In monastic
life, alongside the central church, you would always find a bakery and a
brewhouse. Because the water was not
guaranteed to be pure, the monks would have a brewhouse which would brew ale
with an alcohol content just strong enough to keep the water bacteria
free. In Dunfermline, at the Abbot
House, they are recreating a medieval brewery, just like the one that would
have been nearby when the abbey was a working community.
When Mrs Gerbil
and I visited, the brewer told us that the process is temperature critical and you need to get
the liquid up to exactly 70 degrees centigrade.
In the absence of thermometers, the way you would tell the liquid had
got to that temperature is by looking at the surface. When the cauldron hit seventy degrees, the surface would go
mirror smooth and you could see your face in it. Everything looks calm on top, yet things are
still quite hot underneath, an awful lot closer to boiling than ordinary room
temperature.
How often
does conflict look like that? You may
think that things are peaceful on the surface, but underneath, the unresolved
hatred on both sides means that it won’t take much for things to reach boiling
point.
The global
landscape has been shaped by conflict, past and present. Tensions leading to the first world war had
been brewing for at least a century before, with a network of treaties and
alliances all serving to try to prevent war while at the same time allowing
them to increase their military capabilities.
It only took a small act, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
for the whole house of cards to come tumbling down, and the deadly conflict to
erupt.
And even
with the ending of hostilities, the treaty of Versailles didn’t really sort
anything out in Europe, and World War 2 was inevitable. The effects of the wars can still be seen
today on the maps of Europe, in the shape of Germany, and the divisions in the
former Yugoslavia.
In the
British isles, we have had our own share of conflict. Between 1969 and 2010, the troubles in
Northern Ireland lead to at least 3,500 deaths, and each death had a mother, or
a father or a child that was bereaved, asking why.
One such
parent, Colin Parry set up the Tim Parry – Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace
in Warrington, where Tim and Johnathan were killed in an IRA bomb attack. Colin did something perhaps unthinkable to
victims of terror, he invited Martin McGuinness, the Northern Irish Deputy
First Minister, and former IRA member to speak to the foundation. Colin Parry has said that he does not forgive
McGuinness, and is aware that his decision has drawn severe criticism, But he
has said that “this is absolutely what you need to do if you are leading a
peace foundation which proclaims the importance of talking rather than
fighting.”
In his
speech to the foundation, Martin McGuinnes had this to say...
“Conflict
resolution is about much more than ending conflict. The conflict is over, but
the work of conflict resolution must continue.
If we approach conflict resolution on the same basis that we approached
ending the conflict then I firmly believe acknowledgements about the past can
become a powerful dynamic which will move us again to new places that many
believe are beyond us.”
We can see
that, just like the heating pot in the brewery, we cannot just look at the calm
reflective surface, we need to be aware of what is going on underneath.
The Isaiah
reading this morning is a familiar one this time of year, beating swords into
ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.
Is this idealistic Does it
actually have any real world merit?
The war in
Mozambique, the only country in the world that has a machine gun on its flag, raged between 1977 to 1992. As one way of finding ways of reconciliation
between communities, The right Reverend Bishop Dinis Sengulane arranged the
collection of 600,000 weapons, exchanging guns for books, bicycles, and sewing
machines. One village exchanged enough
guns they bought a tractor. Not a plough,
but close enough. There was a genuine
fear that the guns would have been shipped to another part of Africa and they
would have fueled a conflict elsewhere.
There are millions of weapons circulating Africa from the colonial days,
Belgian, French, Russian, even British army rifles, all still deadly. In a project that brought together artists
from all sides of the divide, some of the guns were turned into art, Two
examples, a tree of life, and a throne, both recently on display in the British
Museum.
The artworks are the visible
part of swords into ploughshares, but perhaps more importantly, swords are not
just physical weapons, but a willingness to seek conflict rather than
reconciliation. It’s not enough to calm
the water by taking away the guns, you have to change hearts from swords to
plowshares as well. Through his work
supported by Christian Aid, Bishop Sengulane continues to seek to do this.
We hear that
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends” I would argue that to devote
your life to peace, to spend your every waking hour uniting communities,
breaking down barriers and softening hearts that have been hardened through
years of warfare, that is the same thing.
That is showing great love for your friends. And who are our friends, and who are our
neighbours? I’m going to leave you
to answer that yourselves.
I will
close today with some words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “You can only be
human in a human society. If you live with hate and revenge, you dehumanise not
only yourself but your community. You must forgive to make your community
whole.”
Blessed are
the peacemakers. So pray for them,
support them, wherever they are. Help make
them stronger. Then you too will be
doing your bit, beating swords into ploughshares, one gun and one heart at a
time.
