Luke 12: 49-57
August 19, 2007
The Rev. James Richardson
Interim Rector, All Souls Parish

Shalom. Salaam. Peace.

The words of peace are very hard to hear in today’s biblical lessons. Instead of peace, we get the Book of Isaiah – and the words that echo in the Battle the Hymn of the Republic: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”

Instead of peace, we get the Letter to the Hebrews with words about torture and flogging, and a stern admonition to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” And we do not get a warm, fuzzy, peaceful Jesus today: “I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus thunders, “and how I wish it were already kindled!” Today, the good shepherd seems to be in someone else’s pasture: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Now, let me pause and tell you I don’t pick these lessons. For those of you unfamiliar with our peculiar way of doing things, these biblical lessons come from what is called “the lectionary,” and the lessons are assigned on a three year cycle. You will hear the same lessons today in Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches and many other churches. Today, whether we like it or not, we get a sword, not a plowshare. No peace, no shalom, no salaam.

Or do we?

There may be another way to hear this. It may be that God’s peace is very different than how the world thinks of it. The problem is that to explain this, I run the risk of bogging down in theological abstractions – the kind of peace that leads to taking a nap during the sermon.

So I want to want to tell you a story – not to avoid the biblical lessons, but I hope, to go deeper into their meaning, deeper into the meaning of God’s shalom. The story I want to tell you is about one of my ancestors. I do this partly because I love telling this story. This story, as they say in the South, tells you something about “who are my people.” But, also, I think this may help illustrate these lessons better than a theology treatise.

My ancestor, George Richardson, was my great-great grandfather – he is my grandfather’s grandfather. I have George’s hand-written journal, so I can tell you a good deal about him from his own hand. He was born in 1824, and grew up to be an itinerant Methodist preacher in Minnesota and northern Illinois. He spread the gospel on horseback, riding from town to town.

The first time The Rev. Richardson met a black person was when he came face-to-face with an escaped slave on his doorstep. Her name was Kitty, and that encounter changed his life and the life of his family forever – and changed a good many more lives after that – to this day. George and his wife, Caroline, spirited Kitty out of town to freedom further north, and their home in Galena, Illinois, became a stop on the Underground Railroad.

When the Civil War erupted, The Rev. Richardson was sent with a group of pastors to make a report on the morale of Union troops fighting near Nashville in Tennessee. He was struck by the sight of African Americans – escaped slaves – crossing the battle lines to form Union regiments, so he signed up on the spot to be the white chaplain to a black regiment.

George spent the duration of the war with the 7th U.S. Colored Artillery Regiment in Memphis. When the Civil War was over, his mission was not. George and his oldest son moved to Dallas to start a school for the freedmen – the ex-slaves. The school was burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan, and the Richardsons rebuilt it. The school was eventually named after a donor, an Iowa abolitionist by the name of Samuel Huston – the Texans thought that was a misspelling so to this day they pronounce it “Houston.”

The school moved to Austin, where the Richardsons set up shop in the abandoned rectory of St. David’s Episcopal Church, whose rector had been forced to leave during the Civil War because he was an abolitionist. Eventually, the school merged with another black college, and today it is thriving as Huston-Tillotson University. In the 1950s, Jackie Robinson was the basketball coach, and distinguished alumni include Cecil Williams, the pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco.

It has been one of the singular honors of my life to have given the invocation at commencement two years ago at Huston-Tillotson, the year it officially became a university, and to dedicate a stone to my ancestor. Kitty the escaped slave touched a lot of lives.

I mention all of this because I think George Richardson understood that to bring God’s peace to earth, he had to be an agent of hope and justice in the midst of a most terrible conflict, the Civil War. Sometimes being an agent of God’s peace means dwelling in the heart of conflict because it is precisely in those places where God’s kingdom breaks through.

A friend of mine, Craig Klein, a deacon who lives up on the North Coast, calls this finding God on “the sharp points.” Perhaps it is on the sharp points that we are most acutely aware of God’s presence guiding us, opening our hearts and binding up our wounds. It is very tempting to avoid the sharp points. Conflict is unpleasant and messy and worse. But the absence of conflict is not peace, it is not shalom, it is not salaam. Sometimes the absence of conflict is merely acquiescence in oppression.

I want to be careful here – Jesus is not saying “Go forth and create conflict.” Rather the gospel calls us dwell on the sharp points of our time, because it is in the muck of conflict, and the heartbreak of tragedy, where God finds us and shows us a way to true peace. The sharp points can break open our hearts and allow us to respond to the world in ways we never imagined possible. Maybe it is especially in those moments where we can most find God’s amazing grace.

And that brings me to the conflict that has consumed the Episcopal church in recent years – the division over including gay people in the full life of the church. I sometimes wonder why having a gay man as bishop in far away New Hampshire, a state I assure you I have no intention of ever living in, should have anything to do with me.

One way of viewing this conflict is to see it as messy and painful and divisive – and it is all of that. Or we can see this as a sharp point that is opening us to new possibilities, new ways of changing lives, and new ways for including all of God’s people in God’s church. I believe we are really witnessing the birth of a new way of being church, and all birth is painful. This conflict is a gift because it is bringing us closer to the church Jesus would have us be. It comes with work, and it is not easy work, but it is the work we’ve been given to do, Each one us gets a share.

Each one of us counts because every one of us experiences the sharp points some time in our life. And that means each one of us has something to contribute from our own experience. God calls each one of us to be agents of life and grace, and gives us everything we need to do this work. You have no idea how many lives are changed by the simple things you do here at All Souls. All Souls is here in this place, at this time, for a reason. Lives really are changed by Christ through you. People really are freed from what enslaves them, and God’s kingdom really is bursting alive through you. One person really can change hearts and change the world – think of Kitty the ex-slave. Please let me close with one of the verses of that great old Civil War hymn,

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make all free,
While God is marching on.

Shalom. Salaam. Peace.