“There’s a difference between being a peace-keeper and a peace-maker.”
My sister visited over the weekend. If you would ever care for a snapshot into our times together, a text exchange between her and her hubby Saturday night would be pretty accurate:
Him: You guys go anywhere tonight?
Her: No, stayed in and talked. So far we’ve covered racism, feminism, eviction laws and lack of regulation, and poverty.
Him: Naturally.
I love talking with her. God has had her on a wild ride in downtown KC and she’s learning lots about social justice. But something that really struck her was the line above from a sermon she recently heard. Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, which usually doesn’t equate with keeping the peace.
It makes me think of how Dallas Willard described peacemakers in The Divine Conspiracy: “They make the list because outside the kingdom they are, as is often said, ‘called everything but a child of God.’ That is because they are always in the middle. Ask the policeman called in to smooth out a domestic dispute. There is no situation more dangerous. Neither side trusts you. Because they know that you are looking at both sides, you can’t possibly be on their side.”
Yikes.
My sister followed it up with an excerpt from this book about how following the crowd is often the opposite of following Truth. He pointed out how Jesus hid from the crowd when they wanted to force Him onto a throne, He wept when their Hosannas tried to push Him into military takeover, and He pled for their forgiveness as they crucified Him.
Instead of the crowd, Jesus nurtures the “little flock.” Even if 2 billion people in the world have the Holy Spirit alive inside them, we are still His little flock. A tender term for those who wish to lay down their lives and follow Him.
And because of that tender shepherding, we can resist joining the crowd or becoming a crowd. Instead we can focus our energies on loving.
I want to be just as concerned with an unreached people group in Africa as I am my friend down the street. I want to see the same urgency and dignity in discipling our children as I see in praying about the prison crisis in our country.
What I don’t want to do is get swept away in a crowd mentality. In any of these situations. Something that is very tempting for me.
What do you do to avoid joining the crowd or becoming a crowd?