Peace Be With You ... and Courage

All these resurrection experiences of Jesus we get – from Easter till about four weeks from now when we say he ascended into heaven and it’s all wrapped up – all these images of the resurrected Jesus are scattered and inconsistent.

Some of them we’ve read in the last couple of weeks, and others we haven’t. But there’s the road to Emmaeus, when it was something about his voice that affected people. Or the disciples needing to see his wounds. Or Jesus’ eating with them, or the story of him fishing with them. Or just stories of one person telling another person they saw Jesus. And all these experiences don’t really fit into a storyline, the way the stories of his life do. And we can end up feeling as disoriented as the disciples.

But there are two threads that seem to hold together this grab-bag of Jesus experiences: a kind peace he brings and the new community that that peace makes – there’s a causal relationship there. And Tim talked about peace in his sermon last week, the Bridge talked about it at lunch, so I want to stay with the program.

Because I think our regular life as a community of faith is a lot like this whole weird post-resurrection thing. We all have different experiences of Jesus, and a lot of times one person’s experience doesn’t make sense to somebody else – but it can help them anyway. We’re a community that is never set but we’re always changing. And hopefully what’s at the center of it all is both community and God’s peace.

And that’s all well and good to say – to talk about community and peace. And it’s hard to find somebody who’s not going to get with that. I mean, who’s going to say, “Oh no, I prefer isolation and hostility?” – though I think a lot of times we really do. But that’s why we can’t leave it at just nice-sounding words. If we’re going to make it real, and not just nice, then we have to ask: What does peace really have to do with community? What is this causal relationship?

In the Bridge this spring, we’ve been talking about how we experience faith through our bodies – how the stuff we say about God or the church actually works in terms of our real experiences like exercise, or sexuality, or anxiety or depression, or feelings or addiction, and how all this stuff is what makes faith real in our bodies. One of the things that struck me from our discussion last week was how people saw God’s peace as something that is bodily – it was the first thing that came up.

People were saying – I paraphrase here – that God’s peace nourishes us, it moves us and wakes us up. One person even said it was a sense of God’s peace that woke him early enough on Easter morning to get to the vigil without using an alarm clock – which is so not the experience I had.

But the point is that the kind of peace Jesus is talking about today, and last week, isn’t a chamomile-tea kind of calmness that puts us to sleep. God’s peace wakes us up, it doesn’t leave us sleeping. God’s peace makes us more alive, not less alive.

But – here’s the clincher – it doesn’t wake us up in an anxious way, or in a depressive way, like waking up to a feeling that nothing is possible. A sign of real peace is that you feel like you’re waking up – and everything is going to be ok.

And that’s a powerful combination. Because what happens when we wake up and we don’t feel falsely high or low, but just clear and tuned in?

What happens is that we have an effect in the world. I don’t mean that we decide to go out and do good works, though that can be a result. When God’s shimmering peace is in us, it nourishes us with a kind of energy that gives things simplicity not complication. But an active kind of simplicity. And when that peace is in us, we bring that active simplicity into the places we go, we make a different chemistry with the world. So in other words, it lets us deal with the inevitable changes around us in a different way. God’s peace doesn’t mean we’re passive; it means we’re responsive, just from a different kind of place than what the world would dream up.

God’s peace doesn’t leave us alone and it’s doesn’t let us leave the world alone.

I mean, look the other major time we hear about peace from Jesus’ life. It was when he was born, and it was being somehow shouted, sung, however it sounded, from the heavens by angels who said “Peace on earth.” That didn’t mean suddenly everybody stopped fighting and went home and drank warm milk. That meant peace was in a body on earth and that had consequences.

Night shepherds were scared, but peace made them move, and they found themselves with their feet in the dung, before an infant who was wrapped in the same kinds of cloth strips used to wrap corpses. And then wise men came from far away – a lot of hard work – and kings were upset and had thousands of young children killed, and Jesus and his family fled into Egypt. Nothing calm about this peace.

And the point is that it started forming a new community that from the get-go cut across all human boundaries. It went from the highest heaven to the most unsanitary earth. It went from the rich – the wise men were obviously people of means – to the poor night workers whose land was occupied by another country, so they were doubly powerless. It went from people of one religious background, the shepherds being Jewish, to the wise men, whose religion we can only guess at. It went from mentally ill King Herod to the savvy and loving Joseph. All of these people responding in one way or another to Jesus. Welcome to “peace on earth.”

And now we’re at the bookend of all that. Jesus was wrapped in bands of cloth again, as a corpse. And those bands broke loose, and something happened, and once again he became a body that held peace. It was upsetting to people, again. And it changed a community, again.

Look at Peter, in the Acts reading. I mean, in the Gospels, this guy couldn’t have been a bigger buffoon, and suddenly here, he’s a brilliant, self-assured preacher. He’s telling all these people who came out to see a man who was healed that they’re there for the wrong reason. They’ve come out for entertainment. But, he says, the point isn’t watching someone else’s life change. The point is what’s up in their own hearts. They need to be ready to look at the world differently, because whether they realize it or not, it’s been turned upside down. The point is just whether they want to tune in to it. You go, boy.

This little scene with Peter shows how having meeting up with the peace of God has an effect. There will be newness and change, and it probably won’t be just the super-private “my very own personal change,” even though that’s a lot easier to market these days. There’s a flow between inside and outside. So this peace of God is going to change community. And I’m not so sure it’s so easy for us always to believe in that.

So let’s look at an example a little closer to home.

Last Sunday, I went to a special service at the Trenton cathedral, in the Diocese of New Jersey, just north of us. It was a celebration of people who were in recovery – people struggling with addiction who were recovering from its power in their lives, maybe recovering for days, maybe for decades. And it was really beautiful. The 12 steps of recovery were woven into the Eucharist in a way that showed they really are parallel – they both take us through a very healthy process.

And the preacher was Bishop Mark Hollingsworth, of the Diocese of Ohio, who is an alcoholic who’s been in recovery for something like 20 years. He talked about how to be in recovery is to be in community, how it makes for unusual neighbors, how it means finding peace in uncertainty, and how isolation is what undermines the whole thing. But he added something interesting.

He said we know that we’re all in a global economic crisis – and a real common catchphrase we hear all over the place now is – global economic recovery, right? Recovery initiatives, recovery strategies, recovery packages. But – recovery.

So Bp Hollingsworth took the recovery ideas of 12-step and said these folks are more ready to live into a real global recovery because they’re better at it. They know that recovery makes for strange bedfellows and that the group is always changing. They know recovery cuts across all of society, that it makes us look for the places we can have a realistic effect, that we seek serenity in the uncertainty, and that we can see this as spiritual change. And while we all want to say we believe these things, the folks in recovery have had to live them as sheer survival – that’s the difference.

I think Bp Hollingsworth was right, I just hope the church itself isn’t too far behind 12-step groups in being ready to be part of society’s recovery. The hard thing about it is, we really don’t know what things are going to look like on the other side of recovery; no on ever does. Crises are always a chance for God hunker down and do some really breakthrough work with us. The question is only ever, Can we be instruments of that?

Can we find ourselves with different neighbors, can we deal better with our shared humanity – in reality not the abstract – and can we look for places we can have an effect, and find serenity when we can’t. In other words, can we be instruments of God’s peace?

Instruments of God’s peace….

Suddenly, something sounds real familiar. And it should – because we’ve somehow stumbled right into the heart of the old beloved prayer of St. Francis. Remember? It starts off “Lord, make us instruments of your peace.” Wow – what if that’s what Jesus is talking about when he says “peace be with you”? Because here’s the thing. The prayer doesn’t go on to say, “Let us sit quietly, let us be nice people, let us be calm or placid.” That is so not the St. Francis prayer.

The St. Francis prayer is incredibly active. It’s about really hard work. Let us sow love, union, hope, light. This isn’t “sew” like sitting in a nice chair, this is “sow” like putting our hands down in the dirt. It’s about working the soil, and tending it, and tending the seeds, and watching the wind and the rain and being tired and hopeful and trying again and again and again.

Then the prayer says to help us seek to console people. “Seek” – it’s tiring to seek, you have to go out and hunt hard for something, something you can sense in your heart and that you yearn for but that’s just eluding you out there in the world. For instance, people who come here who feel like they’re seekers are on a hunt, and maybe they’re hunting for consolation and maybe they’re hunting to have the chance to console somebody else. Then – the prayer says, let us seek to understand and to love. You know how hard to can be to understand someone? And then – the never-ending gift of looking, hunting, for more ways to love them.

The prayer attributed to St. Francis, probably the main prayer most people go to when they want to talk about peace, is about the hardest work I’ve ever heard of.

And maybe that answers our question. Maybe that’s the relationship between God’s peace – and the real community that Jesus is trying to put together in these stories. And that really helps me. Because now, that’s a connection between peace and community that doesn’t feel just glossy and flowery and like drugged-out ‘60s, but actually like something that has to do with real life.

This connection between peace and community means we’re determined enough to sow things, and driven enough to seek things. It’s about God’s interests, not human ones. It means that instead of having the hurts inside of us be places we’re ashamed of, or what we see as weak, the tables are turned, and they are in fact places of strength and help in the world. And instead of making us act out of fear to enforce quietness, God’s peace lets us act out of freedom and trust that we’re bringing a new picture into being that we can’t see yet.

When we ask God to let us be instruments of that, it’s nothing less than a huge and daring act of bravery.