Radical Peace Makers God's Elite Fighters - Zack Morgan

Church historian Theodoret tells of a monk named Telemachus. He was an Eastern ascetic who was stoned to death in Rome when he tried to stop a contest between gladiators in the arena. He entered the stadium while the games were in progress and, going down into the arena, attempted to separate the combatants.

The spectators were infuriated, and at the instigation of Satan, they stoned to death this messenger of peace. Emperor Honoris, upon hearing this, was so moved at Telemachus's death that he abolished gladiatorial contests. Legend has it that as he ran down into the arena, Saint Telemachus was shouting, "Stop in the name of Christ! Stop in the name of Christ!"

So this story is one of a man who gave himself for the cause of peace, defeating the Roman culture of violent entertainment. Most Christians today know that Jesus is the Prince of Peace. But what does that mean for us?

What does that mean for us Christians who follow the King? How should we Christians represent the Prince of Peace in this violent world? The title of my message today is Radical Peacemakers: God's Elite Fighters. So a little background: last week, for those of you who weren't down for communion, downstairs for communion, Kevin was sharing a little bit, and he said that he prefers the word devout over the word radical. And it was funny because this I'd already had my title picked out. But I also thought it was funny why he said he liked the word devout. If any of you have been looking at his WhatsApp status in the last two weeks, he's been quoting from William Law quite extensively.

And William Law is famous for his work, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. So you can figure out where he got that from.

So Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are they that mourn. Blessed are the weak, meek. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the pure in heart.

And to jump into verse nine, Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven."

So the word peacemaker is found only one time in the Bible, and I believe that Jesus used the perfect word to describe this: one who makes peace. For myself, unfortunately, I had heard the word peacemaker so often that it had lost its original meaning to me.

And if you would ask the average American, "What is a peacemaker?" Well, probably the average American over 40, I would—this would be my definition of a peacemaker because I grew up reading the Encyclopedia. But if you would ask the average American, "What is a peacemaker?" I would venture to say they would mention someone like Jimmy Carter, who negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt back in the late '70s.

Although what President Carter did I would consider is a form of peacemaking, I do not believe that this is the kind of peacemaking that Jesus is talking about. What President Carter did was more of a broker. He facilitated—he negotiated a deal between two parties, making sure everybody stayed happy.

So that is why I'm using the word radical peacemaking. I want to get back to the root word of peacemaking: one who makes peace, one who creates peace. And another thing about peacemaking, or like what the world as a whole would consider peacemaking, like what President Carter did, is the peace is dependent as long as both parties uphold their end of the deal.

But I want to go—and I want to take peacemaking to be one who creates peace, one who makes peace.

So I'm going to be covering a small aspect of peacemaking. And peacemaking is really a broad subject. And the more I've talked about it with some of the brothers here, I'm realizing it's just a really small aspect that I'm going to deal with today. And I want to make sure that we realize that peacemaking—the majority of the peacemaking that we will do in our lives will be loving our family, loving our brothers, forgiving others, loving our neighbor, being at peace within our church.

That's the majority—the peacemaking where we will be involved in. That's where the most of our time we will spend. It's everyday and mundane, that kind of peacemaking. It's not easy, and it's not glamorous. So I don't want to minimize that aspect of peacemaking.

But the peacemaking I'm going to be talking about today is one that we all think about as non-resistant Christians, and that is, what would we do in a violent situation? What is a Christian's response to violence?

On the heels of blessing the peacemakers and the persecuted, Jesus says, "You are the salt of the earth." And the salt, as I talked with Brother David yesterday, and especially in Jesus' day, would not have been viewed as flavoring as much as salt was viewed as a preservative.

Origen writes, "The believers are salt. The rest of mankind is considered earth." It is because Christians have faith that the earth is preserved. It's because Christians do the Beatitudes. The Christians do the things that Jesus says to do, and that is what preserves this earth. That's what keeps this earth from flying apart.

It's the Christians, and peacemaking has a large part to play with that.

So if you continue on in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes on, and he expounds on peacemaking and loving our enemies. He says, "Don't resist others. Turn the other cheek. Do good to those who do you wrong. Bless those that curse you.

Go the extra mile." And we know stories of people who have read these verses and have asked themselves, "What if Jesus meant every word that he said?" Many of us know Dean Taylor, who was in the U.S. military at the time when he started reading these verses, and he decided to literally follow the teachings of Jesus.

We know that altered the course of his life. But people who have grown up in Anabaptist circles will most likely not have a paradigm shift like Brother Dean. But what I want to do today is I want us to still own this vision and own this lifestyle for ourselves.

This way of living is so counterintuitive to rational thought, and in the eyes of the world, it's extreme. But to the Christian, this is the simple example that Christ lived and died by, and that's the way of the cross.

I recently read a book on peacemaking, and I'm going to refrain from sharing the title just because it was a really good book, and I'm going to critique it. Probably most many of you will know what book I'm talking about, but the story took place in the Middle East around the time that the state of Israel was established. So that would have been the late '40s.

And the author grew up—this happened over his childhood. And the author grew up in a home where the simple life and the commands of Jesus were lived and taught, and they believed strongly in that. And they had a rich heritage of being Christians, Palestinian Christians.

So he, along with his family, as well as their Palestinian Christian village, watched as their ancestral lands were taken from them by violent Zionists, confiscated to create the state of Israel. He saw his father over and over blessing his enemies, doing good to those who maltreated him.

And later on in his life, he went to seminary, and he really grappled with the idea of loving your enemies and peacemaking. What is the Christian's responsibility to violence?

What is a Christian's job to violence? Is it okay for others to just take advantage of us? How about if other people are being hurt? What is a Christian's responsibility to violence? So at the end of the book, it climaxes to where the author leads thousands of people, Jewish and Palestinian protesters.

They peacefully protested in front of the Israeli government. And that was the climax of the book. They were protesting against the crimes against the Palestinian people. And that was like the pinnacle of the book, at least how I read the book.

But I will say I was disappointed in that. When I read the story of this young man's childhood and how his father, over and over again, blessed his enemies, did well, did good to those who treated him wrong, I read this and I was like, "I really have no idea about peacemaking. I have no idea about loving my enemies.

There's so much to learn." But what I find sad is that people have convinced themselves that the ultimate in peacemaking is protesting, maybe peacefully protesting, but manipulating the government to create laws for peace and justice. As Kingdom Christians, we know that peace and justice does not come from the government. The government does not have the answer to peace and justice.

You may say, "Zach, the story you read of Telemachus, wasn't it the Roman Emperor who changed the law and outlawed the violent games?" And my response to that is, "Yes, but it was the testimony of Telemachus that inspired others to pursue peace."

People are willing to protest violence, but rarely are they willing to become a part of the actual solution.

What is the solution?

What is the solution to violence? So as I've been doing the last number of messages, I've been sharing my experience as a Christian and different things I've grappled with. And this is a big thing that I've wrestled with.

In 2016, I came to my own roads, I came to my own crossroads on what a Christian's response to violence should be. So I had been living in Guatemala for about a year then, and my coworker and I, our main mode of transportation was using the public bus system, which was dangerous, especially if you were bussing in the city.

And the longer—I guess I was just naive, but when I lived, when I first got there, I always kind of snickered to myself. I thought everybody's just scared all the time. And the longer I was there, the more careful I became. The more things you see, the more you realize that they're not just making it up.

So kind of watch my back, different areas where you learn to be careful. And my coworker and I, we were at a bus station that was notoriously dangerous. And we usually stayed together, just watched each other's back when walking through this area, just to be extra careful.

Well, he had backtracked, and he went back to buy something from a vendor, and I was leaning up against a fence and just waiting for him, watching people. It was a busy area. And all of a sudden, I was leaning up against a fence, and all of a sudden, I saw a man running past me. In the same instant, there was a thug chasing him, who then karate kicked the poor man in the back.

This happened directly in front of me. The man fell and hit his head on the ground, and he was knocked out cold. He was laying right in front of me. The thug walked up to the man and stood over him. I was sure I was about to watch someone get murdered.

And in that instant, in that split second, I thought, "What am I to do? What is the Christian's responsibility to violence? What is a non-resistant Christian supposed to do when someone is being attacked?"

The thug gave one hard kick to the man in the face and ran away. I stood there frozen with fear. I watched as pedestrians ignored the man and walked around him. I knew right away I was not the brave hero I always imagined myself to be.

The man slowly started gaining consciousness. He started rolling around, flopping around. And as people walked past him, they just laughed. They might have thought he was drunk, I don't know. But I do know I was appalled. I was appalled at the lack of sympathy people showed him, and I was appalled at my own cowardice and fear.

I knew I should do something to help. So when the man still wasn't fully conscious, he was trying to put a shoe on. I walked over to him, steadied him against the fence. I tied his shoe on. It was a struggle.

Mostly what I remember is looking back to where the thug came, waiting for the thug to come back, because I expected the thug to run off to grab a gun and was coming to finish him off.

At that moment, my coworker came back. I told him what happened, and we decided it was best to get out of there, so we left. I thought about this for a long time afterwards. And this story is probably more pivotal in my quest for non-resistance and peacemaking than I can even explain.

I really started to wonder, what is a non-resistant Christian? For most of my teenage and young adult life, I had heard messages on loving your neighbor, doing good to those that hate you, turning the other cheek. Don't retaliate evil for evil.

But my question was, what are we to do with violence that happens to others? What are we to do with violence that happens in front of us? And this wasn't the first time where I started thinking about this.

Before I had moved out to the village, I lived in the city for about six months, Guatemala City. And my job was, well, I said when visitors would come and ask me what's my job description, well, first of all, if you're ever a missionary, make sure you have a job description, because that's what everybody asks you. But people would ask me what my job description was, and I said, "I'm a waiter.

I wait in traffic. I wait on ladies shopping for fabric. I wait at people at the airport. I wait." And what I did was I'd drive a car and just wait. So I saw a lot of things happen in the city.

I'd seen people get assaulted. I've seen people who had got jumped and had their motorcycle stolen from them. I've seen driving down at night, looking down the dark alleys of the city and watching people bare feet chasing each other. And I started thinking, it started to be something where I was thinking about, what if something would happen in front of me? What would I do? What would I do? What's my responsibility to violence?

This time was different as it happened directly in front of me, and I felt some responsibility that the man got kicked in the face. So my question after this experience of watching the man get kicked by the thug, are Christians supposed to sit and watch violence happen and then come in and clean up the mess afterwards, or is there a place for a Christian to prevent violence?

So I really started to search God after this, and I decided that I wasn't going to stop until I found the answer.

I did not want to be in another situation that I did not know what to do. I did not want to be a passive onlooker twiddling my hands, not knowing what to do.

What tools does a Christian have to combat evil in this world? We know that knowledge empowers us, and I felt shackled not knowing what to do. I wanted to know how to respond.

And I took comfort in Telemachus's story.

And around that time, I was living out in a village in Guatemala, and it was a time where I discovered a lot of things about the Bible and a lot of things. I'm glad many of you here weren't there. The things I discovered, some things were really good, some things were kind of crazy.

I'm glad that I had a really stable, mature Christian that I was living with that helped me with my really radical ideas that I had. But one of the things that I discovered living out there by myself was the verse in, I think it's Proverbs, where it talks about the name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run to it and are safe. And I discovered that the name of Jesus evokes power to overcome temptation, that just by saying the name of Jesus evokes power to overcome sin and temptations that we're facing.

And so the story of Telemachus made sense to me in that the man ran down into the arena. He said the name of Jesus. He said, "Stop in the name of Jesus." So that obviously there's power behind that name.

But one thing that really bothered me was that Telemachus died. Didn't know what to do with that.

He was brutally murdered. And actually, this whole thing about Telemachus running in saying, "Stop in the name of Christ," is just legend. I just found that out recently. So I take that for what it's worth.

So 2018, a couple of years passed. I moved back to the States. Abigail and I were married in 2019. And for our honeymoon, we went down to Louisiana, cut across, and our final destination was San Antonio.

San Antonio, San Antonio, whatever you however you want to say it. And we were at the Riverwalk. How many of you have been to the Riverwalk in San Antonio? I knew you guys would. Okay, Radford has. Anybody else? Okay. Okay, very good. Good. So the Riverwalk is, I don't know when it was built. It was built many years ago.

But there's a river going through San Antonio, and there are sidewalks, bridges, gardens, restaurants, and you go down into the, you go down, like there's different access points where you go down the steps. And essentially, it transforms into a different world from city to like gardens and restaurants. Beautiful place.

Now, one thing I would recommend, just as a side note, if you just recently got married and you're madly in love and you walk down into the Riverwalk, make sure you remember where you parked, because it's very difficult to come back up and try to find your car again. We spent more time walking San Antonio than we probably did the Riverwalk trying to find our car.

So we started taking, I started taking pictures of landmarks, I think, or yeah, whatever the case at the end. By the time we had our system figured out, we were going home. But so that was our final destination. We were on a busy section of the Riverwalk.

It was the second day. We had been there maybe a couple of days.

And someone gently touched my, we're kind of squeezing our way through the crowd, and someone gently touched my elbow and said, "Sir, can you help me?" And it was real quiet. I looked back and there's this little man standing there and he said, "Can you help me? Can you give me some money?" And he was trying to tell me what was happening and I said, "Come over here." And so we went off to the side, people were walking around and I asked him, "What's your story? What's going on?" And he was from Oklahoma, Nebraska, somewhere there, and he had bussed in to San Antonio for a vacation.

And he had a medical emergency. This is, I'm recounting this story to the best of my memory, but he had a medical emergency and he had landed in the hospital and three days ago he was released, but he had no money to go back home.

And I said, "Well, where, I mean, what have you been eating?" And he said, "I've been able to bag enough food to eat every day." And I said, "Well, where have you been sleeping?" On the bench. And I don't remember if he told me this, but I remember the 80 years old is what stuck in my mind. So he was, whatever the case, way too old to be sleeping out on a bench.

So Abigail and I gave him enough money to get back home. And as he was thanking us, I must have mentioned something about Jesus because he perked right up and he said, "I'm a Christian too. My name's Pastor Jack." And he had a little briefcase and he opened it up and it was lined with tracks and Bibles.

And I was like, "Oh, Lord, like, wow, here's a brother. I didn't even know it." And he gave me a Bible that told the story, the passion and Jesus' passion and story for him. And he said it was a book that he read often.

But it was the last thing that he said that caught my attention. This is why I share it with you. He said, "Pastor Jack told me, he said, right before you came, he said, I'd been praying." And I said, "Lord, how much longer?

How much longer? I've been on the streets for three days and nobody will help."

He said, the Lord answered him and said, "I have someone on the way." And a couple of minutes later, Abigail and I showed up.

So why do I share this story? What does this have to do with peacemaking? It's because it was at this moment where it dawned on me what obedience to Jesus means. Instead of viewing the commands of Jesus as being rules on how to live and how to be good, I started viewing the commands of Jesus in a way that his commands have been given to us so that we can be the hands and feet of Christ here on this earth.

I started to view it as a guide on how to act the way Jesus would act while he's not here.

And the honor that I felt knowing God could count on me was like no other. At that moment, I would have said, "Yes, sir," to anything God would have asked of me. I felt more like a soldier carrying out a special assignment.

And this is the message and the call to arms that I propose to you today. I want you to see who we, that we who follow the king are elite fighters. We have infiltrated enemy lines and are carrying out acts of sabotage on the kingdom of darkness.

Anytime we mitigate suffering, point people to the Prince of Peace, or prevent acts of violence, we are radical peacemakers, God's elite fighters.

All these experiences culminated for me at Zach Johnson's talk at KFW. I believe it was last year titled No Blood But Our Own.

And if I remember correctly, or how I what I went away with the message from my point of view was Zach's proposal is that the weapon that the Christians have against evil is our own selves, our own blood. We inject ourselves into the chaos that the world has created, absorbing evil on our own selves.

And as Jesus said that we are the salt of the earth, I understood his message as the blood of the Christians is a lubricant for society. We inject ourselves at the point of friction in the world. And by not retaliating, we kill evil in its tracks.

This was my epiphany to my long quest to how to deal with violence we witness. So this summer, and I've shared this story with some of you, this summer I was at a gas station and filling up my truck with gas.

And two vehicles quickly pulled in and the drivers jumped out. And it was a man and a woman, they were yelling and swearing at each other. And I almost drove off, but I thought, well, God should have some boots on the ground. So I stayed.

And I started walking over to the group that had gathered. And I don't know why, but by now the woman had been yelling at another woman and challenging her to fight. The guy who was drunk or someone intoxicated had taken his shirt off. He wasn't doing this, but I could almost imagine that was covered. Like, take, take, come on, let's go.

So it was like kind of a fight, looked like it was a brewing. And so I started walking toward the group and there was a group watching. And then before I got there, the two women started fighting and their husbands were there trying to pull them apart. And so I ran through the group of onlookers and I was yelling, "Stop in the name of Jesus."

And I ran up to the two women and I put my hands on them and I just said, I put my hands on, I said, "Stop in the name of Jesus." And they stopped and they backed off. And that gave me enough time to get between the two groups and I had my backs to the antagonist.

And the other woman, her husband was still trying to hold her back, hold her down. And she slipped out of her husband's grasp and came running toward me and I just kept blocking her way, put my hands up and I blocked her way and I said, "Ma'am, please." And I just tried to calm her down. And so she tried to dodge past me and then she just stopped and glared at me and her lip quivered. And I just had to think about, and I don't know if I thought about this right at the time, but I did think about what the Apostle Paul taught about the weapons that we fight.

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Our enemy is not people. Our enemy is the power that the people have sold themselves to. It's a power that people are enslaved to. And I had to pity this woman.

She lives a rough life. I used to believe that a peacemaker is someone that negotiates peace between two parties and keeps everybody happy. They placate everybody. Are you okay? Yeah. They just make sure everybody's happy before we can have peace.

But in reality, the peacemaker, part of being a peacemaker is keeping people from doing bad things to others. And in that process, you may make the evil doer angry.

So there's a danger. There is this ideal also that some Christians propose. And that's this ideal that we should seek martyrdom. And it's almost like martyrdom is the pinnacle of what you should be as a Christian. And I've heard people say, "Oh, the glory of the martyrdom." And I really want to be careful and caution us with this.

And Brother David helped me with this as well. What the early Christians believed about seeking martyrdom, to seek for martyrdom is actually sin. Is that correct? Okay. Yeah. To seek martyrdom is sin. And it makes sense because first of all, Jesus said, "If people are persecuting you, get out of the way. Go to another city."

And then second of all, if we go out of our way to get martyred, then we are causing more violence and we are causing someone to commit murder.

But today what I'm excited about is proposing the idea of self-sacrificial peacemaking. So the purpose isn't to go get martyred.

You may lose your life as Telemachus did, but we're not to worry about that. As Tertullian said, "Well, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." Christians are not to worry about their life. What happens, happens.

It may feel like so many of them and so few of us, but in the end, when the Christian sacrifices himself for the sake of peace, the church will grow.

And I also, as a word of caution, I also believe we need to follow what Jesus talked about being wise as serpents and harmless as doves. That context, does anybody know what he's talking about? When he's talking about being wise as serpents and harmless as doves, what context is that in?

Anybody know?

It's in the context of being persecuted. It's in the context of, "Hey, be smart about this." And yesterday, Dave and Deborah helped me just work this through a little bit more. You know, there is a difference between two men who are fighting with knives or a situation where a child is getting beaten.

Another thing is that we may be not the one called to intervene in a certain situation. For example, my wife will probably not be called to intervene between two six-foot men fighting. It's probably not her place.

So Jesus says we need to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

I believe there are multiple ways to respond correctly. The more opportunities we have, the better we will get at responding well. One thing that has helped me with creating this message is it wasn't until I was talking with Kevin yesterday, and I realized with how I responded to the man in Guatemala, I didn't respond incorrectly.

That had been hanging over me for many years.

I do know I could have responded better. And that could have been starting with helping the man get some Tylenol before we just left him sitting by the road. Maybe getting some more help. We could have responded better.

Although I didn't respond incorrectly, I could have responded better. The more opportunities we have, the more we will grow and become better in peacemaking. But one thing for sure is the way of responding incorrectly is with violence.

2 Timothy 2:1. You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. Join with me in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Interesting that the word witness is also, from what I understand, is a Greek word for martyr.

Romans 8:36. As it is written, "For your sake, we face death all day long. We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. We are more than conquerors. What does that mean? How are we more than conquerors?

Well, let me ask you this. How can you kill someone who has already died to self? How can you break someone who has already fallen on the rock and that has already been broken?

The most formidable foe is someone who has nothing to lose. And that's us. Like I said, the most formidable foe is someone who has nothing to lose. Think of the Kamikaze fighters. They were very hard to take out. Suicide bombers that would crash their airplanes into warships, American warships and British warships. Very hard. Suicide bombers in the Middle East. Like it's very difficult. And that's the evil side. But the Christians can flip that around and do the same thing. And that's the heart of the early Christians that I want to portray to you. And I want to own for myself is disregarding our life for, you know, you can't take anything from me because I already have eternal life.

Yeah. And one thing I forgot to mention is that when people come at non-resisting Christians and say, "Well, what are you going to do in such a situation like this?" Well, my question is to them, "What are you going to do? Like shoot them every time?" No, in reality is it's great judgment. You need a lot of judgment. I don't care if you are a non-resisting Christian or if you are gun-toting Trump lover. You know, you need judgment. You know, there's a lot of judgment that is involved with violence. So it's not a clean answer either way.