When Peace Becomes Obnoxious

Lenten Reflections on the Sermon on the Mount

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Matthew 5:9

On Thursday, March 29, 1956, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a message at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky titled When Peace Becomes Obnoxious. It was his response to the University of Alabama barring Autherine Lucy, a black woman, from attending classes. A few years prior, Autherine had sued the university and their attempts to deny her admission based on the color of her skin. Though she succeeded and was permitted to attend, becoming the university’s first African-American student, Autherine was expelled three days later “for her own safety.”

Autherine Lucy

Once on campus, Lucy’s life was threatened. People threw eggs and bricks at her. A mob formed and jumped on the top of a car in which she was riding. They held protests against campus integration. Their ringleader, a man named Leonard Wilson, “told racist jokes as the crowd waved Confederate flags and howled” at “the exact location Confederate cadets faced Union soldiers 91 years earlier.”¹

The next day, after Autherine was expelled, the paper came out with this headline: Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama.

Dr. King chose this headline to be his dance partner, lamenting how this “peace” had been “purchased at the price of capitulating to the force of darkness.” This, King said, is the type of peace that all people of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious, that stinks in the nostrils of the Almighty God.

He goes on to say:

Yes, it is true that if the Negro accepts his place, accepts exploitation and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be a peace boiled down to stagnant complacency, deadening passivity, and if peace means this, I don’t want peace.

1) If peace means accepting second-class citizenship, I don’t want it.
2) If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don’t want it.
3) If peace means being complacently adjusted to a deadening status quo, I don’t want peace.
4) If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don’t want peace. So in a passive, non-violent manner, we must revolt against this peace.

In His seventh beatitude, Jesus teaches: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. It is the only place in the scriptures where “peacemakers” is mentioned. It’s root word - peace - however, appears over 90 times. One of those instances occurs in Zechariah’s prophecy about Jesus, the One who will, “shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79).

The other root word - maker - is pretty straightforward: to do or to make. It’s range of uses then were as manifold as it continues to be today. We make food, creating meals from a variety of ingredients, patiently, lovingly, creatively. We make cars and machines and designs and materials using our fullest faculties, employing all our heart and mind and soul into their creation. We make pots out of clay, turning mud into beautiful - and useful - works of art. We make our homes. We make friends. We - like the God in whose image, the scriptures tell us, we ourselves are made - are makers.

What might it mean to make peace in our world today? In our lives? In our community?

And what does it not mean? What is “false peace” - the type “stinks in the nostrils of of the Almighty God, that values “being nice” over being truthful, the type that is defined by a lack of fighting rather than the presence of justice?

I had a friend who helped define the distinction for me. He said, when his two sons are fighting, he can send them to their rooms. Their separation and the lack of arguing is a type of “peace” but not true peace. That’s not the desire he has for his boys. He wants them to confess and own what they themselves have done to the other. He wants them to forgive each other. He wants them to love each other. And he wants them to be friends. That is a different kind of peace, one that does not negate, dismiss, deflect, nor attempt to forget the offenses caused, but one that names them and owns them so that true reconciliation might take place.

Being a parent is hard. So is making peace.

It involves being honest, even though it be uncomfortable, hard, or painful.

Making peace involves ownership, of what we ourselves have done and what we have left undone, what others have done, what those before us did and did not do, the ways we have been complicit, too.

And, to be sure, making peace is proactive; it is not passive. A meal doesn’t make itself and neither does peace. It takes ingredients. It takes people. It takes time. And, as with many meals, it will probably involve some heat-filled moments.

But thanks be to God who is with us in the fires, the One who is guiding our feet - and this world - toward The Way of Peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus says. And to that I say, Amen! May we be among such blessed company in such a time as this.

1. https://civilrightstuscaloosa.org/trail/stop-4/