Paul Hill is dead. He was killed in the war. A holy war, he would say. A just war, he claimed. The Reverend Paul Hill was executed by the State of Florida this past Tuesday for murdering a doctor and his bodyguard in 1994 outside an abortion clinic.  Hill believed he was saving innocent human lives and that he had — and all the people of God have — a mandate to punish the evildoers and protect vulnerable babies from genocidal abortionists.

I expect a great reward in heaven, he said before his execution. I feel very honored that they are going to kill me for what I did. I wish he could speak to us now from the grave. I hope he would have a different view of things? [Associated Baptist Press (3 Sept. 2003)]

Now, what you think of abortion law is quite beside the point in this case. Even the most anti-abortion forces have condemned Paul Hill’s actions.  Flip Benham of Operation Rescue said: Christ did not come to save us with a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a dagger between his teeth; he came to lay his life down so that others might live. And Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission equally denounced Hill, comparing his logic to radical Islamic jihadists. (A good word for the Southern Baptists — mark it down.)

But this is the point, don’t you know?! Whether you are Christian, Jew, or Muslim, you can turn to your sacred scriptures and justify just about any cause, including your violent acts, on the grounds that God requires this kind of dedication.

We are close to the second anniversary of 9/11, when Muslim terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center with prayers on their lips, reciting in Arabic the mantra Allahu Akbar — God is great! How could they think they are honoring God by killing people God has made? Well, Paul Hill’s actions show that it isn’t just Muslims that fall prey to this deluded thinking. Christians do, too, and always have. Remember that we are the same people who thought that torturing and killing Muslims and Jews and even Christian heretics in the Middle Ages was a tool of God to purify the soul and bring it to the truth. Thank God we got away from that with the Reformation! No, sadly, even Protestants have been guilty of this. John Calvin presided over the burning at the stake of Dr. Michael Servetus outside the walls of Geneva for the capital crime of not believing in the doctrine of the Trinity. And all over the British Isles, you will find monuments to Catholics and Protestants who were martyred by one another in the cause of the true faith. Jews don’t get off the hook, either.  Some groups even today in Israel appeal to places in the Bible to justify the killing of Palestinians. They say that God gave them the Land of Israel and even ordered them to drive out the Canaanites, in some cases being sure to leave none of them alive. It’s in the Bible, people.

So,when we say we are people of the Book, when we say we are Bible-believers, that isn’t the end of the matter; it is only the beginning. We are all interpreters. You can claim to believe the Bible and be a Nazi or a bigot or a terrorist or an anti-Semite. But the question is whether reading the Bible that way will really lead you to a warm welcome at the gates of heaven when you have to go there, or put you on the hot seat to hell.

During the next five weeks we are going to examine what the Apostle Paul called the peace that passes understanding. I am going to make the claim that when we read the Bible rightly, we understand that God is a God of peace, of nonviolent love, of gracious persuasion and powerful forgiveness. We will look today at how this is grounded in the God who is peaceful by nature and who is working a peace agenda in the world though Jesus Christ, even now. In future weeks we will look at how we can experience personal peace with God that sinks in deep and frees our anxious hearts. We will look at how to make peace with those closest to us that betray us, and with those who are furthest from us that must yet become our neighbors. Finally, we will consider God’s ways of peace within the Christian family — the church — and among other religions. How does that sound? All right, then, climb on the peace train, and let’s ride it together.

God, first. God first, and God last, and God in between. If God exists at all — and we certainly believe in this room that much at least, then we are not going to pit peace against religion the way some do who think that religion itself is the real problem with the world. As if we are all more capable of being sweet, peace-loving humans if we could just shake off the shackles of religion, as if religion is all just superstition writ large. The issue is whether we are worshiping and emulating the right God, because we all become like the god we worship. We know that religion can become toxic and therefore dangerous to the health of everyone. But that is not what God intends, and it is clearly not how the Bible begins, ends or struggles toward in between.

So to the beginning then — Genesis 1. It may not seem obvious at first, but if you read Genesis 1 and 2, you find that there are two accounts of creation, not one. Why do you suppose we need two? People don’t write things down for no reason.  They are moved to write, even to write Scripture, in order to order life a certain way, in order to explain things on certain terms. The second account is probably the earlier, the first coming later, during the captivity of Israel in Babylon around the sixth century B.C. Every day Israel lived in Babylon, it had to manage in a world where the reigning religion of the god Marduk gave the ruling house of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors legitimacy to use violence to enforce their will on everyone. After all, the Enuma Elish, the creation account of the Babylonians, contains the story of how the world came into being as a result of a war among the gods. The world was created, in other words, out of violence, and the peace of society can therefore be maintained only by blood sacrifices to the gods in order to keep chaos at bay. When floods or drought threatened the land, the assumption was that the gods were unhappy, and the balance of nature was sign enough that something had to be done to appease their wrath. In ancient religions the sacrifice of a virgin might be performed in order to purify the people by transferring their sins onto her and offering the best of the people to the gods as an attempt at holiness. Or religion was protected, and the gods appeased by killing the enemies of the empire, thus honoring the gods of the people of that faith.

Into this worldview breaks the insight of Israel that a God of peace created the world in peace and for peace.  There is only one God; there is no battle to be fought in heaven. But God created space in which that which is not God might live in harmony with God. Once that space was made outside of God, though, the void, the emptiness, the chaos that emerged in God’s making space had to be ordered and set right. God began to fill that space with light and land and sea and creatures of every kind. And each time, each day God made the things that would come into being, God spoke a word and it came to pass. Let there be … was the word that is both command and invitation.

God made and ordered the world by a peaceful word, out of nonviolent love.  And this was a revolutionary thought to peoples of that time. But what it did for Israel, powerless against the might of Babylon and helpless against her gods, was to give hope that peace was a power that would defeat violence and terror. That the God that made the world would come to Israel’s aid, just as God did when they were slaves in Egypt. Israel left Egypt without firing a shot or taking any blood from her enemies. This is the God of the Bible, and this is the God we worship. Just say the word, God, and we have hope.

Fast forward to Paul’s view of the end of all things. When Christ’s work is finished on earth, when all the enemies of peace are subdued, the Son will hand over the remade world to the God who first made it. And it shall be the kind of world in which God will dwell with us in peace in the new space God is making. This is the vision of Isaiah that comes true at last: the lamb and the lion shall lie down together. Nature will be a habitat, not a jungle, and humankind and beast shall live in peace.

There was a beautiful and surprising picture of this a few years ago at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago. As crowds gathered round the gorilla exhibit, a three-year-old child climbed over a protective barrier and fell 20 feet into the gorilla’s lair. The little boy hit his head on the concrete floor and lay unconscious as the frightened humans, including the boy’s parents, looked on. There were seven gorillas in that habitat, each with arms the strength of ten men, each with incisors the size of a Rottweiler. What happened next can only be a reminder of the first days of creation and a hint of the world to come. A seven-year-old gorilla mother named Binti Jua, meaning “daughter of sunshine,” with her own baby on her back, shielded the child from the other gorillas, gently bent down and picked up the boy in her arms, then walked him over to the door and left him there in easy reach of the zoo staff. The boy was taken to the hospital and quickly recovered.

Now there was something surprising to us in this — that the gorilla would not obey the law of the jungle. There was an instinct for life and peace, even though humans may have been experienced as a threat to her and her young in the past. That instinct for peace is a hangover of creation and a hint of new creation, placed there by the God of peace. But it has to sink deeply into each of us and all of us. We have to commit ourselves to equally surprising acts of nonviolence and peacemaking if we are to reflect the God who made us and who calls us still in peace and to peace.

In between the first word and last of creation, there is the daily word of peace that is the same word. Peace I give unto you, Jesus said, my peace I give you. Not as the world gives. Let not your hearts be troubled. The means by which Jesus brought peace to the world was by offering himself as the final sacrifice for the sins of the world. He undermined violence by refusing to employ it. He announced God’s peace to the world by enacting it in his own life. This is the God we worship. This is the God who is at work even now to cure our warring ways and to draw us into the wholeness of Shalom, as the Jews call it — or Salaam, as the Arabs call it.  Peace, in any language.

The peace the world gives is seen in the Romans sacrifice of Jesus in order to quiet the crowds and keep King Herod from threat by the King of the Jews. The Pax Romano, the peace of Rome, was peace at any price, even at the cost of sacrificing an innocent man. But the peace of God is self-sacrifice. God offers the divine life as the final sacrifice for the world.

God thereby created a new space in which the world might live — a space called the body of Christ. The peace of God rules the body of Christ and is an invitation for all the world to share that space.

Peace is the first word of creation. Peace is the last. The peace of Christ is forever.