"Our Ever Elusive Peace"


Sermon Delivered By Reverend Richard E. Stetler – December 23, 2012

Centenary United Methodist Church

Isaiah 55; Micah 5:2-5a

 

    This morning, as the Swan family lighted our Advent Wreath with its candle of Peace, did we have any thoughts about the candle’s significance?  Why does the coming of Jesus make us think about peace? What has happened during the last 2,000 years to make us imagine that Jesus brought peace?  If he brought peace, where is it among the various societies of our world?  

    The most significant statement Jesus made on the subject is located in the Gospel of John.  He said, “Peace is what I leave with you; it is my own peace that I give you.  I do not give you peace in the same way that the world does.  Do not be worried and upset; do not be afraid.”  (John 14:27)  Jesus has been frequently called, The Prince of Peace.  What did he bring?

    A number of the Old Testament scriptures point to a time when peace will flow through humanity’s numerous societies like a river.  We grow impatient for that day to come.  Songs have been written about peace.  Candle lighted prayer vigils are held because of our desire for peace.  Still, peace eludes us.  Is it possible that we are looking to God to bring peace on earth when peace will only come when it is the collective will of humanity?    

    There have been periods in our recent history when people have experienced such a collective peace.  For example, a number of us have known people that were born in the late 1800s.  While it may be difficult for us to imagine, there really was a time when pockets of people lived very peacefully together.  There are a number of reasons why this was so.  People lived on farms in rural communities. 

    The stories of their childhood were fascinating to listen to.  Rural families kept to themselves.  If they talked to people -- prior to the arrival of the telephones with the cranks on the side -- it was with the veterinarian.  It was with the grocer who collected requested items and brought them to his cash register.  They spoke with other farmers, with the people at church and with the doctor who made house calls. 

    When the world experienced The Great Depression in 1929, farmers felt little economic pain because everything they needed was there on the farm. There was no global community and for the most part their lives were peaceful.   Trust and their sense of community were taken for granted by families. They assumed such peace was everywhere.

    Their world was a very different environment from the one we know.  Today, the news of everything from earthquakes to mass murders is known all over the world within minutes of the event.  We live in a world where successful teenage recording artists can become multi-millionaires overnight.  We live in a world where individuals can very easily set aside their society’s core values simply because they feel like it.  Self-absorbed people are never sorry for what they do until they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar.  Then, they become very repentant.

    This is not to say that we live in a world that is decaying.  Our world is just different from the world our ancestors knew.  Accelerated change has all but removed people from those rural settings where peace once existed.   No matter what we do, peace eludes us.

    Why does that happen?  Lasting peace between the world’s cultures may be centuries away from happening.   When Jesus said, “I do not give you peace in the same way that the world does.  Do not be worried and upset; do not be afraid,” he knew the world cannot give peace to anyone.  Becoming peaceful is an individual experience that comes from an act of will.  Keeping our peace every day takes a constant effort.

    A number of years ago, one of my former congregations had a series of Lenten services on Wednesday nights.  I had arrived early to prepare the children’s nursery when I heard the loud voice of a man who was using the pay phone that hung on the wall just outside our church’s kitchen. The volume of the man’s voice carried everywhere.  He was not happy.

    Without any effort, I could hear everything that he was saying.  He was extremely agitated with something his son had done.  Using very angry tones he said, “Will you shut up and listen to me?” He also seasoned his words with numerous expletives.  His language pushed me over the edge.

    I could not resist my desire to see who this man was so I peeked around the corner.  To my surprise, the man was a complete stranger.  However, a half hour later the coordinator of our Lenten programs introduced him as our speaker for the evening.  I sat in the congregation absolutely stunned as he spoke very eloquently and quite sincerely about the love of Christ. 

    For quite some time I thought of him as a two-faced hypocrite, until I found myself, any number of times, in a frenzied state causing me to stifle my hostile feelings as I moved from one setting into another where a different state of mind was required.  Peace is very elusive.

    Our Isaiah passage this morning offers us a path to find peace, a path that Jesus walked once he awakened at his baptism.  Isaiah was quoting God when he wrote, “Listen now my people and come to me; come to me and you will find life!  I will make a lasting covenant with you and give you the blessings I have promised.  I, the Lord your God, will make all this happen.” (Isaiah 55:3f) 

    The responsibility for experiencing peace is clearly ours, not God’s.  God was saying, “Come to me and you will find life.”  Yes, God will make things happen, but only after we surrender our struggles and come to him.  Today’s well known expression is, “Let go and let God.” Jesus taught his disciples “Do not be worried and upset.  Do not be afraid.”  For peace to come, we have to let go of emotional responses that cannot possibly serve us.  We were not born with this skill; it has to be learned through our practice of choosing peace when our environment is calling for very different responses.

    Most of us know Ron Lucas.  When I learned that he was a highly skilled scuba diver and also a published underwater photographer, I spoke to him about my interest in putting on tanks and slipping beneath the surf to get a peek at Bermuda’s underwater world.

    Ron discussed with me the amount of training that is necessary before anyone goes for their first dive.  He told me that a good number of people skip that step.  He said that they put on the tanks and descend into a magnificent world having no knowledge about diving. They have zero skills for managing themselves underwater.  They have absolutely no experience with how to function when they encounter problems. 

    Think of how similar scuba diving is to the time when our spirits enter our magnificent world that is even more beautiful than the coral reefs around our island.  Think about coming into contact with life forms that are more remarkable and varied than the beautiful tropical fish, the magnificent shell creatures and the other marine life around Bermuda. 

    Coming into our physical forms is like scuba diving for the first time.  Most of the values our parents teach us have not yet been tested.  Young people have not yet entered life alone where they will experience the intense drama that adults often find there.  Intense drama has a way of hijacking our peace.

    We come into contact with the selfish attitudes, manipulative values, and fraudulent behavior of people that are as dangerous as rip tides, poisonous coral and dangerous marine life.  This is just like being underwater when our equipment malfunctions.  We have to know how to recognize the shortcomings in our personal skill sets in order to evolve in our knowledge of how to live in our physical forms.  We are not required to have a master’s degree in life-skills before we engage life as an emotional mature adult.  Peace eludes us.

    Our inability to hold on to our peace is what causes such emotional pain when a marriage fails, when a person is made redundant in his or her work place and when young people believe no one understands them. 

    Peace eludes people when they feel the need to escape into the fleeting pleasures generated by narcotics, alcohol, comfort foods, sex, and their pursuit of things in the world that are always changing.  This absence of peace is why Charles Dickens had Ebenezer Scrooge say, “Bah Humbug” each time acquaintances talked to him about Christmas.

    If we return to Jesus’ world for a moment, we read that he encountered a number of moments when his peace was tested.  He saw how tax collectors were gouging the public.  He saw how Roman soldiers were threatening his own people by extorting money from them.  He took compassion on a woman who was found committing adultery. (John 8:11)  He did not devalue the worth of another woman that had been with five husbands even when the man she was living with was not one of them. (John 4:17)  Jesus did not over-react when his cousin, John the Baptist, had been savagely and senselessly murdered. (Matthew 14:13)

    Jesus, however, was not on a crusade to produce peace in the world.  He knew that global peace was never going to happen as long as people lived by different values.  However, his words from the cross demonstrated that peace could not be taken from him even by those that had just driven nails into his hands and feet.  

    If we want peace within ourselves, we have to remember the words from Isaiah, “Come to me and you will find life!”  We have to learn to let go of thoughts and feelings that easily remove peace from our lives.  When we have inner peace, it is because we know that God has a firm grasp on reality that right now we do not have the capacity or ability to understand.

    We have no teacher that enters our lives at just the right moment to remind us, “Don’t let these events rob you of your hope, love, joy and peace.”  These were the themes of our Advent candles.  Isaiah’s passage has God say, “Come to me and you will find life.”  Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”  When our emotions have been tamed, our spirits will radiate the themes of our Advent candles.

    Lois and I had some interesting conversations with Lee Rankin before he died.  Some of them were of his early life growing up on St. David’s Island.  People living on his island were like family. Trust and the sense of community created a quality of life for everyone.  He told us, “Our world changed when the causeways were built and newcomers began to settle among us.” 

    Jesus taught, “My peace is not like the peace that people received from the world.”  Like everything else in our world, what Lee had remembered from his childhood was one moment in time when his environment actually made peace possible within his community.  But as Lee learned, he had to adjust to a world that was quite different.

    Jesus taught that each of us can achieve peace regardless of the conditions of our world.  Like everything else in life, skills only develop in us with constant practice.  The goal of achieving peace is what saves us from being pulled into the web of others when so many conflicting values test us every day.  Even Jesus failed a number of times when his patience and peace were tested.  (Matthew 21:12)  (Mark 9:19) 

    When we feel our defenses surfacing, that is a test. When we want to respond with unloving attitudes, those are moments of testing.  Once our spirits win the battle over our aggressive emotions, peace is the reward.  This is why Jesus taught that the potential for developing all the qualities of our Advent themes is within us.  He called it, The Kingdom of God.  The crown jewel of life is peace.  Jesus did not bring peace as the world gives it.  What he brought was the knowledge of how each of us can find and hold on to it