ST. LUKE'S LUTHERAN CHURCH OF BAY SHORE

                                 Peace Sermon

 

Arabic: Assalamu alaikum

Hebrew: Shalom Aleichem

Spanish: La paz sea con ustedes

German: Friede sei mit euch

Italian: Pace e bene

Japanese: Konnichiwa

Hindi: Namaste

Peace be with you

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No matter how we say it, no matter what culture, what nation, or what people, we choose to express it in, every language on earth employed by human beings contains a greeting of peace.

There are two basic kinds of peace: personal peace and civil peace. Personal peace is defined as being in a state of tranquility, of having the quietness of mind and a sense of freedom from both personal and civil disturbances, to be at peace with oneself.

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When we greet one another in the name of peace we are wishing the other person a sense of well-being. We are expressing a desire that that person’s soul is at peace, that they are experiencing a blessed and peaceful relationship with their creator and their fellow human beings, that they are in a state of bliss free from fear and anxiety, and are experiencing an absence of want, of need, of disharmonious thoughts and threatening situations.

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Civil peace, on the other hand, is defined by the dictionary as “a state of peace, security and order within a community provided for by law or custom,” which is another way of saying that the purpose of the law is to prevent violence.

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Two Sundays from now, on September 21st, 193 countries around the world will observe the United Nations International Day of Peace. It comes, however, at a time when great numbers of people from those countries are not experiencing personal and civil peace.

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In his official statement for this occasion U.N. Secretary General António Guterres wrote,

 

“The demand for peace today is unparalleled. Conflict and warfare wreak havoc, breed poverty and starvation, and displace countless individuals. The turmoil of climate change is omnipresent. Even peaceful nations face significant disparities and divisive politics.”
 

Hence, this year the U.N. has adopted what it calls 4 Sustainable Development Goals that are critical for world peace. The first goal is titled

 

No Poverty, Zero Hunger, and says: Eliminating poverty and hunger addresses the root causes of many conflicts. Stable access to food and income reduces desperation and promotes cooperation.

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The second is, Health, Education & Gender Equality: Healthy, educated societies are more likely to resolve disputes peacefully. Gender equality also helps create inclusive systems that reflect the needs of entire populations.

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Third is, Clean Water, Affordable Energy & Economic Growth: Access to sustainable resources lowers the risk of resource-driven tensions. Economic opportunity can replace instability with hope and shared progress.

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And fourth is, Justice, Institutions & Global Partnerships: Effective institutions and international cooperation form the backbone of peace. Strong governance, fair laws, and community participation are all essential.

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These are all worthy goals and if accomplished, even partially, would go a long way to achieving at least some sense of personal peace for people of all nations. What about that second category: civil peace? What was the dictionary definition again? Oh, yes, “a state of peace, security and order within a community provided for by law or custom.”

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On the surface of it that sounds good. But what happens when the law is unjust, when the law itself is what is causing a breach of the peace, when the so-called “state of security and order” it seeks to establish is the very thing that is causing the violence in the first place? A “state of security” is worthless if it is unethical, if it infringes upon or threatens people’s personal peace. Order simply for order’s sake is completely without merit if it is merely being used to advance the  government’s agenda over the will of the people. There are countless examples in history of authoritarian regimes imposing what the Nazis called gute Ordnung, “good order” for establishing a state of security — namely their own.

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When governments abdicate their responsibility to provide for the personal peace and welfare of their citizens, when they conflate security and order with civil peace, history tells us that it leads to rebellions like the French and American Revolutions, the Warsaw ghetto uprising and Tiananmen Square. That is because civil peace cannot be achieved separate and apart from the personal peace of the citizenry, for where there is no personal peace, neither is there civil peace.  

So how does that relate to the U.N.s four stated goals for world peace? Let’s take them one at a time.

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The first is, No Poverty,  Zero Hunger. The dismantling of a society’s social safety net, which it is every nation’s moral obligation to maintain for the sake and the dignity of its citizens, is to commit state-sanctioned violence against the poor. Just because the law permits it does not make it right. One cannot be at peace when one is going hungry, and governments must never be at peace with their citizens being hungry. Jesus asked, “What parent whose child begs them for a piece of bread, gives them a stone instead?” What government, in a land where 1 in every 5 families don’t have enough food, eliminates school lunch programs, which is the only meal more than a million kids will receive that day, who go to bed hungry every single night?

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What government that can afford to lavishly spend trillions of dollars on AI, crypto currencies, sending celebrities into space, and subsidize corporations and billionaires who don’t need it, can’t somehow find enough money to feed its citizens and cancels food assistance for a starving world that by U.N. estimates will lead directly to the deaths of an estimated 11 million people, most of them children? When people die of hunger they don’t die peacefully in their sleep, they die violently, very, very violently.

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What country tells its citizens who are living in poverty that they just need to pull up their bootstraps? As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “You can’t pull up your bootstraps if you haven’t got any boots.” To oppress those that society has rigged the system against is to commit violence against one’s neighbor, afflicting their conscience, their heart, and their physical wellbeing, and violates the precepts of a gracious God found in all of the world’s religions.  

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The second U.N. goal is Health, Education & Gender Equality. The bi-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, estimates that because of recently enacted laws, 14 million people will lose their health insurance in the next 10 years, which is the complete antithesis of the dictionary definition of civil peace as “security and order within a community provided for by law or custom.” It does the precise opposite by violently ripping people away from their medical safety net, creating untold physical, mental, and financial anguish and totally destroying their personal peace.

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As for education, there can be no civil peace if the personal peace of teachers and librarians is violated so that they have to fear for their jobs, indeed their very lives, because a few self-righteous persons object  to a number of book titles on the shelf they don’t like, books that in most cases, it turns out, they have never read, but who wouldn’t dream of banning the Bible, though by their standards, it is one of the filthiest books on the shelf.

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As for gender equality, I’m told I only have 5 minutes to deliver this sermon, so don’t get me started other than to say that we are all God’s children regardless of our gender and we are to love and cherish one another equally. To object to this is to do violence to God’s word.

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Third, Clean Water, Affordable Energy & Economic Growth. When irreversible damage has been inflicted on the long term health of children and their parents because it takes government years and years to remove lead poisoning from the drinking water of low income communities like Flint, Michigan, violence has been committed against both the civil and personal peace of their inhabitants. Do you know how fast it would be fixed if that occurred south of Montauk highway or in the Hamptons?

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And fourth, Justice, Institutions & Global Partnerships. Justice, these days, is a relative concept according to its exercise by various government institutions. When governments can flout the law by kidnapping, beating, and literally shooting first and asking questions later, and resort to deploying the army against its own citizens (which is the classic definition of fascism and a police state), both civil and personal peace go out the window and those governments can expect nothing less than full blown uprisings and civil violence.

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The U.N.’s International Day of Peace dates back to 2010. There hasn’t been world peace in any of the 15 years since, not even for a day. A cynic would say it hasn’t worked, so why keep doing it? Peace doesn’t just happen; we have to work at it. Is total global peace realistic? No, of course not. That’s like saying the goal is to build affordable housing for all people everywhere. Is that likely to be accomplished? No, but that doesn’t mean you don’t start building houses wherever you can which promotes both civil and personal peace. Scripture says, “Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called the children of God.” In the words of the prophet Micah, “He has showed you, O humans, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

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                                                                     Peace be with you.

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                                                                     Thanks be to God!

 

                                                                                   Amen

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This keynote address was delivered by Pastor Kris Baudler at the Interfaith gathering for the town of Bay Shore, NY on 9/11/25