Table Manners for Peace Builders
Peter Storey reflects on the Eucharist in the life of peacemaking. This article is adapted from the presentation that Peter shared at the 2004 Gathering in Nashville.
You’ve come to this conference to search for the spiritual resources needed for peace-building, the power that can break through conflict, alienation, division and hate, to build peace. Because we’re gathered round this Communion Table, I am drawn to asking the question: how does the Lord’s Table resource us for peace building? What does it mean to be Eucharistic peace-builders? What are the “table manners” that we need to be reminded of in order to be effective peace builders?
The Communion liturgy I know best closes with the words, “We thank you Lord, that you have fed us with this Sacrament, united us with Christ, and given us the foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all humanity.”[1] As we journey through the liturgy I want us to have that closing prayer in our minds: the deep gift of being fed, the amazing experience of being united with Christ, and the glorious vision telling us of a banquet prepared for a united humankind.
The Collect…
There is a rhythm in the Eucharist. It begins with the Prayer for Purity:
“Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets can be hid;
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your Holy Name;
through Christ our Lord.” Amen.
In whatever conflict it may be, the one who is working with us in the sacred ministry of peace building has interior access to all the parties involved. We need to know this, believe this and be confident in it. The process does not rely only upon us or the skills we may have gained. Ron Kraybill’s book,[2] tells us this in a hundred different ways. God’s Spirit can cleanse our thoughts and bring a power beyond ourselves to bear on the poor talents and frail characters of all involved. When we enter into the task of peace-building it is important that that this prayer of purity becomes our prayer.
The Confession…
For peace builders there needs to be a special journey into ourselves if we are going to be of help in building God’s Shalom. On this inward journey we need to ask God to surface those attitudes, judgments, hostilities, angers and hurts within us that could block our usefulness. Jean Vanier talks about coming to terms with the “wolf within.”
When things were very bad in South Africa, Trevor Hudson, once my associate minister and now becoming a well-known author in the realm of spirituality, was leading us in retreat. Some of us were under severe pressure, experiencing intimidation and harassment from the secret police. He invited us to name the people “that you really resent, hate and feel alienated from.” I didn’t have any difficulty writing down “Security Police.” Then he said, “Write down all the things about them that you hate,” and I didn’t have any difficulty with that. My list was a long one. “Are you sure you are finished? Is there anything else you want to say about them?” he asked, and I found a few more things I wanted to say about them. Then came the punch-line: “Now I want you to put a line through any of the qualities there that you have not sometime or another discovered in yourself.” And I wished my list had been much shorter, because many of the things I hated in those Security Police were also part of my story too!
Confession helps us to confront in ourselves the things that we often see more clearly in others. We will not be able to facilitate healing in others until we have at least been honest about the presence of these things in our own lives. The Eucharist invites us to do that, but it doesn’t leave us there.
The Absolution…
Absolution gives us confidence to go into conflict situations in the strength of God. We go, trusting in the wholeness that God has declared about us even though we know we are only half-whole. We go with the trust that God is willing to place in us even though in our most real moments we cannot trust ourselves. We go ready to lean into the promise which says “your sins are forgiven you.” We do so with a confidence born of the assurance that God has spoken these words.
The Peace…
The words of absolution are followed by the peace and we reach out to embrace one another. Often the people we embrace are strangers; we do not know them, we do not know their story, nor do we know what hurts and fears and struggles populate their minds and hearts. We say to them, “The Shalom of Christ be with you,” and as we speak those words we remember that when Jesus said “Shalom,” he brought more than a greeting: he gave them the actual gift of his peace: “Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such as the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears” (John 14:27 NEB).
The Eucharist reminds us to take the gift of Christ’s peace into situations of conflict, and sometimes it is the one gift we will have to give to the people we meet there. I have had enough experience to know that when I take a troubled and anxious spirit into such situations, I help not one little bit, I made things worse. Our need to ensure that everything comes out right is the besetting sin of our craft. When I was pressured by my own anxiety to succeed, and to do so in a tight timetable because I had maybe 200 kilometers to drive late at night from some remote township far from home, that anxiety transferred to those I was dealing with, making a good outcome almost impossible. We need to hold on like drowning persons to the gift of Christ’s peace, and to say to Jesus, “You’ve given it, I’m going to hold it: I’m going to take you at your word: I’m going to trust your peace.”
The Word …
When peace builders soak themselves in Scripture we discover that the message of peace building is not located in just a few of our favorite and obvious passages. As we look at scripture with the eyes of those who Jesus calls God’s sons and daughters, we will find the call to peace building emerging in all of Scripture.
We will listen with our hearts and let the stories of our faith help us do something that is most important: we will allow the Word to help us imagine what God’s peace looks like. I heard of a group of Jesuits who recently had been working, struggling and praying for peace and justice for many years. They were saying that they were not sure they could imagine any longer what God’s peace looked like. “The world is such a denial of God’s Shalom that we are not sure that we have the right picture in our minds any longer.” That is why Scripture is important to us, because there is a picture there of a “whole universe mended by God.”[3] We need to re-vision what God’s peace looks like, we need to re-imagine it so that we can declare what will be, in order to transform what is.
One of the important things in South Africa’s long struggle for liberation was just to help people imagine what they found unimaginable: a South Africa where black and white lived together hand in hand and at peace. It was crucial for the church to incarnate that dream in the life of the Christian community so we could say to an unwilling world, “There! Look at that! That is what we mean when we talk about God’s future for South Africa! That is the new South Africa.” Like Isaiah, we wanted to declare God’s new thing “before it even broke from the bud” (Isaiah 42:9 NEB). It’s easy to do so afterwards. It’s very easy once it’s in full flower to say, “Ah! There’s peace!” But the world needs those who can see peace before it breaks from the bud and declare it in the way they live.
Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaking to a peace council he was attending in 1934:
“How does peace come about? Through a system of political treaties? Through the investment of international capital in different countries? Through the big banks, through money or universal peaceful disarmament in order to guarantee peace? Through none of these for the simple reason that in all of them peace is confused with security and safety. There is no way to peace on the way to safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be made safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war. To look for guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means to give oneself altogether to the will of God, wanting no security but through faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hands of Almighty God. Once again, how will peace come? Who will call us to peace so that the world will hear; will have to hear.”
He answers his own question by lifting up a vision of a church unafraid to declare the whole counsels of God, relying utterly on God’s Word:
“How will peace come so that the whole world will hear, so that all peoples may rejoice? The individual Christian can not do it. When all around are silent, he can indeed raise his voice and bear witness but the powers of the world stride over him without a word. The individual Christian too can witness and suffer. O, if he only would. But he also is suffocated by the power of hate. Only the one great Ecumenical council of the Holy Church of Christ of all the world can speak out so the world, though it gnash its teeth, will have to hear so that the people will rejoice because the Church of Christ in the name of Christ has taken the weapons from the hands of their children, forbidden war, and proclaimed the peace of Christ against the raging world (my italics). Why do we fear the fury of the world powers? Why don’t we take the power from them and give it back to Christ? We can still do it today.”
Because we know how Bonhoeffer died there is something deeply haunting about the last words he spoke in this very brief address: He said:
“We want to give the world a whole word, not a half word, a courageous word, a Christian word. We want to pray that all this word may be given us today. Who knows if we should see each other again another year?”
I wonder when last any of our congregations in the US heard such a passionate and urgent call to peacemaking?
The Intercessions …
We can never celebrate the Eucharist without intercession. We will be saved only by a robust spirituality of engagement with the world, shaped by and reflected in our Intercessions. Thus our souls are saved from self-obsession even as we aid God in the work of redemption.
When I think of intercession, I remember those four friends who picked up their paralyzed friend and bore him to a house where people were doing church listening to Jesus. The house was so crowded that when they came with their paralyzed friend, all they saw were the backs of the congregation (which is probably the most typical posture of the church towards the world). But they were carrying the pain and the struggle and the paralysis of the world, and their intercession required action. They had been bearing his pain in their hearts for long enough, now they bore his body, and they carried him up onto the roof, and they tore a great hole in it, and suddenly, “Thud! Crash! Look out below! Jesus, we’ve got work for you.” In a moment of glorious mayhem, there was their friend lying at the feet of Jesus. The pain of the world had hacked its way into the church, and it could no longer be ignored. That’s intercession!
I hope that we will be serious enough peace builders, to be prepared to do damage to church property for the love of the world. I hope we will break open church roofs – and walls – for the love of the world. I hope we will make it more and more difficult for the church to turn its back on the pain of the world which Jesus came to heal.
The Invitation …
The invitation begins with a very important word for Wesleyans: the word “All.” This table is surely for all. Was it Mary Bethune-Cook who started the first college for African-American women? I seem to remember a movie about her – a musical – in which she sang a song about the home she had grown up in, a humble little cabin in the South. The song title was, There’s Always Room for One More, and it told how, no matter how small this little cabin was, it just seemed to be able to stretch for every newcomer. I would like to think that around this Lord’s Table, there is always room for one more and that the table manners that we are taught here invite u always to make space for another. Hospitality consists of this progressive widening of our hearts.
Now I confess to a heart that does not widen easily. You may have a similar problem, but Jesus will not stop inviting us, calling us, to expand our hearts. Jesus will want us to make space for friends, he will want us to make space for neighbors, he will want us to make space for strangers, and then – even more scary – he will want us to make space for enemies. In fact, there is absolutely nobody that is not his friend. They may not know it, but he is friend to them already. It grieves me deeply to see part of the church family I belong to obsessed with issues of who may and who may not be called friends of Jesus, and who may and who may not participate in the fullest sense of what this table stands for, including the vocation to ordained ministry.
Recently I was with 300 United Methodists at a peacemaking conference in Lansing, Michigan. It was very exciting. I had to do quite a bit of speaking and was saying the same kinds of things that I’m saying now, but nothing spoke more powerfully than the concluding worship, when the Lansing’s Gay Men’s Choir arrived to sing to us. (Well, to be more accurate, some of them came. Most were afraid to come into a United Methodist church). Those with the courage to stand before us, sang songs which they had composed, powerful songs about the pain of how they had grown up and what they had been told about themselves all their lives. There was so much brokenness and hurt, and so much of it had been conveyed or endorsed by the church, and yet here they were, standing with incredible courage in front of a body of church people. When they had finished they wanted to scuttle away, but fortunately the organizer stopped them and said, “Please don’t go yet. Wait for the prayer.” I had to give the benediction and remember feeling deeply judged by this moment. I said something like, “O God, your unconditional love is eternally expressed by those arms nailed wide open at Calvary. Forgive us that ours are so tightly folded in rejection. Tear our arms open, God so we can learn to love as you love, to embrace as you embrace.”
The invitation is to all. It is always unnatural and sad to see someone sitting all alone at a restaurant table, eating a three-course meal. We are not meant to eat alone, and I guess the crucial question is, and it faces the church right now, is whether this table can be the place where we most willingly and readily bring not just our worship but our differences? We could have a theological discussion about the two views about the Table of the Lord. One is taught mainly by Catholics, but practiced by many conservative Christians too. It suggests that the Sacrament of our Lord is a confirming ordinance only. It is what you may receive when you’re in a “state of grace” and you’ve got everything right. Wesley was taught that, but he made a heart-expanding discovery: that this Table offers a “converting ordinance” too, and we may come, not because we’ve got it right but because we know we desperately need to get it right. Thank God for this converting ordinance, because otherwise, none of us would get to that table.
Some of the most powerful moments in my life have been of communion in places where people have been divided from one another. I once got a phone call in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my clergy in a very right-wing town 100 kilometers from Johannesburg had been arrested by the Secret Police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister and then we went looking for him. When we found where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by an enormous white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. Ike was a small 5’1 guy, and he had been pulled out of bed in the small hours of a freezing winter morning, and dragged off like that. I said to the guard, “Look we are going to have communion,” and I took out a handkerchief and put it down, and I had a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of communion wine and some bread wrapped in cellophane. I set out my pocket handkerchief and made the Table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the invitation, I said to the guard, “This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.” This must have touched him somewhere in his religious self because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike because you always give the sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters; the ones that are hurting the most, and Ike ate and drank. Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I then offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips touch a cup which had just been touched by a black South African. This made a crisis for the guard: either overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took and he drank. For the first time, I saw the glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took a bit of a liberty with the truth and said, “In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,” and very stiffly, the guard reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of Benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.”
I wish I could say that Ike was released by an angel of the Lord just then, but that took some days. From that moment, however, the power equation between that guard and Ike was changed forever. God’s Shalom had come through this Table. It’s a converting ordinance.
When the church has the courage to say, “Come with your divisions and let this table speak to you.” When the church is willing to trust what this table means and can do, people change.
The Prayer of Humble Access …
And then there is the prayer of access.
“Lord, we come to your table trusting in your mercy and not in any goodness of our own. We are not worthy even to gather up the crumbs under your table, but it is your nature always to have mercy, and on that we depend. So feed us with the body and blood of Jesus Christ, your Son, that we may forever live in him and he in us.”
We come with little other than good faith. We need to be very careful that we don’t put too much trust, in our “skills” as if they are weapons, our version of armaments. It is our empty-handedness that may help us to be useful to the cause of peace building.
I remember a confrontation with the state president of South Africa where church leaders went to try and reason with this man to turn his government’s apartheid policies around. I remember saying to him, “President Botha, you need to listen to us more carefully than you listen to others who come into this office. The reason is that we are the only people who come into this office who don’t want your job. We are the only ones that come here wanting nothing. Everyone else you listen to has a power agenda. We are the only people that come here powerless.” That is why the cross of Jesus still speaks the most authentic word in history: because it is spoken out of the heart of someone who wanted nothing but who loved all. God can use our powerlessness to transform. God can do that with the simple elements that we place on the communion table, transforming the wine and bread into sacramental gifts.
The Sharing of the Bread and Wine …
So we take and eat and drink. And we do so in remembrance. Have you ever thought of that word, remember? The opposite of remembering is not forgetfulness. The opposite of remembering is dismembering. We live in a dismembered world and it is around this table that we re-member that world, the broken pieces are put together again, God mends the entire universe! This can only happen, however, because Christ has been broken open on the cross. It is only out of his brokenness that healing and mending can come. The breaking of the bread reminds us of our own vocation to be willing to be broken in the cause of wholeness. What a symbol of our ministry! What a reminder of God’s costly ministry
* * *
These are challenging days and I believe that very difficult times lie ahead for peace builders in this land. The strident voices that put their trust in the myth in violence for their redemption are going to be very hard to silence. It is going to be very costly to go on loving. It is going to be increasing difficult to hear the victims of violence because a wall of deafness has been built around this nation. Voices from around the world saying, “please hear us before it is too late,” are being shut out.
I hope that out of this gathering, there will come a commitment to an Order, no matter how small its membership, who will covenant with each other, pray for one another, resource one another, listen to one another, be in silence with one another, celebrate with one another, hold one another accountable and act with one another for peace. The world recalls many important people involved in South Africa’s great struggle for liberation, but I want also to remember, with incredible gratitude and a sense of awe, that small body called the Methodist Order of Peacemakers to whom tired and burned out, ashamed and guilty peace builders could turn for what the gift of this Table represents. There we could make our deep confession and hear voices say, “We know how you feel, but you need also to know that your sins are forgiven.” There we gathered around the Word and were reminded who we were. There God took our dismembered and shattered faith and put it together again.
In our most challenging days, we also could not have survived without the gift of people like you. Now, in your days of challenge, let me remind you that this Table makes Christians the first world citizens, so maybe this word from someone who comes from another part of the world may speak something into your deliberations. I pray that will be so.
[1] All quotations, unless otherwise noted, from the Methodist Service Book, Methodist Conference Office, Revised and Expanded Version, 1992.
[2] From Ron Kraybill’s forthcoming book, “Transforming the Peacebuilder.”
[3] A phrase beloved of Daniel Erlander, author of “Manna and Mercy, a Brief history of God’s Promise to Mend the entire Universe,” copyright 1992, Daniel W. Erlander.
Peter Storey is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke University Divinity School.
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