Shalom Y'all!

During Lent I’m writing each week about one of the blessings Jesus gave in his great Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7). Today’s blessing seems tailor made for our era: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

When I was a kid, mom put a plaque on our mantle that melded faith and southern lingo. It said, “Shalom Y’all.”

Shalom was the greeting and parting word in the biblical era. When we greet or bid farewell, our words don’t carry much freight: “Hey, how’s it going?” and “See ya later.” But in Jesus’ day their “Shaloms” meant, “Peace be with you.”

By that they meant something more than what parents do settling sibling rivalries – resolving conflict. Shalom meant that “all is right with people personally and relationally.” So Shalom-making is a high hope indeed!

Sarah and I also have some “Shalom” art gracing our mantle – not a plaque, but a painting by Edward Hicks.

Hicks was an early 19^th century Pennsylvania artist. He was also part of the Quaker Church, which had a distinct focus on peacemaking. He called this painting, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” and sought to depict the prophet Isaiah’s description of the Kingdom, “the wolf shall lie down with the lamb. And a little child shall lead them.”

Look closely, and you can see in the background that he combined Isaiah’s peacemaking prophecy with hopes that were still alive for Quakers with their Native American neighbors. As you know, those hopes didn’t turn out so well. But Hicks saw those efforts as true peacemaking, or shalom-making.

If we updated Hicks’ depiction to our day, whom might we show meeting in the background: MAGA enthusiasts and Democrats? Ukrainians and Russians? Palestinians and Israelis? Or maybe you and a family member with whom you’re long since alienated? Is such shalom-making a mere pipe dream? It can seem so. But then why would Jesus speak such a blessing?

Actually, most of the life patterns Jesus blesses in these beatitudes are beyond us. But they weren’t beyond him. Nor are they beyond what he has called us to commence as our ways of life in the Kingdom he has launched, and will complete when he returns.

In that completed Kingdom I don’t know if we’ll discover that the wolf and lamb’s comfort with each other is literal or simply symbolic. But I know that we’ll all be living fully in shalom, and so MAGA enthusiasts and Democrats will connect easily. So, too, will all the other conflicted twosomes.

When Jesus first came, he was a shalom-maker, but as with the other advances of his Kingdom, his shalom-making remained incomplete. Even so, he demonstrated the blessed life of shalom-making in his Kingdom, and his own character as Son of God.

Now he has called us to do the same – not abandoning the shalom-making call because it won’t be completed, but pursuing it because it points to him, what he has done already, and what he will one day complete. And it shows our kinship to him, for he blesses shalom-makers as “children of God.”

So don’t wait for a shalom-making venue where your efforts will be a cinch to succeed. Bring your blessed Jesus life into a conflict zone that is there before you, and let him do his kind of shalom-making through you and in you.

It’s what our world needs now – and what Jesus blesses now. Go for it, children of God!

Shalom y’all!