The Peace at the End of All Things

Propers: The Seventh Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Beyond the cares of this world, beyond our cruelties, our culture wars, and our petty politics, there lies a great stillness; a great peace; a great love that undergirds and uplifts all things in every moment of their being. This is the peace of God that passes all understanding. And this peace is forever calling us, forever gathering us, forever bringing us all home in Him.

As Christians we are privileged to experience this peace as a foretaste of the feast to come. We know the risen life of Christ already and not yet. So long as we are here on earth we are at once both seeking and savoring God, both questing and resting in Him. We have the peace of God within us already and not yet. And this is the paradox that sees us through the difficulties of our age. Such is the message of all this morning’s scriptures.

In our reading from Acts, Paul and Silas are in Philippi, a Roman colony, and they encounter a young woman who is doubly bound: enslaved by men and possessed by demons. She has a python spirit. And when Paul casts the demon out of her with but a word in Jesus’ Name, the Philippians—those who own her, who profit from her—are outraged. They accuse these foreign Jews of disturbing the peace of the city, of advocating alien customs unfit for Rome.

Thus Paul and Silas are thrown in jail and tortured, both beaten by the crowd and flogged by the state, as is good Roman tradition. Never mind that Paul is in fact a Roman citizen himself, which makes his torture without trial very much illegal. And how do Paul and Silas respond to this outrage? Why, by praying and singing, hymns and psalms. Surely they must be mad.

Ah, but suddenly the plot thickens. An earthquake strikes. All the doors are thrown open, all the chains unfastened, and the foundations of the prison are shaken apart. See how the tables have turned. The jailor becomes now the captive, caught by dereliction of duty. The torturer becomes now the victim, having to turn his sword upon himself for shame and public dishonor.

Yet Paul prevents this comeuppance. “Do not harm yourself!” he calls. “We are all here!” And the jailor rushes in bearing torches, and falls trembling before men whose flesh he has torn. And his whole household thus is baptized. And so once again God takes the enemies of His people and makes of them His own. Their punishment is to be saved—for indeed, Paul once tortured Christians too.

Just imagine a society so afraid of foreign customs, Middle Eastern Jewish customs, that it feels it must resort to violence both illicit and legal in order to protect its traditions, its mores, its self-held identity. Imagine a community outraged simply by slaves being freed, the oppressed uplifted, and the gods of commerce unmasked as devils. Tell me, have any of us seen a society like that lately? My, how far we’ve come since the primitive days of the Bible.

Just a word of compassion, the forgiveness of sins, the Name of Jesus Christ—and our strutting pretense, our legal and societal violence, our victimization of the alien and the foreigner are all laid bare like a raw and festering wound. And we fall trembling at the feet of those we have wronged, to receive for ourselves this new life in Christ.

Likewise the psalm we sang this morning, Psalm 97. It is a paean to the glory and majesty and beauty and might of the One True God of Israel—which is sung, mind you, in the midst of crushing defeat. This is a psalm of Exile, of a conquered people deported to an alien land. They mock, in song, the gods of the pagan nations who have even now defeated them in battle.

Like Paul and Silas, the Psalmist is taken, battered, and beaten. Like Paul and Silas, he responds with peace and music and prayer. And at first that might seem crazy. But here we are, thousands of years later, still singing his psalms; whereas the nations who had conquered and sent him into Exile—well, go and look for them now.

Revelation is up next, a scene of astonishing grace. In Genesis, at the beginning of the Scriptures, paradise is a garden fit for two. There Adam and Eve walked in peace with God and with all that He had made. Alas, we fell from grace. Yet here at the end of the Scriptures, here at the end of the age, paradise is no longer a garden but a vast megacity, the New Jerusalem, a thousand miles long, a thousand miles wide, a thousand miles high! And its gates shall never be shut.

Did you catch that? Evil and wickedness and cruelty shall not enter, but not because the doors are locked. All may come. All are welcome. Let everyone who is thirsty come and anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. There is room in this paradise for all, for the old heaven and the old earth have passed away, and now they are together a new heaven-and-earth, as one, where God again shall dwell with us as our Light and our Lamb and our Hope and our Temple. And so the City itself makes us holy, makes the impure pure.

That’s the endgame. That’s the final judgment of God. The peace of Christ, of the Logos, of the Word of God in, with, and under all things, shall at the last draw or drag us home in Him; so that what we have but tasted in this Christian life—the Word and the Sacrament, the liturgy and community—will fill us up to bursting and pour forth on all the world. There shall not be one iota of Creation, one molecule, one spirit, one thought, that shall not at the last be suffused in the all-consuming fires of God’s love.

And all that is not beautiful, good, and true—all that is not properly us—will be incinerated in those flames. All your stuff, all your things, all your bank accounts and billets and bills, it’s all going away. All the money we strove to earn. All the clothes we thought so important. All the silly little put-downs we pronounced just to feel a wee smidge better than everybody else. It will all burn up in those flames like smoke upon the breeze.

And so will all our sins. So will all our divisions. So will all the evil we have done. And then we will be free. And we will have peace. And we will be one, just as Christ and the Father are One. That great love, that great stillness I mentioned at the start, which undergirds and uplifts everything in each moment—it will well up from below and descend from above and come out from within us until God is all in all. And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well.

It will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.

So love without limit, my Christians. Give without thought of reward. Forgive without worry of justice. We must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, for the love with which God loves His Son is in us, and He is in us. All gods bow down before him. Even our money. Even our time. Even our hearts.

The vision of peace, the vision of love, the vision of unity at the end of the age exists for us already and not yet. Let it come through us. Let it be through us. Let us sing and pray and liberate all things. For the world does not know God, but we do. We know Him in Christ Jesus. And they will know Him through the life that we live in His Name.

So go. And be Christ for the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.