Divine intervention is the Church promoting peace in society

Bernard Headley, Contributor

I CHOOSE to see Minister of National Security Peter Bunting's revelatory moment of unscripted humanity as a leap of intuitive understanding, an epiphany. It is one that the nation as a whole needs to experience in this matter of crime and seemingly uncontrollable violence.

Mr Bunting, remember, came, first and foremost, to worship with us, a Seventh-day Adventist congregation, in a church service on the campus of Northern Caribbean University, on that eventful Saturday/Sabbath morning. In other words, Mr Bunting came to church.

And truth is, the Church is, and always will be, another place. It's the place you seek out grace and healing, where you are allowed to grieve and then be comforted. It's the place you come to for rejuvenation of the spirit and renewal of hope; where you are inspired by the Word and your spirits soar with the wings of the morning on the strains of a song, stirringly rendered for us that morning, from someplace deep in their hearts, by the members of the Clarendon Jamaica Constabulary Force Choir.

The Church and its divine hour are not rostrums for political man-ups and grandstanding, for bravura and triumphal chest thumping. In church, you share and commiserate with fellow travellers on humanity's failings and weaknesses, on its bent toward darkness, discouragement and destruction. But you gain strength, you revive, you are able to rewind, to wheel and come again, after prayer and from touching somebody.

"I don't mind telling you that sometimes I feel discouraged," admitted the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, one of the 20th century's relentless freedom fighters, in typical, rich cadences in a sermon to his Ebenezer Baptist congregation one Sunday morning in Atlanta, Georgia. Sometimes, Dr King said, reflecting on his years battling America's racism, he felt beaten and dejected and that his work was in vain. But church and faith would in short order "revive" his soul again. "A still, small voice," Dr King said, would encourage with: "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for truth. Stand up for justice ... ."

Holy moment

Minister Bunting's epiphany is a holy moment that ought not to be trivialised, wasted or, worst of all, used cannibalistically in the course of what is for us normal politics - only in this instance it's the dead feeding on the dead. Mr Bunting's reading of our crime situation as one that can be saved ONLY by "divine intervention" is not at all for me discomfiting. Rather, I take comfort in his seeing - with his own two eyes - that the solution to our bedevilling crime and violence problem is bigger than what he divines from his Excel spreadsheets or is illumined by expertism; that it supersedes the methodologies of his tougher, and even smarter, law enforcement.

Divine intervention does not mean God coming down to Earth and waving a hand over Jamaica, 'land we love', and pronouncing an end to crime and wickedness. Rather, divine intervention can and ought to be understood as the faith community actively helping to work it out, to "holding up an IDEAL possibility for humankind", as the Harvard University theologian Harvey Cox wrote in the turbulent 1970s. "A religion tells us how to get from our present fallen state ... to what we can or ought to be," Cox wrote. The analysis of divine intervention, then, is a call to believers for "critical, informed and sympathetic engagement in the broadest sense".

Divine intervention means the Church engaging the society in building what a 2012 Inter-American Development Bank report calls "antipodes" to violence. It means possessing an understanding of and LIVING the ways of peace - not the peace of the cemetery, as reggae icon Peter Tosh had ingeniously put it; but a peace that actively interrogates as it seeks to integrate economic development with opportunity, tolerance with respect, restoration with healing, and equal rights with justice.

The denomination Minister Bunting came to worship with the Saturday morning of April 13 has expressed these values in its executive documents. The following statement was voted by the church's General Conference Executive Committee (meeting at the world church headquarters in Maryland, USA) in 2002. The document, titled A Seventh-day Adventist Call for Peace, includes this appeal:

"The education of the church member in the pew, for non-violence, peace, and reconciliation, needs to be an ongoing process. Pastors are being asked to use their pulpits to proclaim the gospel of peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation which dissolves barriers created by race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and religion, and promotes peaceful human relations between individuals, groups, and [within] nations".

We have already received in this land of what must be a million Christian churches a measure of divine intervention from the Lord of the Sabbath - whichever day happens to be yours: "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27).

Bernard Headley is retired professor of criminology, University of the West Indies, Mona. Send comments to bernardheadley1@gmail.com.