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“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God”
Matthew 5 v.9

On Sunday 17th February the Revd John Nicholson led our worship and our discussion after the service. Below is the text of his sermon for that day. John was minister at Union Chapel from 1959 to 1966 and was also Ecumenical Officer for England and Area Superintendent for the the North Eastern Area of the Baptist Union.

The year 2007 saw a remarkable celebration throughout the country of the Bi-centenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Scholars, politicians and journalists explored the events leading up to the Act of 1807, and many sought to apply the challenge to forms of modern slavery, both at home and abroad. The Christian Church joined in this celebration, placing it in a Biblical context, both from the OT with the exodus from Egypt and from the NT with Paul’s letter to Philemon , and stressed the contemporary evil of Human Trafficking.

I want this morning to look at the story of a parallel campaign, what could be described as the peace movement. I deliberately call this a campaign because I believe this is as urgent a challenge to the church as is that of slavery. It so happens that this weekend marks the 50th anniversary of CND,(the Campaign for Nuclear Dis-armament). I want to start this story with the passage from Isaiah chapter 2. Some years ago a lecturer at Lancaster University, John Sawyer, now at Newcastle, wrote a book entitled “The Fifth Gospel – Isaiah in the history of Christianity”. He points out how different ages have emphasised different parts of the book of Isaiah. The middle ages stressed the messianic prophecies in the early chapters, the reformation emphasised Isaiah 53 with its picture of the Suffering Servant, the C20 focussed on verses 2-4 of chapter 2 with its picture of world peace. He mentions that in 1959 the Soviet Union presented to the United Nations building in New York a bronze statue of a man beating a sword into a ploughshare – what an irony that an atheistic government should use a biblical image. The other passages in Isaiah mentioned by John Sawyer develop this picture – the messianic prophecies include the description of the child that is to be born as “prince of peace”, and Isaiah 52 contains the verse “how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion “your God reigns””. We could say that Isaiah combined the idealism of a poet with the realism of a politician and the fervour of a preacher.

Let’s move on in the story from the OT to the NT. We have the words of our text as one of the Beatitudes. We have the two examples of the new righteousness superseding the old law later in Matthew 5 regarding non-resistance to evil and loving your enemies. We have the example of Jesus himself at the time of his arrest rebuking Peter for drawing his dagger with the words “those who take the sword shall perish by the sword”. In the rest of the NT there is no direct reference to making peace, just as there wasn’t to the institution of slavery, but in the early church we know of Christians martyred for refusing to join the army. Sadly the conversion of Constantine made the church almost a department of government, but in the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas wrestled with the question “what is a just war?”, and that discussion has continued ever since, although today an increasing number of scholars maintain that with developing technology no war can be described as “just”.

At the time of the Reformation our spiritual forefathers, the Anabaptists, returned to the teaching of Jesus, and most of them asserted that a Christian could not bear arms . They, together with their Mennonite off-shoot, developed the idea of a “Peace Church”, and the Mennonites hold to that position today, as you doubtless learned from Alan and Eleanor Krieder, when they were living in Manchester. British Baptists have never gone as far as that, and indeed the last Baptist to be a member of the cabinet, Ernest Brown during the Second World War, used to argue strongly year after year at Baptist Assemblies in the 50s and 60s in favour of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. That is not to say that all Baptists agreed with him. During both the First and Second World Wars the minister of South Parade, Leeds, the church we belong to, was a pacifist, and was respected as such by the members, even by those who strongly disagreed with him. I think it is true to say that of the 8 ministers of Union Chapel during the C20, 4 were pacifists, although for pastoral reasons we didn’t emphasise the point, perhaps as much as we should. In retrospect we concentrated more on peace making between Christians through the ecumenical movement, although I hope we showed that we were against racism and sexism. I know of two occasions in the last 40 years when a preacher here has been interrupted by a member of the congregation, once at the end of the service and once during the sermon. I commend you for your present pattern of worship, which provides an opportunity for this during the second session!

During the past 25 years however the attitude of the church in Britain to peace and war has changed remarkably. At the end of the Falklands war the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, incurred the wrath of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, for refusing to make the service in St Paul’s Cathedral primarily an occasion for thanksgiving. When in 2003 Britain invaded Iraq, the leaders of all denominations in Britain criticised the government for acting without the support of the United Nations, and, during the past year they have all expressed deep hesitation about replacing the Trident nuclear missiles. It is worth noting that some Baptists, in common with other Christians, have resumed (after nearly a century to the contrary)taking an active part in party politics, so that in both Leeds North West and in Manchester Withington at the last election the seat changed hands, in your case to a son of the manse, in our case to a committed Roman Catholic. Certainly in Leeds the Iraq war was a major issue. A former associate member of Union Chapel has recently been chief whip for several years of one of the major parties, and a former member of the Sunday School is a PPC in a target seat.

How then are we to further this challenge to be peace makers? Let me suggest a number of ways:

• By supporting the peace movement in the context of other campaigns which are seeking to further the kingdom of God upon earth, such as Make Poverty History, Cut the Carbon, Inter-Faith Relations, CAAT (Campaign against the Arms Trade).
• By becoming involved in party politics, and in that way seeking to arrest the general apathy to politics in modern society.
• By demonstrating that within the fellowship of the Christian church there can be unity with diversity in seeking the kingdom, consensus without confrontation which is a scourge of modern party politics. It was a young Baptist woman, the secretary of the Christian Fellowship of one of the three main political parties, who took the initiative a few years ago in forming a Christian Political Fellowship where members of the three parties can meet and pray together.
• By holding together the three characteristics of Hebrew prophecy which are exemplified in the prophet Isaiah – the idealism of a poet, the realism of a politician, and the fervour of a preacher.

In 1995 a book was published entitled “The shaping of prophecy – passion, perception and practicality”, by Adrian Hastings, Professor of Theology at Leeds, a Roman Catholic, who was succeeded in that post by Haddon Wilmer, a Baptist layman. It consisted of a selection of sermons, and I want to conclude by quoting from one of them by the editor, entitled “Between prayer and politics”: “without prayer and its grounding in faith the human city and its politics remain irredeemable. But without politics prayer becomes a selfish ego-trip. A way to God which is not a way back hour by hour to our neighbour on the streets of our city is the way to a God who does not deserve either to be worshipped or to exist”.
John Nicholson