Luke 4:14-21 

We live in an age of violence. Even before on 9/11 terrorism reared its ugly head, Americans were on our way to being a society defined by violence - whether the ritualized murder of fictional terminator movies, or the equally ritualized but less benign reality TV shows giving us live feeds of very the real flesh and blood violence of police beatings and crimes in progress, all in the name of entertainment. Is it any accident that today's teenagers - who grow up with a Joy Stick in hand to control video games showing rape, murder, and mayhem - are the children and grandchildren of the twentieth century, which social critic Lionel Trilling once called "the century that brought hell above ground" in two world wars, Vietnam and Cambodia, just for a start.

Even the Taize community, who still hosts the worship service that is the pattern of our time together this evening, could not escape the culture of violence, when on August 16, 2005, Brother Roger, the 90 year old founder of Taize was killed by a deranged follower at evening prayer.

Waging war is both easier and more popular than waging peace and resisting violence. With a stroke of a pen, or the dispatch of a surge of troops, a president can declare or extend war. But just try declaring peace before its time has come. Part of our problem with peace is that we still mostly think of it as the absence of war. Peace has become nothing more than the lull between one war and the next. "A wise person in time of peace prepares for war," the Roman poet Horace put it.

Yet if in classical Greece and Rome peace conceived to be an ‘absence' of conflict and war, in biblical thought, peace had a more constructive meaning. For Jews Shalom then as now is not just the absence of ordered violence; it is rather the presence in our lives of everything that makes for social and individual wholeness and prosperity. Peace in the Jewish tradition is about wellness, not just the absence of disease. Peace is about how we live together.

Thus, when the Jew, Jesus, said "blessed are the peacemakers," he was encouraging us not merely to prevent or stop conflict, but to remove the causes of war, to eradicate those spiritual and social relationships where imbalances of power and the cultivation of injustice reign unchallenged. Peace as spiritual and physical wholeness went hand in glove with active, unselfish concern for one's neighbor, both within the community of faith and outside that community. It shouldn't surprise us that Jesus begins his ministry reading from the Prophet Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Jesus was a very radical pacifist.