Ps 85 — Andy James

Peace Enough to Share

July 19, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 85 and Luke 24:28-43
preached on July 19, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s hard to believe that ten years ago I was in my final interviews and negotiations to become your pastor—I’m actually pretty sure that exactly ten years ago today we met with the presbytery’s Committee on Ministry—and it is maybe even harder to believe that I remember anything at all about that whirlwind experience! Still, I recall very clearly talking with the pastor nominating committee about worship—what was important to you, what you might be open to doing differently, and especially what was distinctive in worship here.

One thing that the committee talked about at length was the passing of the peace. They told me with great enthusiasm about who it involved everyone greeting everyone else with the warmth of God’s love and how the service would just not be the same without it. Over ten years, I have discovered that the committee was very much correct: the passing of the peace is a very important part of our worship here. Still, I must break some difficult news to you, and after ten years I hope you are able to hear it with the honesty and love that I intend: passing the peace is a very important part of worship for a lot of small churches, not just this one!

We do something right here in making the passing of the peace an important part of the service. As you know so well, this is not just a perfunctory greeting—it is the embodiment of God’s love and peace and hope that we are privileged to share with one another. This time of greeting one another is not about saying hello to the people we haven’t seen since last Sunday but rather about extending God’s welcome to all who join us for worship. This time of sharing peace assures us of God’s peace with each one of us in a way that opens us to live out that peace in and with our world.

All these things are embodied in our scripture readings today that give us a deeper perspective of God’s peace and so inform this practice of our worship. Each text brings a different perspective on what this peace is and how it spreads in the world, but both make it very clear that the peace that we share in this weekly ritual comes from God.

First, Psalm 85 describes how God’s peace is offered to us in words so that it can be lived out. Amid the brokenness and pain of our world, with the memory of past salvation and reconciliation close at hand, the psalmist describes how God’s people await a word of peace that will show God’s salvation and glory for the whole earth. But this peace is not just some wonderful and hopeful concept, offered only in beautiful flowing words. This peace actually gets lived out as “steadfast love and faithfulness… meet” and “righteousness and peace… kiss each other.”

This strange and wonderful imagery of peace had to stand out in the world of its first hearers. As contentious and fractured as our world so often seems to be, ancient Israel was touched even more regularly by war. I suspect that peace was far more often a dream than a reality in that day and age, for Israel stood at the crossroads of world culture and commerce and was always under attack by some outside culture or empire. So to hear a proclamation of peace like this had to be quite startling.

If that wasn’t enough, the meaning of the word used for peace here, shalom, went far beyond a description of the absence of conflict. This shalom points to not just the absence of conflict but also the presence of wholeness, completeness, and safety—the deeper elements of peace that come from God and are offered to us to share. Shalom is a transformative way of life that makes the world a different place, emerging from the ashes of human conflict to bring hope, stepping out of changed relationships so that we can live differently, in harmony with one another and all creation. And so each week we are invited to share this peace, not just a peace of greeting one another in the usual way at the usual time but a transformative peace that breaks down the barriers that divide us and demonstrates how we can live and share God’s peace in the world.

One of the best examples of sharing God’s peace in this way is on display in our New testament reading for today from the gospel according to Luke. This story of Easter evening presents us with a situation filled with fear and excitement as Jesus appeared to his disciples on the night of his resurrection. Jesus had been revealed to several of them earlier in the day, including to two of them who had walked with him on the road and not recognized him until they sat down to share a meal. But when he showed up as all eleven of the disciples were gathering on that Easter Sunday evening, they were “startled and terrified.” They didn’t quite know what to do—they “thought they were seeing a ghost” because they just had not figured out how their beloved teacher who had been executed and buried just three days earlier was now alive again. So Jesus’ first words to them set the stage for our sharing each Sunday: “Peace be with you.” These were not magical words to automatically fix everything, for Luke reports that “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering,” but in sharing this peace, Jesus invited them to take comfort in the gift of his presence so that they might share it with others.

The peace Jesus shared with his disciples continues to be shared in these days. When we pass the peace each Sunday, we bear this kind of wholeness and new life into our lives and our world. In worship, we pass the peace following the confession and pardon so that we can celebrate the ways our forgiveness enables us to walk in newness of life. But when we pass the peace in worship, it is not so much about receiving something to bring us comfort for our own lives but rather about sharing this confidence of new life so that we can live in new and different relationship with one another and the world. What good is God’s peace, after all, if it does not transform how we live with one another? Why is this peace worth passing and sharing if we do not try to make it real with others and our world? How can we expect to be reconciled with God if we do not find reconciliation with one another?

Our world needs this kind of peace now more than ever. We have not had to look far in our news this week to see the need for changed relationships of wholeness and peace to take hold. When months of diplomacy resulted in a new agreement with Iran around limits on nuclear and conventional weapons and an end to extensive sanctions, some people said that continued conflict and even potential war was preferable to a pathway towards peace. When the nation of Greece found themselves in the midst of deep economic depression and went to their neighbors and partners in the European Union for assistance, some people labeled Greeks as lazy and incompetent, demanding deeper suffering and continued austerity without any real help to open up new possibilities for wholeness and redevelopment. And when a young Muslim shot and killed five people at two military recruiting stations in Chattanooga, some people immediately labeled him a terrorist, even in the absence of conclusive evidence for such, and Franklin Graham, a minister and son of the beloved evangelist Billy Graham, even called for an end to all Muslim immigration to the United States, continuing a history of xenophobia and racism against our faithful Muslim friends just as their holy month of Ramadan came to an end.

Amid all these seeds and sprouts and full-grown conflicts, God calls us to live out the peace that we pass and share each Sunday in our worship. The psalmist calls us to listen for the peace that God speaks to us so that we might be a part of what is sure and certain to be ahead:

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

And Jesus calls us to set aside our fears and live in reconciliation and peace with one another, recognizing how his resurrection brings new life into being here and now for all the world. If this peace is good enough to share among one another, then it is good enough to share with all the world. It is good enough to inspire us to live in a new way with those who are different from us. And it is good enough to offer to the world as even a glimpse of God’s steadfast love, faithfulness, and righteousness in our actions and beyond.

So may God continue to inspire our worship as we share the peace with one another and give us strength to share that peace with all the world so that we might stand as a witness to new life and hope in our broken and fearful world until all things are made new in the peace and joy of Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Vision of Peace

October 5, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 85 and Isaiah 32:16-20
preached on October 5, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s been a lot of talk lately about peace, although these days it seems like that the more we talk about it, the more difficult it is to actually find any.

The Global Peace Index, which “measures peace in 162 countries according to 22 indicators that gauge the absence of violence or the fear of violence,” finds that 111 countries have increased in their levels of conflict over the last year, versus only 51 where peacefulness has increased. The whole report is pretty depressing. 500 million people live in countries at risk of instability and conflict, with 200 million of those live below the poverty line. Since 2008, only four indicators reviewed in the index have improved worldwide, while eighteen have deteriorated. And all this conflict costs us an incredible amount. They estimate that the global economic impact of violence reached $9.8 trillion dollars last year—the equivalent of two times the total economy of the entire continent of Africa or $1,350 per person around the world.

With this incredible impact of conflict in our world, it is incredibly surprising to me that we don’t spend more of our time, energy, and money sorting out a way of life that will bring peace to our world. However, our scripture readings today point us to a different way. As we receive the Peacemaking Offering to support the efforts of this congregation and our broader church in the global witness to peacemaking, these two wonderful texts from the Old Testament give us a vision of peace in our world.

As Christians, we tend to examine the question of peace from two perspectives—the internal and the external. When we think about internal peace, we focus on the peace that comes within our lives, “peace like a river in my soul,” as the old spiritual puts it, peace that comes from God to displace our fears, set aside our worries, and give us internal comfort and hope for our own individual lives. But we cannot think only about this kind of peace. We must also consider external peace, the peace that emerges between people and in communities and among the nations of the world, the peace that comes only with hard work, difficult listening, and tremendous amounts of trust built up over time.

Both of these kinds of peace are summed up in a single great Hebrew word that is found in both of our texts this morning: shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word that always gets translated into English as “peace,” but there’s a lot more contained in that word than is implied in our simple translation. The Hebrew word shalom pulls together a wide variety of understanding related to peace that is more than simply the absence of conflict. Shalom is more about presence than absence—the presence of social justice that enables all to have the things that they need for life and living, the presence of wholeness that offers an understanding of completeness and new life, the presence of hope for something beyond the present reality that is yet still very much achievable in our lives and our world.

This kind of peace, then, filled with wholeness and justice, is exactly the peace that the prophet Isaiah focuses on in our second reading this morning. As he writes to a people who have known little more than conflict for generations and who will end up facing even greater conflict and finally exile in the years ahead, Isaiah pauses from rehearsing all their wrongs to tell them how things will start to go right.

Justice will dwell in the wilderness,
and righteousness abide in the fruitful field.

What stranger place to make things right than the wilderness! What more unusual home for righteousness than the field at the center of the harvest! The prophet knows that God’s way of bringing change and hope will be transformative, that God will challenge the expectations of our world and upend the understandings of our lives that have become the norm.

And then this justice and righteousness will bear even more fruit: peace. Shalom will be “the result of righteousness, quietness, and trust forever.” Peace will come when order is restored, when quiet listening is at the center of all relationships, when trust in God stands at the center of all things. This peace will take root and bear fruit in so many different ways. The people “will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.” The wild forest, filled with terrors and destruction, will be tamed into something new. The city where conflicts rage will find comfort. God’s people will be connected to the land and find comfort in the waters of every stream.

These visions of peace from Isaiah go right along with the words of our psalm for today. Toward the end of these thirteen beautiful verses, we find some of the most unusual imagery of peace in the bible.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.

If only this vision could be real! If only we could find this sort of peace in our lives! If only our world could settle into such ways! These things may seem impossible, difficult, and even far off, but it is our call and challenge as followers of Jesus Christ to bear this vision of peace into the world. This vision seeks not simply to eliminate conflict but to promote a way of life in our lives and our world where justice and righteousness will flourish for all people. This vision of peace doesn’t seek to squash conflict here so that it later emerges over there, like a perpetual high-stakes game of “whack-a-mole,” but works to change the structures and systems that allow conflict to flourish and replace them with a way of life that promotes social justice and peace. And this vision of peace doesn’t proclaim peace when things aren’t actually whole and complete and calm but instead gives us a vision of something more so that we can be encouraged in the work of making peace each and every day.

The vision of peace we have in these words from Isaiah and the psalms is one that is still a long way away from being known in its fullness, but that doesn’t mean that we are freed from doing this work in the world now. God’s shalom is still very much distant from us in its fullness, but there are yet little glimpses of it here and now. We see God’s shalom whenever a broken relationship is mended or a new start emerges amidst uncertainty and challenge. We see God’s shalom when we welcome the presence of the Holy Spirit into our lives to feed our hearts with new life. And we see God’s shalom when we work to bring justice and righteousness into the relationships of our lives and our world.

It is not easy to live lives that show this vision of peace. A lot of people will object to the pathway that we offer along the way. Some want an easy peace, simply declared by someone in power without any real consequences for that person—and so without any real consequence in general. And some will say that peace just needs to be put off until some bigger conflict gets worked out. But the work of bringing peace and justice and righteousness to our world begins with each one of us every day, with honest assessments of the relationships in our lives and the things that we do to foster or limit peace, with simple steps to increase communication and build trust when there is uncertainty and fear, with openness to a new and different way that we find first here at this table, where the one with great power and privilege emptied it all to share it more abundantly.

Each Sunday, as we did earlier today, this community passes the peace with one another. I was told when I came to be your pastor nine years ago that we could change most anything in the order of service—except for the passing of the peace! That time of connection and sharing peace with one another is one of the great visions of peace in our life together. The Iona Community of Scotland, in one of its communion liturgies, has taken that ritual and given it new and deeper meaning by introducing it with these words:

not an easy peace,
not an insignificant peace,
not a half-hearted peace,
but the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ
is with us now.

May the vision of this peace be with us every day, and may God guide us as we share it with one another and all the world until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.