Performing Shalom
2024-2025 Theme
Embracing Wholeness, Healing, & Sacred Connection
Shalom is often expressed as “peace,” which is included in the concept, but performing shalom is far richer than the absence of hostility and strife; it includes all the fullness, abundance and delight we see portrayed in the creation account of Genesis, celebrating right relation between God and humanity. When performing shalom, we are pursuing and shepherding the fullness of relation with God.
“Shalom moments” are reflected throughout Jesus’ ministry, inviting the disquieted into His presence with acceptance and safety; moments of healing and restoration; and the sharing of food and community. These also are reflected in the teachings of Jesus that provide guidelines for these moments, including the two greatest Commandments; the Beatitudes; the Lord’s Prayer, and many more.
Dr. Steve Guthrie
Professor of Theology/Religion and the Arts &
Senior Fellow, Creative Arts Collective
With our first cycle of grants, the Creative Arts Collective is inviting people to engage with the first two chapters of the biblical story.
That feels appropriate! We are interested in the creative arts, and so we are beginning with the story of creation!
If you even just quickly scan over the first chapter of Genesis, one thing that stands out is the repetition of the word “good.” In just that first chapter, seven times we read “and God saw that it was good. . . and God saw that it was good . . . and God saw that it was good.” So the biblical story begins with a world in which things are as they should be. It is a world that is marked by right relation; a world that is pleasing. That “pleasingness” is further emphasized in Genesis chapter 2. There God places the humans in a Garden called “Eden” – a Hebrew word that means “delight!”
Another thing that we see in these first two chapters is a kind of “many-ness.” It is a world of fullness and abundance. So we read that God creates “plants bearing seed of every kind” and “trees of every kind” and “birds of every kind” and “wild animals of every kind.”
The biblical story then, opens with a world marked by goodness, delight, fullness, abundance, and right relation. This is the kind of world God desires, and the kind of world God creates.
If you were looking for a single word to sum up that kind of delightful abundance, a good choice would be the Hebrew word Shalom. It’s a word we sometimes translate “peace,” but really “peace” is too tame a word for shalom. Biblical shalom isn’t just an absence – like an absence of conflict or an absence of pain. Instead, as we’ve been saying, it is a fullness – an abundance of goodness and variety and beauty and delight.
That fullness is also suggested by the word “performing” in our grant theme. Shalom isn’t just an absence of conflict, and it also isn’t something that’s just passively observed. The biblical story invites us to enter into this shalom; to participate in it and enact it. And in fact it is God who gives us the first instance of this in Genesis chapter 2. We read there that on the seventh day, God rested from the work God had done. This is not God catching God’s breath, because God is just so exhausted from creating. Rather, readers of Genesis have understood this as God delighting in the world God has made. And in the same way, over the centuries people have marked the seventh day by feasting and resting. This is not meant to be just a matter of taking a nap or stuffing yourself at dinner. Instead, it’s meant to be a way of “performing shalom.” It is a way of reminding ourselves that the story of creation begins with abundance, and fullness, and delight. What’s more, we’re reminded that the biblical story invites us to join in as authors and fashioners of that same kind of goodness. Our hope then, is that our first round of grant recipients will do just that.