"How we can help our world is by stop being mean to other people espisaly black people. We should start respecting others and wacthing what we do." -Dominque, 4th grader, note left at Civil Rights exhibit at Missouri History Museum
"They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not take up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore." -Micah 4:3
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to head across the Atlantic to spend a week in Israel experiencing the Holy Land. The experience was irreplaceable and life-changing. I'm sure over the course of the next few weeks/months/years I will have more reflections from the trip.
On our last day in Israel we spent two hours at Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust museum just outside Jerusalem. To say that it was a profound and moving experience would never do justice to the feelings I experienced walking through its halls.
Two moments on this tour will forever be seared on my soul in a different way, two reminders that we each have a story to tell and that some get left unfinished.
Halfway through the exhibit there was a display beneath my feet. Under a layer of plexiglass, lit by a dim glow, was a layer of shoes left behind from extermination rooms in concentration camps. I sat, silent for 10 minutes, on a bench set just to the side of the display. There were no words. The shoes were bare and worn, remnants of a people who'd been given less than the essentials at the end of their life. There were the shoes of children and the boots of laborers. They each told a story. And they'd all ended in a room where their owners had become more victims of what came to be known as the "final solution."
A few hundred feet later, after the last stages of the holocaust and the downfall of Nazi power were chronicled, I came to the final room in this museum: the Hall of Names. Surrounding the central walkway was a circular wall with shelves filled with countless boxes holding even more folders. In each folder was the name of a victim of the Nazi extermination. Every victim that had been made to feel like a "that" instead of "whom" had been left named. Although their stories had been cut short, chapters left unwritten, their names had been retained.
It was in this room that my legs failed. I fell to my knees under the weight, unable to communicate in any other language than the tears sprinkling down my cheeks. My legs couldn't carry the profound despair my heart had grasped. And I cried.
Things aren't right in the world. It doesn't take anything more than a cursory glance to realize this is the truth. There is pain, and too often we are the cause of that hurt. But that isn't a new or radical conclusion. The prophets of the Old Testament knew this too, and they knew that God had made the world with something far better in mind.
The prophet Micah was acutely aware of this. But he was also aware that as we had been capable of bringing pain and destruction, we were just as capable of remaking the world in the kinds of ways God made it in the beginning.
Micah imagined a world where the people drew close to the God who set the world in motion, and in response, they would "beat their swords into iron plows and their spears into pruning tools. Nation will not take up sword against nation."
I love this picture. Not because it meant no more war, but because it goes even further. Instead of simply throwing away the instruments of death, they would repurpose them. Instead of using iron to destroy, they beat them into shovels to re-create the world they'd destroyed. They would start fresh by re-making the world right where God had started, in a garden. Perhaps the work of peace is not simply the end of violence, but the work of grace.
But it's what Micah wrote next that has most captured my heart. "They will no longer learn how to make war." They won't learn how to make war, as if the capacity to cause pain is a learned behavior.
The word Micah uses here is the world yilmedun, meaning "to learn." It comes from the root lamad, from which we get "to train," "to instruct," "teacher," "instructor."
The power of this language didn't settle in me until I walked through that museum in Israel. I watched videos of Hitler's Youth rallies and the way the Nazi's systematically taught people to hate and isolate. And I saw the stories of those who were most hurt by that learning.
But as people of God, we have a different lesson to pass along. If we are the kind of people who worship the God who set the world in a harmony of shalom, then we can't pass on the lessons of violence. Our lessons must be those of metalworking, teaching those in our radius the art of repurposing the tools of war into the tools of grace. We have to be gardeners who invite our neighbors to pick up a shovel to till the ground for a future that looks more like the kingdom God imagined in the beginning.
May we be those kinds of people. May God bend our hearts away from violence and towards shalom. May we learn the art of seeing our family resemblance in our neighbors. May we teach a new kind of lesson. Because in the end, we're left to wrestle with the question Micah posed to Israel: which will we pass on, the swords or the shovels?
forever unfinished...
