Report on "Peace Among the Peoples"

            At the invitation of leaders in my denomination, I attended the conference titled Peace Among the Peoples, held at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, July 28 – 31, 2010.  It was a privilege to represent the Moravian Church, Northern Province, at what proved to be a challenging, stimulating, and informative event.  Following is a report on my experience at the conference.

Restoring the Impact

Maestro John Sinclair, during a lecture at the 2009 Moravian Music Festival regarding the latest scholarship on 18^th century music performance practices, observed that, no matter how carefully we reproduce the instruments and performance styles of earlier periods, the one thing that we cannot reproduce is 18^th century listeners.  Our 21^st century ears, having been exposed to the works of Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and the like, simply cannot hear as shocking the music of Beethoven and his contemporaries.  What once was startlingly innovative now sounds to us quite ordinary.

The same thing is true for stories and sayings in the Bible.  A good example of this phenomenon is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Today we use the term Samaritan to mean helper or healer, as in the names of hospitals and counseling centers.  But to Jesus’ listeners, the concept of a “good Samaritan” was somewhere between shocking and incomprehensible.  The Jews of Bible times regarded Samaritans as apostates, idolaters – a people to be denounced and shunned.  Our pastor during my college years maintained that a way to restore the original impact of the parable was to rewrite it as the “good Communist”.  With the fall of the Soviet Union now two decades in the past, we should revise that once again, perhaps as the “good Taliban”.  Jesus’ point was that it was a member of a detested group who served as a good neighbor when religious leaders of the injured man’s own community failed to do so.