is it starved? Starvation of the mind, caused by neglect, is one of the chief sources of exhaustion and weakness in a servant’s life. If you have never used your mind to place yourself before God, begin to do it now. There is no reason to wait for God to come to you. You must turn your thoughts and your eyes away from the face of idols and look to Him and be saved. Your mind is the greatest gift God has given you and it ought to be devoted entirely to Him. 

Friends, and I speak to myself now too, whether it is for peace with friends, with family, or with God, it will take deliberate acts of trust training.  Choose to step out and trust.  The reward is a peace that passes understanding!

Philippians 4:6-7  6Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  

Sing: When Peace Like a River

Dr. Jim Mannoia