April 15 Sermon on Peace

Isaiah 11:1-9

11A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. ²The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. ³His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; ⁴but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. ⁵Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. ⁶The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. ⁷The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. ⁸The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. ⁹They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

In the master bathroom in our house, there is a clock that makes a rather audible ticking noise. Now, I never noticed this until shortly after we put it up and Rachel insisted that I close the door to the bathroom before she could sleep. She said the sound drove her crazy and she couldn't sleep with it. I hadn't noticed it at all. We're all wired a little differently.

What's the one sound that disturbs you the most? What's the one sound that, if you had the power, you would rid the world of forever?

Ok—so let's imagine a world without those sounds. Let's put you in a room where there is quiet—there isn't a single annoying sound to get on your nerves. Would you be happy with the way the world sounded? There wouldn't be any noise.

What would you miss?

At first, we might revel in the silence. But then we'd probably notice that there were no birds chirping, and there were no children laughing. We wouldn't hear the choir sing their beautiful songs and the wind wouldn't rustle the leaves in the trees. We wouldn't have any annoying sounds—but that wouldn't be quite enough. We want the sounds that make us glad, that make the world a more beautiful place.

We're going to talk about peace today, and we're going to do it in the same way—peace isn't just about the cessation of hostilities. When Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant sat down to draw up a peace treaty to end the Civil War, they didn't just agree to stop fighting—they had to figure out what happened next, how to fill the void of fighting with something good so that the country would have a chance of sewing up the wounds that had been torn open. The kind of peace we're going to talk about today is incomplete if we only talk about avoiding evil—the kind of peace that we will discuss is a peace that can only be complete if there is a sense of fullness to it. Imagine a grocery bag that not only doesn't have unhealthy, terrible things in it, but also is bursting at the seams with abundant goodness, with a wealth of treats for the body and the taste buds. This is shalom, God's peace. This is the kind of peace for which the world is destined, and this is the kind of peace we are each seeking today.

Getting away from the idea of peace as the simple notion of people not fighting, I'm going to read the beginning of the 11^th chapter of Isaiah. As we read, I want you to notice that it's more than a simple quiet. Peace isn't indicated by the lack of violence, but by a community that is working on all cylinders, a community that is in love with one another. It's not enough that the wolf doesn't eat the lamb—here, they actually lie down together, at peace, at rest.

<read 11^th chapter of Isaiah>

When we talk about shalom, about God's peace, there is a sense of all of creation living just as God had intended it to live. It's a fullness—defined not simply by the absence of conflict, but by each created thing living up to its fullest potential, to the height of how God created it to be. What we had in the Garden of Eden was how it should be—but in our sin, we turned from God's peace, believing in arrogance that we could somehow manage to secure a better future for ourselves. We shortened our vision to the here and the now, and we have been suffering ever sense because of our shortsightedness, because of our sin. We established our own gods and believed that we could buy security, but in reality it has only purchased more anxiety, more struggles. We could easily say that it is worse now than it has ever been, but the reality is that, ever since the fall, we have been captured in the net of sin and, in struggling to get free, have wounded ourselves with the weapons we created in the hopes of securing for ourselves a better life. We are indifferent to the abundant life that God has offered us, the shalom, the peace of God that passes all understanding, because we have tried to grasp it and control it, rather than merely accept it as gift.

Perhaps, every now and again, you have had a sense that things are not the way they should be. We spoke on Monday about how some people grew up in households where you never locked the doors, where you left the keys in the car. You were comfortable and trusted your neighbors. You might have even trusted strangers. Now, however, you don't do that—now maybe you have an alarm system and a gate and a dog that tells the world to keep out. But inside, there's a gnawing sense that this isn't the way it should be. That it doesn't feel right. That's a longing for shalom—that's the awareness that there is a different way we were created to be, and it's the soul crying out for the peace of God.

How do we get that peace, you may wonder?

For starters, we don't get it. We can't obtain it. We can't earn it. You can't save enough box tops or brownie points to trade in for it. It's a gift, and it comes from one man, one man who died on a cross because that was the only way to secure peace for the world. It sounds funny to say that a violent death on a cross was the only way to secure peace, but I assure you that it was—Jesus Christ had to die for our sins for us to have access to God's peace.

Had Christ not died for our sins, we would be forever at odds with God. We could not be united with God after death, because Christ would not have defeated death, and because God couldn't be united with sin—it's against his nature. But Christ wipes out death and sin, and makes a path to peace for us. In Christ, we are cleansed from our sin, and the part of us that is at war with God, that is opposed to true peace, is forever altered. We stop looking to ourselves and look to God. We stop trying to provide for ourselves and trust in God to provide for us. We stop worshiping ourselves and this world and worship only God.

Now, this peace of God has two aspects to it. In much of the Protestant church in the last hundred years, we have focused only on one aspect, the inner, spiritual peace. This is the deep, heartfelt relationship with Jesus Christ. Personal salvation is the focus of this kind of peace. And there isn't anything wrong with this—but it's incomplete when we stop after this. When we read Scripture, we notice that one's relationship with God is always leading the individual out into the community. One's relationship with God isn't lived in isolation.

So how do we achieve peace? We begin by accepting that we'll only truly be at peace when Christ returns and defeats sin with finality. Until then, we work on our inner life, and that leads us out into the community. One without the other is incomplete. Both are the work of a lifetime, not a day or a week or a month or a year.

To work on the inner life, it's about replacing our fears with trust. We have all sorts of fear—we hear not having enough as we age, we fear not being respected in the world, we fear scarcity and strangers and uncertainty. We fear aging itself, and death and disease and infirmity. We fear that we aren't good enough. For each of these fears, we erect some sort of belief that we can control our fears, or we construct a defense against the fears, rather than turn and trust in God. There are a thousand companies trying to sell you a product to prevent aging, and there are another thousand that will try and sell you the lie that you can protect yourself from the outside world. We tell ourselves lies that we can earn God's love and we consume more products to make us feel superior over our neighbors.

None of these products, none of our lies, leads us to the truth—that God alone can provide for our future, and that all the world's products and lies will fall away and fail us. For true inner peace, we have to trust completely in God, to not worry about tomorrow, to not build up idols that cannot protect us. It doesn't mean we live irresponsibly, it means rather that we don't invest our time and energy into worrying about the future. We make our plans, and we trust that God will provide for us. We don't fear anything—we trust in God. We trust in God in every moment of life and in the face of death, because God has promised to provide for us, to watch over us, to bring us through death into true life. Inner peace means we have to die to ourselves daily, to recognize the places in our lives where we rely on ourselves, and to slowly hand those over to God, that we might be healed. It's about taking the locks off the doors to the chambers of our lives that we have kept from God and handing those over.

This should lead us out into the world, for God's peace, a complete peace for all of creation, cannot very well provide peace and joy for some and not for others. A sense of peace means that we then begin to look out for our neighbor, for we want them to have the same kind of peace we do. We then work for them, regardless of their race or social class. Our idea of our neighbor is radically expanded—shouldn't we want peace for all of God's children? Shouldn't the abundant life that Christ provides be offered to everyone? God's peace is bigger than just us—and so our inner peace should lead us out into the world to see justice and equality for everyone. If we have no fears or anxieties, we are then freed to pass on God's reconciliation to all, to be content with what we have and share it with the world. We can't just have inner peace and relax—our relationship with God, the peace that dwells within us, should compel us to share with others.

God's peace is two sided—and it's not enough to have one without the other. It changes us forever, and it gives us something to look forward to in eternity.

Let us pray.