The order of the Beatitudes is disturbing. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God" sounds so noble! But -- immediately following it -- comes, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake" and "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you."

Is that what the world does to peacemakers? I'll never forget what Bill Coffin, the former chaplain at Yale and national peace leader, said when asked whether he believed good deeds are rewarded: "Of one thing I am sure," he said. "If you do good, you will be punished!"

Now the genius of a religion, historians will tell us, is how it offers a vision of a radically different world. Today you heard such visions from Isaiah 65 and from Revelation 21. The Bible is full of them, visions of a time when God's will is fulfilled, when suffering is done away with and abundance and community togetherness and peace are experienced. But remember! The response you get when you share the dreams God has given you is often, "Let's kill this dreamer!" Just ask Joseph!

Now, as I commented last Sunday, we church folks are generally anxious to disabuse people of the notion that we're anything out-of-the-ordinary. "We're not religious fanatics!" we say. "We're just like you!" But watch out! What we may be saying is that we are salt that has lost its savor, lamps which have been placed under buckets.

I venture to say that most Americans today take the words of Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft more seriously than they take the words of Jesus Christ. They take the words of the "political realists" as gospel, while they see the gospel Jesus announced as an impossible dream. And so -- with only the slightest questioning, and very little of it by the churches -- the U.S. this year increased its military budget by the biggest single leap since World War 2. Now it appears more and more likely that we'll compound the problems we've run into in Afghanistan by waging war on the infinitely more complicated Iraq -- after failing to listen to the advice of almost every one of our allies and friends. And we do this even though:
* We have found no evidence connecting Saddam Hussein with the terrorists.
* No one has hard evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
* It is a violation of the UN Charter for a nation on its own to carry out military action against another.
* The U.S. military dreads this war, for they recognize that the number of U.S. casualties could be heavy, and the long-term peacekeeping following such a war could last for decades and cost us trillions of dollars.
* If we remove Hussein, we are likely to destabilize the entire region; no likely candidates are in place to replace Saddam; even the long-persecuted Kurds beg us not to upset the apple cart.

But don't get me wrong. We are church people! Believers don't rely just on geopolitics and its pros and cons to know the right decision. Yes, we have to listen to those with knowledge. Yes, we have to temper our human tendency toward idealism by listening to the sober realists. But -- as Christians -- our first task is to hear the voice of Jesus! And what he says to us is, "I am the Way." The question is: will we follow his way? It's the way of nonviolence. Along with the various secular alternatives open to us, there's another set of alternatives that we have to consider. They are patterned on the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

New Testament scholar Walter Wink writes that the church is called to nonviolence. That is our vocation, a "vocation grounded in the teaching of Jesus, the nature of God, the ethos of the kingdom, and the power of the resurrection.

"Jesus taught nonviolence," he goes on -- as in the Beatitudes which we recited this morning -- "not 'just war.' As Gandhi observed, 'The only people on earth who do not see Christ and his teachings as nonviolent are Christians.' In so far as Jesus incarnated the ethics of God's coming rule in the world, he is the revealer of its qualities, its essence, its characteristics."

And then Dr. Wink comes to a wonderful insight: "Jesus lived the human life of the future." Think about that! We are still in the early stages of human history. We have barely gotten beyond our caveman existence. Our world is still full of violence and counterviolence, revenge and retaliation, bloodshed and destruction. But the life of the future, the life for which we ask when we pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," is different, radically different! Jesus announced that world when he said, "The reign of God is near," and "The reign of God has come among you." If we pray for it, sisters and brothers, we need to start living it.

"Discipleship means carrying on Jesus' work," Wink continues, "embodying his values, and being a people shaped by his truth." Are we up to that? Is that the commitment we made when we were baptized or confirmed, or when we reaffirmed out faith? In the United Church of Christ we ask such candidates to answer the following question:

Do you promise, by the grace of God, To be Christ's disciple, To follow in the way of our Savior, To resist oppression and evil, to show love and justice, And to witness to the work and word of Jesus Christ As best you are able?

"The church is called to nonviolence," Wink goes on, "Not in order to preserve its purity, but to express its fidelity. It is not a law but a gift.... It is simply offered to those who seek what God has in store for the world.... Nonviolence is not a fringe concern. It is of the essence of the gospel.... Nonviolence is simply living out the teachings of the gospel. It is a commitment to respect the sacredness of each person...while maintaining a resolute determination to overcome all forms of domination. It is the way God has chosen to overthrow evil in the world." (Engaging the Powers, Augsburg-Fortress, Minneapolis 1992, pp. 216 f.)

Sadly, friends, it seems that the church needs some remedial Christian education, for none of this is part of our common parlance. We continue to support pre-Christian and sub-Christian ways of relating to our fellow human beings. Some Christians want to blame the troubles we're experiencing on Islam, calling it "a murderous religion." And certainly Muslims need to re-think the way in which many of their number have recently reinterpreted their faith, in order to justify violence and mayhem. My friends in the Yardley and Levittown mosques have recently written in the Bucks County Courier-Times calling on Muslims to do just that.

But it's not only Muslims who have to do the re-thinking. In the absence of the church taking a strong stance for nonviolence, we as Christians are in the same situation the church was prior to the Civil War: basically supporting the status quo. Frederick Douglas, the great Black orator, said it quite bluntly in 1852:

"The church is responsible for the persistence of slavery. It has shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity." ( from an 1852 speech)

If we continue as Christians to support militarism by our nation, to condone actions which are opposed to the law of nations, we need to be called to re-examine our faith -- what is this Christianity which we claim to live by? How have we heard our Savior speaking? Where did we decide to part from Jesus, or relegate him to the antique shelf?

A couple of years ago people got onto a simple technique of asking how to deal with the decisions they face in life. Just ask, "What would Jesus do?" That's what we need to do right now. As followers of our Servant Redeemer, we need to ask, "What would Jesus do?" and take up our cross and follow him.