A Deeper Peace
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St John:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid …
Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you …
I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
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.
For the second week of Advent, we
light the second candle on our wreath, sometimes termed the “Bethlehem Candle.”
And its theme, its association, is peace.
Oh, what a word that is. It speaks
to the soul, doesn’t it? Do we not seek peace—peace in the land, peace in our
time, peace in our hearts? What wouldn’t we do, what price would we not pay,
for a deep and abiding peace?
Now, peace is not simply the
absence of violence, though that is a big part of it. An old Israeli paratrooper-turned-professor
once told me that, “Here peace doesn’t mean that you like each other. Here
peace means that you don’t shoot each other.” And that’s certainly more than
fair. But there’s also more to it than that. Peace is a state of tranquility,
of harmony, of quiet, not only without but also within.
And that can be a hard thing to
find in this day and age, in this society of ceaseless noise, ceaseless
entertainment, ceaseless advertisements. Everything is always vying for our
attention, our views, our clicks, our likes. And it’s exhausting, isn’t it? There’s
a reason why we don’t join organizations anymore, why we don’t go out to visit each
other anymore, not in the way that we used to. It’s because we’re perpetually
on: never bored, never quiet, never thoughtful, never peaceful.
So it often feels as though we
haven’t a chance to rest, haven’t a chance to breathe, haven’t a chance just to
sit and to be and not always to do. All of life has become a distraction, a
distraction from actual life.
You know, the best kept secret in Wadena
is a little place called Green Island. Perhaps you’ve heard of it; perhaps you’ve
been there. If not, I highly recommend it. It used to be a dairy farm,
transformed now into a truly idyllic park, privately owned yet open to the
public, full of half-tame deer and meticulously maintained paths. It’s our own
little Narnia right off of Highway 10.
They also have a kuti there, which
is a Buddhist meditation hut up on stilts, rather like a treehouse. And you can
reserve time there for free, to pray, to write, whatever. Just email them. For
years I’ve wanted to do that. But whenever I’ve managed to hack out a time, the
weather has turned, too hot, too cold. Yet hope springs eternal. I’ll get there
one of these days. How lovely would it be to sit there in the forest, alone
with the silence—in peace?
But you know, it’s easy to have
inner peace when you’re surrounded by outer peace. How often am I going to be
in a kuti up in the woods? How often will I, as a father of three, have time
and space and quiet completely to myself? The trick is to possess such a peace,
so firmly rooted, as the world cannot take away, because the world did not grant
it to you.
“Peace I leave with you,” Jesus
promised His disciples. “My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the
world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.” And that,
mind you, is part of Jesus’ farewell discourse in John’s Gospel. It’s what He’s
saying to His friends, to His followers, right before He is tortured to death
in public. So clearly the peace of Christ doesn’t mean that nothing bad will
ever happen to us. The peace of Christ means that nothing bad can take Him from
us.
That’s the goal. That’s the aim: to
have such faith, such trust in the goodness of the Lord, that we know, come
what may, that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord; not angels, not demons, not life, not death. We are loved eternally. We
are forgiven eternally. We are raised eternally. And we can know that this is
true, up here, in the mind. But it takes work, repetition, death and
resurrection every day, to have such a virtue penetrate the heart.
Because yeah, Jesus loves me. But I’ve
still got bills to pay and chores to do and people who are counting on me not
to let them down; people who love me. Life can be hard, wearying, boring. We
live in the mundane, down in the mud and the blood. Which is precisely why we
must have one foot in the eternal, in the already and not yet. It is the great
paradox of mankind, wrote Montaigne, that we are both gods and worms, both sinners
and saints, both Adam and Jesus, both mortal and yet eternal.
This is why Christians ever keep
the Cross before our eyes; why we keep to the holy Scriptures, to the Word of
God; why we ever return as beggars to the Table of our Lord, to His Body and His
Blood, to His Spirit hovering upon the waters. The harmony that we seek—the inner
peace of Christ—is found in the Incarnation, in God becoming one of us. Such is
the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord that He has gone to hell and back to
bring us home in Him, to make us one in Him, to forgive us our sins even as we
murdered Him.
Nothing can stop that love. Nothing
can take that from us.
If you want peace, come to
Bethlehem, cling to Christ. He will never disappoint you, never fail you, never
abandon you. Come famine, war, disease, and death, He will hold you fast. He
will march ahead of you into your grave, into the depths of hell, and pull you
back up with Him into heaven. And the battle-cry, the banner raised, will be none
other than the Lion of Judah roaring out to all the world, “Forgiven! Forgiven!
Forgiven!”
Such is the peace that the world
cannot give, and could never take away. Such is the peace that is offered to
all by the Blood of Jesus Christ.
In the Name of the Father and of
the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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