For several chapters in John’s gospel. Jesus gives an extended speech known as his Farewell Discourse, and we have spent the last few weeks of the Easter season reminding ourselves of what instructions Jesus gave his disciples, including us, as his earthly ministry was drawing to a close. And it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that what Jesus is saying, the disciples do not want to hear. They don’t want him to leave them. Nobody wants the people they love to leave.
And so the disciples are afraid and anxious, facing an unknown future. Just like us. We have been thrown into a state of constant upheaval particularly since March 2020, when the entire world seemed to halt in midstride due to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus now known as “COVID-19” and all its variants. In the early days, when there was no treatment, much less vaccines or boosters, there was fear, and panic. Both of these things stemmed from a lack of knowledge, a lack of certainty. And that lack of knowing is also exactly what Jesus’s disciples are facing as he tries to make them understand what is about to happen, and as he spends several long chapters describing something unimaginable to his friends.
In response to the fears the disciples have been plunged into, fears of abandonment and uncertainty at the potential loss of their beloved teacher, Jesus offers what sounds like a simple gift: peace. The word peace is repeated: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you….” This is a precious gift indeed and much needed, since Jesus tells his friends he is leaving them. But Jesus reminds them that the gifts that come from God are untarnished and unsullied by the penury that functions in society when he continues: “I do not give to you as the world gives.”
I think of the juxtaposition between the way society “gives” and God gives. “The world” around us focuses on profit, leverage, competition, and advantage. It encourages giving only if that giving does not inconvenience oneself—giving out of one’s remnants rather than giving out of our first fruits, as the earliest scriptures commanded.
But too many among us are also angry, which is another reaction to stress. And anger is dangerous when it leads to hatred and violence, to looking for scapegoats instead of working for understanding and positive change.
The key to managing the kind of stress and uncertainty in which we have been often lies not in defying but in managing our expectations. Some people today manage them by adopting the lowest standard, like those who are determined to expect the worst from the people around them and from the institutions that make up society. This can make one seem savvy rather than naïve. After all, disappointment is often a daily dish served cold to each of us.
But having expectations be set cynically low leads not just to worse behavior from others—it leads to worse behavior in ourselves. After all, in the transactional world in which we live, the golden rule itself has been twisted from its original intent. It used to be “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It seems like all too often lately, that has instead become “Do unto others before they can do something to you first. Too many of our fellow citizens walk around angry, frustrated and focused on their grievances, whether real or imagined. This especially is on my mind as we hear of a teenaged white supremacist in Buffalo driving all the way across the state to murder Black people in a grocery store in a black neighborhood based on a paranoid delusion that white people are endangered by the mere presence of people of color.
The “peace” the world offers us is too often no peace at all. It is a peace that is based on a lie, of denying that injustice and inequality exists. It is a peace bought at the price of inaction and silence in the face of evil. It is a peace that requires no shared sense of purpose but that pushes the burden onto other people. It is a peace that requires the suffering to be patient in their suffering rather than disrupt the status quo and question those whom he status quo benefits.
The peace that Jesus offers to his disciples and therefore to us, however, is not the peace that the world offers. The peace Jesus talks about is a word most of us have heard: shalom.
Shalom, real peace and contentment even when we encounter setbacks, is the embodiment of a phrase we pray all the time in the Lord’s Prayer as we will in just a few minutes: “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done/ On Earth as it is in Heaven.” Do we mean it? Then we can start by living the resurrection, right here, right now.
In praying that prayer, we are not asking God to come in and fix everything that is wrong with the world we have made. We are praying for the strength, the wisdom, and the love to make God’s will of peace, plenty, and security our own will. We are not praying for peace for ourselves—that’s giving as the world gives. Instead, we are praying for our hearts and minds to be transformed so that we can embody Christ’s peace here on Earth the peace that God wills for all, whether friend or stranger. Peace that is not merely the absence of tension and division, to expand upon a statement by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but the presence of justice.
Shalom is the very definition of a resurrection-shaped life. Shalom is the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to us, but it can only be fulfilled if we demand peace and justice not just for ourselves but for our brothers and sisters. A society cannot live in wholeness and health if it does not tend to the well-being of all its members—and this is triply true of a society which claims to be.
Shalom cannot happen by accident— it requires the deliberate practice of love and justice for even the least in society. We love peace, but we must love justice more. Welfare for all cannot be harnessed to the plow of inequity. Urging others to peace must never be used to mean passive acquiescence to evil.
If we close our eyes to injustice, we turn our backs on Christ’s peace and become hypocrites to the call of Jesus to create the Kingdom of God on Earth.
In 2017, some good friends of mine surprised me with tickets to see Arlo Guthrie in concert on the 50th anniversary of his album “Alice’s Restaurant.” It was a wonderful evening and Arlo put everything into it he could, even though he was ailing and had slowed down considerably since the last time I had seen him in college, and his daughter took over performing at times so he could have breaks at times during the concert, and she was an amazing performer herself. He ended the concert with a song whose lyrics were written by his father, the great Woody Guthrie, that Arlo had put to music. It was called “My Peace,” and he encouraged the audience to join in singing the simple but profound words:
My peace, my peace is all I’ve got that I can give to you
My peace is all I ever had that’s all I ever knew
I give my peace to green and black and red and white and blue
My peace my peace is all I’ve got that I can give to you.
My peace, my peace is all I’ve got and all I've ever known
My peace is worth a thousand times more than anything I own
I pass my peace around and about ‘cross hands of every hue;
I guess my peace is just about all I’ve got to give to you. (1)
The heart of the resurrected life is a life is which we, as followers of Jesus, offer our peace, the peace we have received from Jesus, to the world, just as the song insisted. To demonstrate the love of God for us, to do as well as say, we are called to practice shalom in all its gradients. Peace that brings forth justice. Peace that brings forth reconciliation. Peace that works against poverty. Peace that values the least rather than the powerful. Peace that is true shalom, called for by the prophets throughout history and implied in our gospel. That’s why God calls us to practice peace, real peace through witness in our lives and actions. Our actions and our lives have to serve as witness to reflect God’s love for us back into the world.
Justice, mercy, empathy, and love for all are the building blocks for lasting peace. The society God wants us to build has been described to us repeatedly. We are to care for the widow and the orphan, without distinction. We are called to feel the wounds of the world as Jesus did—to see them, and then work to heal them. We are to feed the hungry, even if our loaves are few and our fish are small. We are to insist upon a society in which there are not winners or losers, but in which each other person’s suffering is our own. We are not to be self-righteous in the face of poverty lest we reveal the poverty of our own spirits. We are called to action, not passivity, if we truly want to practice who we claim to be.
The Rev. Shug and I are wearing orange stoles today to memorialize the lives lost this week in mass shootings. And even more appalling is that there have been already 201 mass shooting in the US already in 2022, and we are only in the 19th week of the year.
The events of the last few weeks and months insist once again on us understanding this truth: evil cannot be overcome by evil-- it can only be overcome by good. Let us be united in our denunciation of the evils of racism, gun violence, and hatred. Let us pray for the souls of those victims of course. But let us be willing to ourselves act to eliminate the scourge of maimings and killings in which our society is drenched. Then and only then, will we truly embody the resurrection of heart, mind, and soul to which we commit ourselves each time we pray that prayer, and gather together here, individually and as the Body of Christ.
We are also called to take the long view as Christians—and to see the image of God in every person. We are called to serve our neighbors and love our enemies. We are an Easter people—a resurrection people. That means that we see that working to make our society more just and more filled with shalom will also increase our own connection with God and each other. The work of shalom, justice, and mercy is holy, and it benefits us all.
Peace, true peace, is a gift that blesses us only if it is shared with others—and the more the better. Jesus gives us the gift of shalom so that, by the help of the Holy Spirit, we can share that gift of shalom with those around us—and therefore we ALL benefit. Let us give of ourselves—not as the world gives, but as Christ gives to us.
Amen.
Preached at the 505, and the 8 and 10:30 Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO on May 21 and 22, 2022.
Readings:
Citations:
1) Woody Guthrie, "My Peace," lyrics found at https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/My_Peace.htm A video of Arlo Guthrie performing this song can be viewed below.
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