World Communion Sunday
4 October 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
PEACEMAKERS, CHEESEMAKERS
Matthew 5:9. Colossians 3.12-17
My twisted mind cannot hear this beatitude without returning to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, an irreverent British parody on the life of Jesus. There’s a scene where Jesus is speaking the Beatitudes to a crowd so large that word has to be passed back through the people by word of mouth. By the time word makes it to the back, “Blessed are the peacemakers” has become “Blessed are the cheesemakers,” which sends confusion through the crowd as they wonder what is so special about cheesemakers.
We have the words of Jesus in black and white (or red, depending on your translation) and yet we are equally confused often wondering what is so special about peacemakers. Many of us prefer cheesemakers – they make our food taste so much better.
Most all of us long for a world without conflict, politicians will often talk about peace, but most of us do not know the things that make for peace as Jesus prayed we would. Some of you will remember the American military referring to violent acts in Vietnam as “peace offensives.” Or the time one former president labeled an enormously destructive bomb “the peacekeeper.”
As the first Gulf War opened in 1991, three clergy were interviewed on a news cast. Two of them declared, “God is with us, we must win!” The third opened his Bible and read the words of Jesus: “Love your enemies.” “Blessed are the peacemakers . . .” and was interrupted by a shout from the minister next to him: “That’s not relevant now! We’re at war!” To which the third clergy replied: “If it’s not relevant now, it’s never relevant.”1
The peace question is not “Does it work in the world?” The peace question is: “What does it mean to follow Jesus in this concrete situation?”2 And though the answer is not always simple, we must reckon with the words of Jesus: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Usually peacemakers are called everything BUT a child of God. They are deemed as irrelevant in our violent world, dismissed as naive hippies, even among Christians, primarily because we’ve been formed most fully by the world to believe that justice requires violence. Peacemakers are unpopular because they often stand in the middle, refuse to take sides, so no one trusts them.
In the powerful film Dead Man Walking, Susan Sarandon is a nun who faithfully visits with a killer on death row AND the parents of the girl he killed. The parents do not understand why she is willing to be the killer’s spiritual guide. She says she’s just trying to follow the example of Jesus. And they tell her: “You can’t be with him and with us.” We understand what they mean.
We live in a world desperate for peace. Shalom is the Hebrew word, which includes everything that makes for a person’s good – health, fulfillment, harmony, wholeness, justice, freedom.
On this World Communion Sunday, Christians all over the world gather around the Table of the Lord as a witness to the church as the one body of Christ. And yet we continue to divide ourselves over issues Jesus never even talked about. It has been said that the spiritual health of a church is often linked to how we discuss our differences and whether we follow the wisdom of
scripture and “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
As a nation, we are dangerously divided – politicians act like spoiled children who refuse to share power or compromise for the common good. If a nation’s quality of life is related to how willing its leaders are to negotiate their differences, then it appears to me that America has stage four cancer of the soul and is presently on life support.
In one of the many dreaded political ads of this season one candidate warned other unspecified people groups that they did not have the right to impose their culture upon us. Who is us? It sounded like a white person’s warning to people of brown skin. Not necessarily the best approach to a peaceful community.
One week ago this morning in our beloved town, twelve of our teenagers were shot in Carolyn Crayton Park. What will the body of Christ, the children of God do about the anger, hopelessness, and poverty that leads people to such violence?
As individuals, we tend to keep our walls up from those who are different. We find it easy not to talk to certain people. We hold on to grudges and choose not to forgive. We nurture cynicism, bitterness, and resentment.
When Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount, the crowd is filled with cynical, bitter, and resentful people. When Jesus says, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God, they think he is out of touch. Peacemaking is a strange suggestion to make to those who live under the cruel thumb of Rome who keep peace through threats of violence. Jesus knows that peace sounds foolish, that racial prejudice was as real then as it is now. People were at each other’s throats. Jesus offers a better way.
But let’s be clear: Peacemakers do not avoid conflict. They are not passive. They do not run from trouble. The person who glosses over problems, ignores differences, acting as if everything is alright when it is not, is not a peacemaker. Peacemaking is not passively accepting things the way they are, but a holy work performed to make things better. Our choices in this divisive world are not to argue or do nothing. We have the option of doing something astonishing, something that makes peace. Peacemakers work for what is true. And peace has to be made by confronting problems. Peacemaking is actively pushing back against the powers that want to take the easy way, the profitable way, irregardless of those in poverty.
Peacemakers ask questions like “What can I do to make this better?” and “How can we fix this?” Peacemakers are those whose passion is for reconciliation, building bridges, promoting understanding. Peacemakers say things like “We disagree, but I can see why you feel that way,” and “This is hard to talk about, but it’s important.” Peacemakers must be creative in exploring new ways to bring people together. It’s too easy to be arrogant and to simply say, “Why doesn’t everybody leave who does not believe like we do?”
Swedish couple Henry and Helga were married for 60 years. They fought like cats and dogs every day of their married lives. They began the day of their 60th anniversary with a terrible spat that lasted all day. At the end of the day Helga said to her husband, “Henry, tonight I tink ven ve pray, ve better pray for peace. Ve been fighting each other for 60 years. So tonight, I tink I’ll pray that the Lord vill take you home, and I’ll go live with my sister Olga.” Not exactly the kind of creativity Jesus called for in harmonious peacemaking.
Then there’s the Indiana sheep-farmer who brought imagination and creativity to his role as a peacemaker. The sheep-farmer had a problem: his neighbors’ dogs were killing his sheep. He tried talking to the neighbors, but to no avail. The problem continued a long time and it became apparent that something had to be done. He could have paid an attorney and filed a lawsuit. He could have built higher fences. He could have poisoned or shot the dogs. But he had a more
creative idea: To each of his neighbors’ children he gave a lamb as a pet. In time, the neighbors had to control their dogs in order to spare their children’s pets. And in doing so, they also eliminated the sheep-farmer’s problem. Peacemaking requires creativity, commitment, and sometimes a bit of humor.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. Doug Dickens said, “Peacemaking is not a Christian option in a buffet line of good deeds. Peacemaking is a divine obligation which is to be taken seriously by every Christian.”
Peacemaking is hard because the differences are real.3 But making peace is how others will know that we are children of God. We are those whom God has met in our brokenness, our sin, and our most embarrassing failures. And once we experience the grace of God at our lowest point it then becomes hard to be judgmental of others at their lowest point. We can no longer live in the world with the same divisiveness – we are good, they are evil. When the gospel takes root in your life, things aren’t that simple. We come to understand that drawing lines is an obstacle to peacemaking: my family, my country, my ethnicity, my religion, my culture, my sports team.
Those who would wage peace must be willing to be misunderstood and even hurt in the process. Don’t forget that the One who spoke this beatitude was hung on a cross as God’s example of what can happen to peacemakers. The Anglican priest Terry Waite sought to intervene in a hostage situation in Lebanon and became a captive himself for several years. How much are you willing to risk to be a child of God, a peacemaker?
God calls us to open our hearts, minds, and mouths to share peace. Our best efforts to heal an estrangement and make peace may not work. Paul knew this when he wrote to the Romans: Live in harmony with one another. (As lovers of music know, harmony is not the same as unison; it’s much more beautiful!) And do not think yourself wiser than you are. (Pretty good advice). And then Paul said, If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. We make our tiny (sometimes scary) steps toward reconciliation, and leave the rest with God.
Peacemakers! Cheesemakers! It’s easy to get confused in a world where it’s hard to hear over the screaming and violence. Jesus says: “Kudos to the peacemakers! – who lay themselves down like a bridge to those who are estranged or excluded or unforgiven. They shall be called the children of God.”
So let us: Be kind to strangers. Act like a friend to someone who is not. Speak a word of kindness to someone who has never heard such a word from you. Restore broken relationships. Think the best of others. Stop and listen. Because God’s children make peace.
It’s hard to be a peacemaker if you find you have no peace in your own heart. Do you remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s wonderful story Treasure Island? Jim Hawkins is told, “Jim, keep the boat steady!” Jim replies, “How can I keep it steady when I’m not steady on the inside?”
Maybe you feel there’s a war going on inside your life today. If that’s your feeling, perhaps you would consider inviting Jesus to help you discover the peace that he offers, a kind of peace most people in this world wish for, but never really know. So we read in the letter to the Colossians: Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which you were indeed called in the one body. And Jesus freely says, My peace I give to you. It’s here for the taking, essential for the
holy work of peacemaking.
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1. James Howell, The Beatitudes for Today, Westminster John Knox, 2006, 76
2. Scot McKnight, The Sermon on the Mount, Zondervan Academic, 2013, 47
3. Mark Scandrette, The Ninefold Path of Jesus, InterVarsity Press, 2021, 106