Shalom

DAILY BYTE

Yesterday we discussed the meaning of “passing the peace,” but of course this is only how we make contact with people who already have made the decision to walk through the doors of a church. It is a good practice session, though, for learning to be bringers of peace when we walk back out of the doors to spread “shalom.”

The word for peace from Psalm 122 is “shalom.” And shalom is much bigger than a peace of quiet solitude – Nicholas Wolterstorff says:

“Shalom in the first place incorporates right, harmonious relationships to God and delight in his service... shalom incorporates right harmonious relationships to other human beings and delight in human community. Shalom is absent when a society is a collection of individuals all out to make their own way in the world. Thirdly, shalom incorporates right, harmonious relationships to nature and delight in our physical surroundings” (Wolterstorff in Gornik, 100-101).

So, the peace that the psalm is talking about is a peace between us and God, us and others, and us and our physical surroundings – the city. And within the city, our primary places of peace are our own neighbourhoods.

It’s time for us to wake up and join the party that’s around us – to see the bad with the good – and to get to know who our “neighbours” really are.

The psalm says the “tribes go up” to Jerusalem. We are many tribes, are we not? We are many of us different and many of us surprisingly the same. Sometimes I do look around the neighbourhood and think, these people are not like me. But then, other than the people at church, the till ladies I always go to in Spar, and the three other families in my block of flats, I don’t really know who my neighbours are, actually.

Do you? Who are the tribes around you?

Do you know who lives in the block of flats you live in – or who your next door neighbors are? In the block you live in? In your wider suburb? Do you know who our partners for creating peace are? It seems obvious that we need to get to know our neighbors, and yet we spend such little time finding out about them.

But as we heard in the definition of shalom, we cannot be in right relationship with God, and we cannot be in right relationship with one another, if we don’t seek to understand each other and seek after our collective best interests? What are the reasons in peoples’ hearts for all the division and fear and solitude?

Perhaps you might say – Hey – I know my neighbors, but it’s not my neighbors that are the problem – it’s people who come in from other places and disturb our peace that are the problem...

Well, where do they come from? Who are their neighbors? Eventually, the borders will intertwine, and I think we will find that we cannot place all the blame on people from other neighborhoods. Because if we look closely enough, those people will become our neighbors, too. How can you be a bearer of shalom in your neighborhood?

FOCUS READING

Psalm 122:3-4 (NRSV)

Jerusalem – built as a city that is bound firmly together. To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, as was decreed for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord.