The Gospels of Luke and Matthew tell the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert when he was preparing for his ministry. According to these Gospels, there were three temptations. In one of them, Jesus was shown all the nations of the world. The tempter, Satan, offered Jesus dominion and power over all these nations. Satan urged Jesus to think of the good he could do with such power, if only Jesus would worship Satan. The Gospel tells us that Jesus rejected this temptation, saying, "Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him."

This is really, in my mind, what the peace testimony is about. What do we worship and trust? What do we understand to be the real base of power and change in the world? How does God want us to treat one another?

In turning away from "realpolitik," Jesus pointed to power, God’s power, that is real and lasting and rejected the illusion of power that lay in the nations of that time. After all, where now are the Chaldeans of Habakkuk’s time? Unless we are professors of history we do not even know who they were. So too have many empires come and gone—the Greeks of Alexander’s time, the Romans, the Mayan and Aztec Empires, the Spanish Conquistadors, and the British Empire on which it was said the sun never set.

All have come and gone. Most of us carry in our blood the inheritance of both the conquerors and the people who were conquered. Perhaps in our DNA we carry the racial memories of many conquerors and many of the once vanquished. The stories are dimly remembered if at all.

Jesus left the desert and began a ministry of preaching and living the power of God’s love for the sick, and the poor, and the people who had made mistakes in their life but wanted to make amends. He seemed to pay little attention to those in power at the time. The message of that ministry is perhaps best summarized in the Sermon on the Mount, one of the most remarkable and radical prescriptions for living. In it we are told to love our enemies, to do good to those who hurt us, and to love one another.

As early Christians, and later early Friends, studied these teachings and the life that Jesus lived, they came to believe that God had clearly shown us that we were not to kill one another. The Gospel is full of teachings about forgiveness and the power of love. The Gospels and the Epistles that follow do not teach hate or violence or human vengeance. We should remember that all of the world’s principal religions teach these same principles. Universalist Friends tend to emphasize the Light within, rather than the Sermon on the Mount, but the teaching about how to live is the same. God has spoken to us in many faiths and many cultures with the same message of love and compassion to one another and of love, obedience, and faithfulness to God.

The Gospels and other sacred writings give a different view of what power is-- a different view of what human beings are capable of if we dare to trust in the power of God to transform us and the situations of our lives. It calls us to worship, not the institutions of this world, but to worship God, and to live in faith and harmony with one another.

Early Quakers, reading the Gospel, found in it a vision of a different kind of power than the armies then contending in England’s civil war. One of the earliest statements was from George Fox, who had been asked to accept a commission in the militia. In those days, many people believed that if the good people could gain control of government, England could be a holy commonwealth. All that was needed was military success over the corrupt government of the time. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In our time, we see many opposing forces each strong in the belief that God’s kingdom can be achieved through military power –whether a crusade or a jihad.