Welcome to
First Churches of Northampton
We welcome all in joyful Christian community.
We listen for God's still-speaking voice.
We work together to make God's love and justice real.
Some areas of our site are currently under construction. Please have patience and reach out to admin@firstchurches.org with any questions
There is No Way to Peace...
More than anything, Vivian Silver believed in peace. In 2000 she helped create the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment, and Cooperation and in 2014 she founded a movement co- led by Israeli and Palestinian women called “Women Wage Peace.”
Vivian had faith that a two state solution was possible and wanted peace and prosperity for her Palestinian neighbors as much as for her Israeli ones. She believed that, “[I]f more Jews could understand the distress of their Arab neighbors, the next generation would be more willing to exchange land for peace.”
Vivian is remembered as a woman who built bridges with people on the other side. She crossed the border regularly to work with friends and activists, wept openly at the destruction of Arab homes by the Israeli government, and drove sick Gazan children to the hospital herself so they could receive medical care. She was so committed to the cause that she was still arguing for a peace deal in an interview with a local public broadcaster from the safe room in her home, where she took shelter on October 7. According to the New York Times:
she was frustrated (after the interview). On the phone with her son, Yonatan, she recounted how the interviewer had dismissed her (vision for peace, even while) in the background, (Yonantan) could hear gunfire and militants shouting. It sounded like his petite, 74-year-old mother was standing on a battlefield….“Do you want to continue speaking, or should we say goodbye?” he asked her.
“Let’s say goodbye,” Vivian told him.
She then texted a little while later to tell him that men were inside the house.
“I’m afraid to breathe,” she wrote.
“I’m with you,” texted Yonatan.
“I feel you,” Vivian replied.
“Are you safe now?” he texted. “Mom?”
There was no response
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/magazine/vivian-silver-oct-7.html) .
According to the Times, “[S]tories about Vivian ran in Israeli and American newspapers. NBC called her a “revered peace activist,” writing: “[T]he silver-haired grandmother is regarded on both sides of the border as an irrepressible force.” The BBC described her as “one of Israel’s best known advocates for peace.” Over a thousand people attended her funeral. “If Hamas had killed her,” wrote Emma Goldberg, “some thought, perhaps there truly was no hope for peace….”
But the beauty of Goldberg’s article, which I commend to you in full, is that though it is defined by the death of this remarkable woman and the grief of her beloved son, their story does not end in despair.
I realize that the title for today’s sermon, “There is No Way to Peace…” might simply sound like an accurate assessment of where we find ourselves at this moment in time, and if that is the case then despair is in order. With war and violence raging in Haiti, the Sudan, Ukraine, and the ever expanding conflict in the Middle East, one could be forgiven for not noticing the ellipsis on the end of that title.
One could be forgiven for simply thinking that the quest for peace is a fool’s errand, an impossible dream, an unrealistic goal.
But the title of today’s sermon is actually the first half of a quote by A.J. Muste who once said, “There is no way to peace…peace is the way.”
How many of you know that quote?
How many of you believe that, believe it with your whole heart?
I do too. Thousands of years of human history bear witness to the fact that violence and retribution, no matter how righteous or well deserved, only ever leads to more violence and retribution. We sow discord and reap suffering. We make war and find no peace.
And I say, “we” intentionally, because although we all know this, when our number is up and we have the chance to do things differently, more often then not, our response to suffering is to make the enemy suffer even more. We keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, which as you all know is the definition of insanity. It’s as if our grief and our pain drive us mad.
We. Us. All of us.
It is very easy right now to point fingers and judge Israel or Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran for all of this violence, but I believe that what we see playing out there could just as easily happen here.
I chose these two scriptures for today because I think they could be written by any one of us if the circumstances were right. Psalm 127 was written from the perspective of a hostage being dragged off into captivity 2600 years ago, but it could just as easily have been written exactly a year and one day ago.
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?..
7 Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.“Tear it down,” they cried,
“tear it down to its foundations!”
8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
These are the words of someone who has witnessed the desecration and destruction of all they held dear: the desecration and destruction of their children and grandparents, their friends and partners, their sacred space, their homes, their nation.
This was written by a person so full of grief and rage at the way their loved ones have been destroyed right before their eyes that all they can think of is how happy will be the day when their oppressors are destroyed by an even greater force, a force so violent they will dash their enemy's babies against a stone. “Then you’ll finally know just how bad it feels” sings the psalmist.
It is ghastly. So ghastly that, as one person observed during Bible study on Monday, we don’t usually read that part in church. But we should. As they say in AA, “you’re only as sick as your secrets,” and this is a part of ourselves we need to face if we’re ever going to learn how to do things differently.
Likewise, consider psalm 139, that beautiful psalm that begins, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me, you know when I sit and when I rise, you perceive my thoughts from afar…” You know that one? We read it a lot, but we almost always omit verses 19-22: “If only you, O God, would slay the wicked! …(for) They speak of you with evil intent… Do I not hate those who hate you…and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.”
And then we pick up with, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
“See if there is any offensive way in me…” Did you not just hear yourself?
Or consider Isaiah 25, another passage so full of peace and promise that we often read it at funerals:
On this mountain God will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples,the sheet that covers all nations;
God will swallow up death forever.The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces;he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth…
9 In that day they will say,
“Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us.This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”
The hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain; but Moab…Moab will be trampled in their land as straw is trampled down in the manure.
Wait a minute. What happened to all people? What happened to all nations? The prophet believes that there will come a day when God will wipe away the tears from all faces…all faces except for those Moabites. It would seem that after what they did to the Israelites, those S.O.B.’s are still going to get what’s coming to them.
I often say that scripture is descriptive rather than prescriptive, meaning that scripture isn’t always telling us who we should be. More often than not it’s simply showing us who we really are… and friends, the truth is that we are all deeply conflicted when it comes to conflict. Even those who were holy enough to write scripture.
We may believe that all people are children of God, but when some of those children hurt our children, we are quick to cast them out of the family with dehumanizing rhetoric that only leads to more hurt. We may long for peace and believe that God does too, but when we are hit, our first instinct is to hit back even harder; so hard that the one who threw the first punch can never hurt us that way again.
The trouble is, we’ve been hitting one another for so long now that there’s no way to know anymore who threw the first punch. There’s no one left above the fray. There’s just this cycle of retribution that feels inescapable, a cycle that simmers and simmers and simmers until it boils over into full scale war, only to go back to simmering after we’ve exhausted ourselves in our attempts to wipe out the ones who caused us harm.
Which is why (spoiler alert) war never leads to peace. War is, at best, only ever a temporary solution; as temporary as the time it takes for our enemies to regain their strength and pay us back for whatever we did to pay them back for whatever they did to pay us back for whatever we did to pay them back, for… you get the point.
And yet when it’s our turn to do things differently, we refuse to learn. Even after years and years and years of the same violent strategy followed by the same violent result we fail - be we Americans, Haitians, Sudanese, Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, Palestinians - fail to understand that peace is not what you get when you finally destroy everything or everyone who could potentially harm you; because that battle never ends. Peace - the true, just, lasting peace that we all long for - only ever comes from the hard work of making peace.
Vivian Silver’s son wants to break that cycle. He didn’t always. The truth was that he had come to resent the time and energy his mother had put into her peace work. For years he regarded her crusade as exhausting, naive, futile.
But as Yonatan watched Israel mobilize against Hamas, “he quickly saw how Vivian’s loss could be used as justification for more killing and destruction;” the exact opposite of everything she had lived and ultimately died for. “On television,” writes Goldberg, “he heard politicians transmuting grief into talk of military might. They were celebrating a bombing campaign that had already killed thousands of civilians, and that, in Yonatan’s mind, would only result in more devastation, not security for either side.”
He understood the impulse. We all do. But even greater than his desire to inflict pain, was Yonatan’s desire to protect other families - be they Israeli or Palestinian, from the kind of loss he had suffered. And so, against all odds, October 7th turned Yonatan, not into a soldier bent on avenging his mother’s death, but into an activist for peace determined to carry on her legacy.
“To many people, Yonatan’s plea — for Israel to immediately end the strikes on its neighbors and reach a permanent cease-fire — sounded detached from reality.” In his interview with Goldberg he admits that “peace activists ha(ve) to operate outside the confines of reality, to change what (is) possible…” But people like Yonatan are not the crazy ones. We are! We are if we persist in doing the exact thing we know deep down has never and will never work.
Standing in the rubble of what was once his mother’s home, Yonatan told Emma Goldberg that taking on his mother’s work has (actually) been a balm (for his soul). “When I’m active… I maintain hope,” he says. (Whereas) “If I sit at home, (peace) seems less plausible.” He (has come to) understand why (his mother) clung to her optimism all those years: ‘It’s better than any alternative,’ he says.
And then Yonatan, according to Goldberg, “looked up at the sky through a crack in the ceiling. The second level of the house, where his children used to sleep when they visited for holidays, was entirely burned. Sunlight filtered through.
“Another person could come here and say this is the reason to kill Palestinians,” Yonatan said. “I stand here and say this is the reason to fight for peace. So this won’t happen again.
He believe(s) that the cycle of grief can twist into something new.”
And dear ones, I hope and trust that you do too.
There is no way to peace…peace in the way.
Yonatan, even and in spite of his grief, is showing us how to walk it.
“If the very militants who destroyed his mother’s kibbutz came to him now saying they were ready to negotiate for peace, Yonatan told (Goldberg) he would listen openly. ‘Come,' he said. ‘Even if you killed my mother before.’
Come.
Amen
[object Object]