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Blasted are the Peacemakers

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. – Jesus

The longer you live and communicate for a living on social media, the more you come to accept a fairly reliable truth: discord sells.

Our minds are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of messages every day, all clamoring for our attentions and affections, all seeking to occupy the same increasingly crowded bit of real-estate for a few precious seconds.

And when it comes to breaking through the virtual din, nothing moves the needle quite like conflict.

As a result most people (Christians included) welcome it, nurture it, and if needed—we manufacture it. This is true of faith-based bloggers, big time pastors, celebrity evangelists, savvy politicians, and Christian folks looking to grow their brands and ministries.

All too often we who claim Christ are as divisive and antagonistic and combative out here as anyone, and I’ll be the first to cop to it and repent of it. Sure, we name drop Jesus but we’ll take you out in a flurry of tell offs and put downs while we do it. It’s a startling easy trap to fall into: begin by obeying a noble, sacred calling but end up chasing the cheap aphrodisiac of page views and post impressions.

And it would all be perfectly fine—except, Jesus.

Reading the words called the Beatitudes, which begin the most famous sermon attributed to him, there is a quiet calm on display; a dignity and gentleness that now sound foreign to our ears and easily become white noise fading off into the background. They’re actually radical, counterintuitive invitations—but they don’t generate enough heat to register that way anymore.
 
I’m afraid that if Jesus were on social media today, most Christians wouldn’t follow him. 

His posts would likely be buried in relative obscurity beneath loud, flashing layers of shade-throwing and name calling—written off as trite, religious, bleeding heart pabulum. He’d certainly never hope to go viral with that played out, hackneyed, “love one another” schtick—that snowflake. He’d surely be called a heretic by pulpit-pounding Bible Belt Evangelicals, with his “what you do to the least you have done to me” guilt trip B.S.

In fact, try and echo the soft heart of the Beatitudes these days, and you’ll find most Christians aren’t all that interested. Nothing sexy there. No juice. No bombast. No fireworks. Worse, it seems the louder people become in their call for compassion, the more they advocate for decency, and the greater they elevate humility—the more likely they are to get soundly destroyed by a chorus of sneering trolls, accusing them of watering down the Gospel. Christlike love now gets shouted down in the streets by the angry mob of our collective outrage.

So much of our modern spiritual experience runs on negativity that it’s become a core value. Take a look around. Remove the anger from many Christian’s social media expression of faith or from the platform of most Conservative Republicans and you’ll often find there isn’t a whole lot left. Ironically the more commonplace controversy and enmity become in our public faith discourse, the less interesting Jesus seems to become to us—and yet the more necessary he is.

The quiet goodness of the Jesus of the gospels is the clear antidote to the chest-beating, pot-stirring, dying-to-go-viral vanity that we mistake for fervent faith; his steady benevolence a dying language as we all grow more fluent in bitterness; his love for the other, the only remedy to American Nationalistic religious venom. 

When Jesus’ goodness and humility really take root in us, our inflated egos shrink back to their proper size, the towering facades of self we labor on crumble, and we begin seeking restoration as much as confrontation as we encounter people. We want others to be lifted, cared for, blessed.

The way of Jesus is the movement toward the small and the low places, it is the way of denial and sacrifice and yielding to another, it is the path of mercy giving and peacemaking.

This way is beautiful and filled with “life that is truly life”—but maybe that isn’t enough to grab us anymore. 

To hell with the peacemakers, war is doing better business these days.

 

 

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