Ready for Honesty on God's Wish for Peace?

A letter this week to online subscribers of Sojourners Magazine begins with this scripture:

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." –Isaiah 2:4

Sojourners is edited by Jim Wallis, one of the leading voices for sanity and honesty in the Christian community. So let’s declare Jim Wallis Day and join him in a moment of honesty: Our scriptures demand peace and to pretend they mean some future time when the world is less dangerous is fundamentally dishonest. It’s been almost three thousand years since Isaiah wrote. If the time of peace hasn’t come yet then I guess it never will, unless of course, we make it come.

Wallis and Sojourners are also voices for common sense, but voices crying in the wilderness. It should be obvious that who we are comes from what we do. To claim we are people of peace while making war defies reason. Can a drug user call himself clean because he intends to quit right after his latest fix? Drug addicts use drugs, war makers make war.

The Sojourners letter goes on to state:
America, Iran, and Israel have been playing war games this summer: Showing off warships in the Persian Gulf, launching missiles, and testing aerial maneuvers – it is like watching a bad game of one-gunmanship.

But it’s not a game. Once again, the talk of military action against Iran has reached a fever pitch, with demonstrations of force on all sides. But this saber-rattling is a dead-end street for the United States and the Middle East.

The letter suggests we contact our government representatives and tell them how we feel. I’m all for that, but I doubt it will do any good. The bias for using military power and threats of annihilation as foreign policy is so deeply entrenched in our culture that it has now infected our latest prophet of change, Barack Obama.

Embedded in the nebulous promise of change which drew so many young people to Obama was the promise we would no longer divide the world into demons and angels, casting ourselves as angels wielding swords of justice. That promise was the implicit bigger picture in his call to end the war in Iraq. But now Obama finds himself so overwhelmed by our national compulsion for military solutions and self-righteousness that he could never endorse a statement condemning “America, Iran, and Israel” equally. The media would annihilate him.

Many believe improving prospects in Iraq take the war off the table in the campaign. But how the war started remains the more important issue, not whether it may finally end well. If you don’t believe it was a mistake to choose war over diplomacy, then you are likely to make the mistake again.

Three thousand years ago we heard God’s will spoken through the prophet Isaiah: God’s way is the way of peace. If we don’t walk it, how can we declare ourselves clean of our addictions?

To read the message from Sojourners click or paste the link below:

http://go.sojo.net/nd.html?r=LdSN2bnqkihd&n=27897552