Peace House 2 Samuel 7:1-6, 11b-17, Ephesians 2:11-22

When I was in college in the late 1970’s there was a group of students on campus
who were mad about missing Woodstock
and flower power and draft card burning and naked cavorting
and they made half-hearted protests about cafeteria food
and wrote occasional rambling letters to the editor against the “Establishment.”
They made a big deal about living together, male and female,
in a large, tumble-down house near campus.
To the dismay of their neighbors, they painted a huge psychedelic peace sign
across the front façade of the place
and with great self importance they dubbed their residence the “Peace House.”

They no doubt had big plans,
but as time passed the only thing I noticed as I walked by the Peace House
was that an occasional new bit of broken furniture would turn up in the front yard
or one of the residents would been seen on the front porch at two in the afternoon
looking bleary eyed and disheveled.
Sometimes I would hear a string of colorful obscenities through an open window.
The Peace House lasted about six months.
The final blow was when someone, a resident or visitor, no one was sure -
was stabbed in the arm with a steak knife and the police were called.
A “condemned property” notice was tacked on the front door a short while later. The Peace House.

The gospel of Luke records that as Jesus is making his triumphal entry into Jerusalem
he stops half-way down the Mount of Olives, looks at the Holy City across the way
and he weeps.
Jesus weeps over the city and he says
“If you had only recognized this day the things that make for peace.” (Luke 19:42).

“If you had only recognized this day the things that make for peace.”
The students who lived together in the Peace House
thought they knew the things that make for peace.
They figured enough idealism, good intentions, and cynical disregard for the status quo
was the perfect recipe for peace.
But they were blindsided by sneakier parts of themselves that they’d overlooked.

It turns out that good intentions are no match for selfishness and a big ego.
Those students were no more spoiled and self centered than the rest of us,
but no less so either.
That they failed in their experiment is not an indictment of them as human beings.
It’s simply a reminder to us all
that it is beyond the capacity of any of us all-too-mortal creatures
to build a house of peace on our own initiative using only our own resources.

King David got it in his head that he was going to build a house for God,
a house of worship, and glory, and peace.
Scholars quibble about David’s motivations.
Some say it is true devotion to God that stirred him to such an idea.
Others, however, see it as merely a political move,
a way of further claiming God’s approval of his regime
and solidifying his power base.

Whatever David’s motive, through the prophet Nathan God is clear in God’s response.
God reminds David that not only does God do God’s best work on the fly, in a tent,
but also that only God, not David, can build a house that has any hope of enduring.

It is to the topic of an enduring house, an everlasting house of peace,
that the author of Ephesians turns in chapter two of his letter.
There is a bone of contention in the Ephesian church;
a controversy over how Gentile Christians should mix with Jewish Christians -
the uncircumcised with the Children of Abraham.
Peter is the first apostle to realize that God has also given Gentiles
full access to the promises of God,
that in Christ there was no distinction between Jew and Gentile.
They were one in God’s eyes.
But it was one thing to speak of unity in the abstract.
It was quite another thing to talk of Gentiles and Jews
actually living and worshipping and serving together-
visiting in each other’s homes,
eating the same food from a common casserole dish.

The cosmopolitan port city of Ephesus was the center
for the worship of the Greek goddess Artemus
and it offered plenty of distractions and challenges to the fledgling church.
So anxiety would have run high for the early Christians there anyway,
but this issue of how to create a climate of peace
when the Jews and Gentiles had so many differences and historic antagonisms –
it must have been overwhelming.
How could they possibly solve such an intractable problem?

They couldn’t.
It wasn’t within their power.
They couldn’t paint a big peace sign on the front of the church, dust off their hands,
and say, “There, that does it.”
The author of Ephesians reminds them that JESUS is their peace.
WITHOUT him there is no chance.
WITH him, however, it’s a sure thing.
It may not be easy. It may take awhile. It may make them uncomfortable.
But with Jesus, IT…IS… A …SURE… THING.
HE will be the keystone that holds all the different stones together.
He will break down the hostility and will build them into a house of peace.

The easy application of this passage is to think of two obvious groups with historic hostility
like blacks and whites, or gays or straights, or “born-here’s” and “come-here’s”
and to note that just as with Gentiles and Jews,
Jesus is our peace. He has broken down the dividing walls
that he might create in himself one new humanity.

But I’ve been thinking that we have a more pressing division on our hands these days,
a more hostile situation that could really use some of that peace Jesus offers.
It’s not Republicans or Democrats
though it would be nice to get some peace on that one!

The hostility that has me in knots these days is the war going on in my own head.
It’s the two sides of my brain slugging it out over the current economic situation;
where we are and where we might be going.

One side of me is afraid that things will never be the same,
that my nest egg has cracked and all the kings horses, and all the kings men….
This side of me says, “I don’t care what anybody does,
just get my IRA and my Money Market Account off the respirator and out of ICU!

But the other side of me is afraid that things WILL be the same,
that we’ll go through all of this and just as quickly as we possibly can
get back to the point where we’re talking about shopping as our patriotic duty
and piling up debt as our God-given right.
I’m afraid that we’ll suddenly develop amnesia
and start to worship the Kings of Wall Street again
and turn up the stock report so we can’t hear the whimpers
of the estimated 16000 children who die of hunger-related causes EACH DAY.1


Last Monday Kai Ryssdal of the public radio program “Marketplace”
interviewed Gus Speth, a professor of Environmental Studies at Yale.2
Ryssdal talked about the place of consumption in our economy
and how conventional wisdom says more consumption is the fastest way to recovery.
Speth responded by reflecting on the nature of a healthy recovery.
Do we judge our well being by the number of things we own?
Or maybe our health should be gauged by the depth and number of
supportive, loving relationships we’re a part of.
Speth went on to say, “I hope we won’t recover. I hope we reinvent.”
He then said, “No politician can do this for us. They’ve got their hands full.
The changes we need have got to come from the bottom up,
from people like you and me who have a different kind of American Dream.”

The next morning, I heard another story, this time on Marketplace Report.3
It was about a $600 million residential, retail and office park called Ballpark Village
that had been planned for the site of the old St. Louis Cardinals baseball stadium.
But the largest tenant pulled out of the deal and the bond market collapsed.
Ground had been broken, but there was nothing there but a hole.

If you believe the hype, it was going to be the salvation of downtown St. Louis,
The brand new Busch stadium is right across the street
and the plan was to provide a place for people who come to the game
to shop and eat and spend their money.
In other words, to consume, to get the economy back on track.

But Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at UT San Antonio
says the delay if not the demise of the project may not be such a bad thing.
He says projects like this are going belly up across the country,
that they’ve become money pits for municipalities.
Besides, he notes that downtown St. Louis already
has an office vacancy rate of 20%

The interesting thing is that somebody has filled in the hole on the site
and has put in a community softball field.
Instead of a monument to consumption
the downtown residents now have a place to play, to exercise,
to come together as a community.
The mayor of St. Louis is disappointed not to get Ballpark Village off the ground,
but how interesting that there is a simple softball field across from that big new stadium.
It’s likely a right peaceful place to be on a summer evening,
probably draws players of different races,
fans of all ages.
It’s plausible to think
that it could even serve as the lynchpin for that downtown community’s life,
the lynchpin or the keystone.
If only we could recognize this day the things that make for peace.
__________
1 I googled the question “How many children die of hunger in the world each day” and found no primary sources listed, but of the
several sites that listed a number, 16,000 was the most conservative.
2 Marketplace, American Public Media. Monday, July 13, 2009 Taking Stock: Rethinking Consumerism.
3 Marketplace Report, American Public Media. Tuesday, July 14, 2009 A Softball Field is Better Than Nothing.