The Savior's Example of Peacemaking

[This is a sacrament meeting talk that I gave on October 12th. Posting as requested.]

Bishop asked me to speak on President Nelson’s talk, “Peacemakers Needed”.

I know so many people who have become alienated from family or friends over things they heard on the news and had different thoughts on, and that seems so totally pointless and ugly to me, and it seems like everybody I know has a story like that. We live in a very angry and volatile time.

I felt convicted by this talk, and it made me want to do better — but I struggled with it. And maybe if I explain why I struggled with it, you might not see it the way I see it, but you’ll at least learn something about me and my family, and why we are the way we are.

So I’ll just jump right into it: I grew up around a lot of people who convinced themselves that there was no righteous way and no righteous reason to ever have a fight.

And these were people who were always nice. They were always civil and respectable and polite. And they had other virtues that I admire.

But their marriages were a nightmare, their lives were full of secrets, and people I love were hurt, very badly, by things that were allowed to fester in the dark.

And when these people I love went to those nice people for help — for protection, for justice — they got a sermon.

And they would cloak this — from my perspective, cowardice — in the mantle of peacemaking. Jesus wouldn’t want me to pick a fight.

Even when I was a kid, I found this utterly contemptible. Not because I wanted a license to fly off the handle, or because I wanted to hurt anybody — but because I saw so many people being hurt, and the people who were supposed to protect them were so afraid of doing their job the wrong way that they didn’t do their job at all.

And when I opened my scriptures, I couldn’t find anybody who acted like that — not the good guys, anyway. Nephi, Abinadi, Alma, Moroni, Peter, Paul, Moses, David, Elijah, Enoch, Joseph, Brigham, Spencer W. Kimball or Ezra Taft Benson — they get into conflict all the time — and they’re not nice about it, in any way we would recognize today.

They walk right up to Pharisees and wicked kings and they start fights. They make accusations. They point out when the other party is lying. They warn them to repent. Sometimes they get into the wrong fights, and they say things they shouldn’t, and then they repent. But they were in the arena.

In Chad H. Webb’s talk from this last conference, he says that when we are teaching any principle of the gospel, we ought to ask “Can you think of a time when Jesus Christ exemplified this principle?”

Which is a very interesting exercise for the principle of peacemaking. When people describe this gentle, non-confrontational nice-guy Jesus, I honestly wonder how we can be reading the same book.

Jesus broke the Pharisee’s rules right in front of their faces, explicitly to provoke them. He didn’t treat them as if they were arguing in good faith when they weren’t: in fact, he explicitly mocked their hypocrisy, calling them whitewashed tombs, a brood of vipers, children of hell.

He drove out the moneychangers who desecrated his Father’s house.

He told the Samaritan woman at the well that she worshipped she knew not what, and that salvation was of the Jews.

In fact, as I was preparing for this talk, I struggled to find episodes in the gospels where Jesus was not confronting, challenging, correcting, or upsetting people.

Now, that’s Jesus: he has special prerogatives, and there are a million ways in which I am not like him — but he did command us to to look to him and follow his example.

He came to us in the flesh specifically to show us how to live. He said “follow me, and do the things which ye have seen me do.”

Which is not the same thing as saying “imagine the nicest guy you can think of, and do what he would do.”

Now, again, I know that the Lord wants me to be a better peacemaker — I can feel the truth of that — especially now, when it feels like peace is being taken from the earth.

But the measure of that cannot be respectability, and fitting in, and never making anybody mad.

They killed him — and it wasn’t because he was so nice and polite and well-liked.

So, recognizing that I’m not Jesus, what should I do with his example? How did Jesus make peace?

President Nelson tells the story of a surgeon who got angry during an operation and threw a gangrene-infected scalpel into his arm. And that image stuck with me.

It was disgusting to imagine this healer, entrusted with this helpless and very sick person, taking his tool of healing & using it to cut someone because he lost his temper.

There’s a dozen ways that story could have ended in tragedy because a person in a position of trust chose to behave like a child.

But for me, that story was the key to this talk, and helped me understand Jesus’ example of conflict and peacemaking.

Jesus is the master surgeon. His purpose in these conflicts was always to expose and cut out what was rotten, and then bind up and heal and reconcile. That’s peacemaking: you dig into uncomfortable and difficult things in order to set them right and harmonize them, so that there can be genuine peace, and not just quiet.

Jesus instigated these conflicts with more knowledge, and more skill, and more love for the people he corrected, than I could ever bring to any conflict.

I have definitely walked into situations telling myself that I was performing surgery, and then realized in hindsight that I was just throwing a contaminated scalpel around. Sometimes I was really trying to do the right thing, but I was over my skis, and clumsy, and careless — but sometimes I was like that surgeon, just being childish and spiteful.

It’s so easy to get it wrong.

But we’re in a bind, because God has given us stewardships that we are not free to abdicate, which place us in fundamental conflict with the world.

We are called to cry repentance. We’re called to defend our families even unto bloodshed. Many of you were literally anointed to wield the sword of justice. And none of that is at odds with peacemaking — it is peacemaking.

The reason there are so many amateur surgeons running around cutting each other up right now is that so many responsibilities have been abdicated, so many uncomfortable things have been left unsaid, and now there are much more difficult conversations that need to be had, in our families, our communities, our country. Now is a time to be wise, and kind, but now is not the time to check out.

The Parable of the Talents tells us that when we stand before God to be judged, we do not want to say, “Well, I was scared I might do it wrong, so I just didn’t do it.”

So peacemaking, for me, means getting better at having difficult conversations. It means searching our motives carefully. It means respecting the gravity of the task, especially with our families and friends. Surgery is risky even when your motives are pure, and not every disagreement justifies it.

In fact, in intimate relationships, the surgery analogy breaks down, because one of you is not the surgeon, and the other is not the patient — you’re entangled, and you have to go to work together, on the both of you, at the same time.

And it’s not obvious where to cut, and you have to keep your hands steady while you’re taking all kinds of incisions yourself, and not necessarily in the right places, and it hurts, and it’s a mess.

The Savior’s way of peacemaking is the cross.

It’s not at all trivial. It’s not for the timid. It’s no wonder people don’t want to do it.

For ordinary people to do this is a miracle. Repentance — receiving a new heart, losing your disposition to do evil — is a miracle. There is no peace — within myself, my family, my country — without the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

So we shouldn’t try to do it alone. We have to invite the master healer into our homes. We have to seek the companionship of the Holy Ghost, and then search and discern that voice, especially when we are called into conflict. We have to repent early and often. But we cannot shun the fight.