"Our
Ever Elusive Peace" Sermon Delivered By Reverend Richard E. Stetler
– December 23, 2012 Centenary United 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 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 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 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 |