Sermon manuscript:
Today we are taking up the topic of peace. It is kind of
hard to grasp perfectly the meaning of this word. The dictionary says that
peace is the absence of disturbance. So a synonym would be “tranquility.”
Another meaning that the dictionary gives is that peace is the opposite of war
or conflict. I don’t have a problem with these definitions—they are getting at
the meaning, but I think they are missing quite a lot.
We have drugs, for example, that are called tranquilizers.
They make people calm. The make people sleepy. They take away anxiety. But
those who have been tranquilized aren’t living life to the full. The fullness
of life is, in fact, too much for them, so life has purposely been turned down.
If tranquilizers were peace, all that we would need to achieve peace would be
pills and injections.
The absence of war, also, isn’t a good enough definition.
Our country has engaged in many wars for the last 75 years, followed by
so-called peace, but that has not brought about too much goodness either here
at home or those lands that we have invaded and bombed.
I doubt that any dictionary definition of peace is going to
be good enough, because peace is a very broad thing, touching on the stuff of
life itself. Therefore it is a very religious thing. Peace is only going to
come together with God, and without God no peace is ever going to be truly
complete. This is not to say that we haven’t tried that very thing—to achieve
peace without God.
Think about where people’s minds have been for at least the
length of my lifetime, probably longer. We’ve heard, have we not, that “it’s
the economy, stupid.” Politicians are to blame for the economy not working
right. If we elect somebody else the economy’s going to change. Then we’ll all
be at peace.
Or maybe it’s not the economy. Maybe it’s fixing people’s
backwards morals, or, on the other hand, fixing people’s progressive morals.
Think of how many billions of dollars get spent every
election cycle—ostensibly for peace, but really for people to scream at each
other. And then, when everything is said and done, the same kinds of people to
get elected over and over again regardless of party. Lately I think a lot of
people have started to think that this hasn’t been working.
Yes, it hasn’t been working. It can’t work. Peace cannot be
had without God. Every attempt to manufacture peace without him is doomed to
fail. The Bible bears this out with countless examples of failing to achieve
peace: The fig leaves didn’t take away the shame. The bushes didn’t keep you
hidden from God. The wandering murderer, Cain, and his descendants built their
cities and discovered their inventions. That didn’t give them peace. That’s not to say it didn’t given them
anything. These things and all our other endeavors give us something of a high.
Tax rebates and stimulus checks give us something. Political victories give us
something. But not peace.
This is even true of that which can bring us the closest to
peace, but cannot quite get there. This is even true of the endeavor to keep
God’s Laws and regulations. God’s laws and regulations are good ideas—really
good! I can guarantee anyone and everyone who would keep God’s Ten Commandments
that they will always, without fail, be better blessed by keeping them. They
will always, without fail, be worse off by breaking them. This is always true
100% of the time. There should be no doubt about that whatsoever.
In fact, before I tell you how this cannot bring peace, let
me just mention that God’s commands are 100% despised by the worldly wise.
Everybody complains about our problems, everybody offers his or her solutions
to the problems—which usually involve somebody else having to change or suffer,
and never one’s self. And yet nobody believes that our misery is because we
break God’s commandments. Nobody believes that we are suffering so intensely
because we are not honoring our fathers and our mothers and other authorities.
Nobody believes that we should love our enemy or that we should not love money.
Nobody believes that we need to be faithful to the one man or one woman that
God has given. And we could go on with the Ten Commandments. Neither Democrats
nor Republicans nor anybody else in the upper echelons of power talk about
these things because they would be laughed at as being beyond foolish, beyond
impractical.
But even if we dared to strive to keep God’s Ten
Commandments despite all the warnings about how outdated and impractical they
are, we still couldn’t arrive at peace thereby. We know this from history too. Occasionally,
very occasionally, God blessed his Israelites so that they kept his Laws and
Commandments pretty well. Even then, however, that was not yet peace.
So what is peace? If none of these efforts bring peace, if
God’s own commandments can’t bring peace, then where is peace to be found? The
answer is a pretty profound statement in our second reading tonight that is
easy to pass over. Paul says, “Jesus himself is our peace.” There you
have the true answer. All efforts towards peace apart from God are always fake
and always leave us craving the next high. Even keeping the Law and the Ten
Commandments can’t do it. Jesus, though, is different. Jesus himself is our
peace.
How is Jesus our peace? Paul makes it clear that this was through
Jesus’s death. He says: “The Law of commandments and regulations were abolished
in his flesh.” We are reconciled to God and to one another through the cross.
Hostility was put to death on the cross.
You know how we are reconciled to God through the cross. I
often speak to you about that. Tonight I’d like to highlight something that
doesn’t get talked about as much: Jesus’s cross is also the way that we as
people may have peace with one another. Jesus’s cross makes peace with God;
Jesus cross also makes peace with one another. The rationale for how that
happens goes like this: When Christ died, all died. Since all died, all were
guilty. Since all were guilty, we are all in the same boat.
In our reading it is clear that what Paul has in mind is the
Jews and Gentiles. It is highly offensive for Jews to be tossed into the same
bucket as Gentiles. Jews, at least somewhat, knew God. Jews, at least somewhat,
kept the Law. They tried, at least, not to do the obviously horrible, blatant
sins of the Gentiles.
They were different, you see, so they wanted to build a wall
between themselves and those who were not like them. Walling themselves off
gave them some peace. They got something of a high when they thought about how
they were better.
Against this we must say, however, that “Jesus himself is
our peace.” History shows that every walled off compound deceives itself
with hypocrisy and imaginary superiority. No organization, no matter how high
they build the walls, can truly attain peace. Not even the God-given laws and
regulations of the Old Testament could give peace.
There’s only one option for peace: Jesus himself is our
peace. We are all tossed into the same bucket by Jesus’s death. Jesus died for
all, therefore all have sinned. Jesus rose from the dead, therefore we all have
the same standing, the same justification before God, which is Jesus’s
righteousness.
So it is quite silly for us to make distinctions between one
another. We’ve all been tossed into the same bucket. We are all dead and lost
in our trespasses and sins—that’s the bucket we’re in. But we have been made
alive together in Christ. All people are brought together in perfect unity both
by the death as well as the resurrection of Christ. We are all brought together
in who we are. Jesus’s death shows that we are all sinners. Jesus’s
resurrection shows us that we are all forgiven sinners. Our condemnation is all
the same, carried out on the cross. Our hope is all the same—that hope being:
because Jesus lives, we will live also.
It is so common for people to believe that they are superior
to others. They have the right job, the right food, the right skin color, the
right education program, the right politics, what have you. But then there are
others who also believe that they have the right this, the right that, and the
right everything. So, then, what do you have to do? You have to fight to see
who’s right. Maybe you even need to do a little ethnic cleansing or some cancel
culture to make sure that your team stays on top.
What you don’t often find is people racing for the bottom.
You don’t find people arguing for why they should be seen as worse than others.
Even among us Christians who should know better it is almost as though Christ
didn’t need to die for everything about us. It’s as though there are some good
parts of us that didn’t need Jesus’s blood, that didn’t need the cross.
However, in fact, thoughts and feelings like that are worse
sins than murder or adultery. They are sins against grace. They are sins
against the Holy Spirit, the preacher of grace. If you don’t want to take your
place together with the other sinners in that one and common bucket of sinners,
then you don’t want to have anything to do with Jesus. Jesus, then, is not your
peace. Your own way of life evidently is your peace. You’ll do it your way. Time
will tell, of course, whether such a hypocritical, selective, and shoddy peace
will manage to hold up.
As for you, if you will be sensible, “Jesus himself is your
peace.” Jesus came to preach peace to you who were far away and peace to those
who were near. Through Jesus we all have the same access to the same Father by
the same Holy Spirit. Your peace is with God. He has made peace. And so you may
be at peace with others, because we are made of the same stuff. We are all
alike, and we are all redeemed the same way in our Lord Jesus Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment