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The other Sunday in church, we sang a hymn that is new to me, “We Utter Our Cry.” A relatively new hymn written by Fred Kaan in 1983 (#439 in the United Methodist Hymnal), Kaan is foremost among recent hymn writers. 

Singing a hymn is said itself to be an act of utterance before God.  The verb “utter” is a most unusual term and is not found anywhere else in the hymnal.  The term is matched in the hymn by “pray, cry, lift up our hearts, and pray (again).” The hymn offers an opportunity for the believer— and the believing congregation —to engage in direct address to the Holy One, and to issue a petition of urgent need and profound hope. If we consider it carefully, such a petition addressed to God is a daring act of presumption to voice an imperative to God; but as Karl Barth has seen, “prayer is simply asking.” Before God we have no standing to do anything other than to voice our need and our hope, and ask what we cannot do for ourselves. The petition voiced here is asking for “peace.” To ask for peace is itself an acknowledgement that we ourselves, on our own, are incapable of making peace.

Our petition for peace addressed to God is accompanied by a series of imperatives:

-hearten - as though we are too easily dismayed;

-heal - recognizing that we are disabled from the work;

-wisdom - admitting that we are mired in fearful, self-serving foolishness;

-give insight - confessing that we get bogged down in old assumption and patterns of behavior;

-your Spirit - acknowledging that we lack the energy and courage required for peace-making.

These several petitions taken together voice our awareness that we are ill-equipped for the hard work of peace-making. But they are also an expectation that we--even we--can indeed be equipped and empowered to do that hard work.

Kaan’s narration of peace is sweepingly large and yet specific. He wrote the hymn at a time when we were becoming generally aware of the profound jeopardy in which the entire ecosystem of the earth had been placed by our anti-peace policies and practices. Thus his petition is,

-that the earth may survive

-that the good planet earth may be replenished and tended.

Along with such a large vision, the petition for peace has in purview those “diminished by doubt and despair,” for there is no question that those in despair are more prone to warring violence with seemingly no other option. This petition for peace, moreover, includes “children yet unborn.” It is not likely that Kaan has in his purview our disputes about abortion; rather his phrase is a recognition that the transmission of the earth as a viable place for life to the next generation and the next after that, is an urgent enterprise. Thus the hope for peace is both sweeping in its scope and quotidian in its focus on coming generations of children who will inherit the task and the gift of preserving the earth as a viable habitat.

The hymn is a petition in which the good work of peace-making is entrusted to God. It is the prayer and hope of the church that God will assert the will, power, and energy to work peace in the world.  We have known of God’s peace-making capacity since the narrative in which Jesus stills the storm (Mark 4:35-41). He addresses the claim of the storm. He sounds his dominical command, “Peace, be still.” The wind and water promptly obey him, because this is the voice of the creator that the wind and water recognize. And so we continue to address this same peace-making God with our deep need for peace and our deep hope for peace. This is indeed the church in its most passionate imperative.

But Kaan wrote this hymn in the 80s, in the wake of the activist 70s. He would have known, in such a context, that the church cannot abdicate its responsibility for peace-making as good human work. For that reason, his hymn not only utters petition to God in extremis. At the same time, this hymn is an urgent summons that human agents must choose and on the basis of such a choice, must act. Thus Kaan utters the perfect either/or facing our real world:

Choose Christ before Caesar!

The phrase recognizes that Caesar is a war actor, that pax romana is a peace imposed by Roman military power. In the hymn, “Caesar” represents the force of war-making power that seeks to impose its will on more vulnerable populations. To the contrary, “Christ” is the one crucified in vulnerability by the Roman Empire, the one helpless before such violent force, and yet the only one who performs peace-making wherein the end of peace is congruent with the methods of peace. The either/or of the hymn is an expose of the way we, for the most part, prefer to have it both ways, both Christ and Caesar, both peace and war-making, both prepared for vulnerability and yet insistent on might among the nations.

The companion phrase in the last line of the hymn escalates a political either/or into an ontological either/or of 

Life before death.

The hymn teems with expository phrases for “death.” These include:

- “weapons of death” as we remember that US policy has the face of mutual deterrence; US arms, moreover, are operative in violent circumstances around the globe.

- “extinction of life” as we have contemplated what a cold, dreary world is left when life vanishes in violence;

- “despair” when we no longer have hope, and resort to desperate self-destructive measures.

We readily fall into despair and choose death through the embrace of hopeless policies and practices that are acutely anti-neighborly.

The alternative of “life” is the practice of creation in all of its wonder, beauty, and extravagance. The hymn recognizes that “life” is a gift from God that requires investment in order that it should be sustained and extended. Thus, the hymn evokes a singing congregation that is ready to “protest and march.” Kaan of course understood that active protest marked the decade, including sit-ins in coffee shops, boycotts, and other public acts of leverage such as refusal to move “to the back of the bus.” He would have us be “unresting in action,” readily engaged, exposed, out in the streets, lobbying, with energy deployed for change that is essential in order to refuse the death-yielding realities all around us.

In sum, Kaan is able to hold together utter reliance on the abiding rule of God, the supreme peace-maker, and the urgent engagement of human agents in peace-making processes. He is alert to the ways in which our “statements and lofty resolves” have no impact or staying power unless they are matched by our actions.

His wondrous hymn may lead us to think carefully about “prayers for peace” which we are able to voice much too glibly. What is it that such petitions hope for and may yield? I suspect that for many liberal Christians, such petitions for prayer are not more than a familiar slogan without much intention, as we do not expect or anticipate any direct action or initiative from on high. It may be that such a petition serves to show that all of our commitments to violence as policy are made quite penultimate at best, behind which stands the Holy God who refuses such violence against any part of creation. 

If, however, we push behind liberal self-confidence in our peace-making capacity, we may come to an awareness of God as an active agent who—in, with, and under our efforts—is the one who may establish peace and who brings disaster against the perpetrators of violence.

As with so much of our Gospel expectations, this is a both/and of Calvinist divine sovereignty and Wesleyan human responsibility. In the end the creator God will not allow claims that obliterate God’s own good will for a viable order of life. At the same time, however, God extends to human agents the onerous task of peace making. Thus, in the familiar royal oracle of Isaiah 9:2-7, the promised “new David” is said to be:

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of peace (v. 6).

These are honorific titles for the occupant of the throne of David, titles that the church has boldly applied to Jesus. Among these titles is “Prince of Peace,” the Lord of life-giving orderliness. But we should not miss that, in the same poetic oracle, we have these lines often skipped in church reading:

They rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest,

as people exult when dividing plunder.

For the yoke of their burden,

and the bar across their shoulders,

the rod of their oppressor you have broken as on the day of Midian.

For all the boots of the trampling warriors

and all the garments rolled in blood

shall be burned as fuel for the fire (vv. 3-5).

The poem recalls the violent days of the Book of Judges and a particular raid by the Midianites, and the violent destruction of weapons of war (Judges 6:1-6). The rhetoric allows that “disarmament” is itself something of an act of violence, a far cry from good policies of “arms limitation.” I suspect that we mumble when we pray to God as peace-maker. We half hope that God will mightily intrude into our war-making world. But we also know that such an intrusion is beyond our horizon, and so we dare to imagine that peace-making is indeed a human task. And that of course is how Jesus voiced the matter:

Blessed are the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9).

Especially favored in God’s horizon are those who work for emancipation, reconciliation, and social transformation.

We might do well to construct an inventory of such peacemakers among us. No doubt that roster would include Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu. But there are many figures less given to fame who do the good, hard work of peacemaking, some of whom operate in government, some of whom are on the streets in the neighborhoods, some of whom will linger long term on particular issues in particular locations. Peacemaking is the hard work of realism; it insists that “peace” requires “justice” and justice is always contested and must be renegotiated always yet again. This human work of peacemaking requires, before it is completed, appeal to God as peacemaker, as it is more than a human task. In many churches and many church services, the benediction is a reiteration of the blessing of Aaron:

The Lord bless you and keep you;

The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace (Numbers 6:24-26).

The final bid of the service is that God should “give peace.” We may, however, find that in reality, peace is not simply a gift from God; it is also a task assigned by God. Perhaps we might add a line to the blessing of Aaron:

…May God empower you to be a blessing of peace to your neighbors.

Kaan’s poetry is cunning and knowing. He gives voice to the both/and of reliance on God and human responsibility in a deft and effective way. He does not permit us to choose one or the other. Peace-making requires the Lordly graciousness of God; it also insists on the daily work of adjudicating the neighborhood to assure that all may share in a common good that provides the necessities for a viable, secure life. That daily action is in purview when Kaan has us choosing

Christ before Caesar,

Life before death.

Such a prayer cannot be an abdication of responsibility. It is rather situating our responsibility amid the larger drama or God’s good creative, transformative will and purpose. The drama of God’s good purpose and our good responsibility is urgent and resilient. It is for that reason that we dare to utter!