Ironic, Not Irenic Peace

10 Pentecost, Cp15, August 18, 2019

Jeremiah 23:23-29  Psalm 82

Hebrews 12:1 – 14  Luke 12:49-56

 Lectionary Link

For the past few weeks, we have been reading in series, the chapters in the Epistle to the Hebrews on faith.  We read that faith is the conviction of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.  In short, faith is living toward a hopeful future with the assurance that the future is going to complete the past in a positive and wonderful way.

In today's installment on faith, the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, recounts the great events experienced and endured by the heroes written about in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The heroes of the past experienced things that we did not; conversely we have experienced things which they never experienced.  The writer states that our faith of the present perfects the faith of the past.  There is a reciprocity across time of the faith of people of the past with our faith today.  It means that we in our assessment of the people who have come before us, the great people of the cloud of witnesses, we need to interpret them in charity and endeavor to escape our temporal provincialism of believing that because we are prisoners of our own time, we are necessarily better than the people of any other time.

The faith of the people of the past was necessary for us to come to the experience of faith that we live and articulate today.  It should be rather awesomely humbling to think that our faith perfects the faith of the people of the past.  Too often we view perfection as an individual attribute rather than the perfection of completeness within the community of faith. Jesus is the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith as the Risen Christ and as the Eternal Word of God from the beginning.  In faith, we are always living into the perfection of being made complete as a community of faith.  So faith is both personal, individual and communal.  The two cannot be separated.

The witness of the faith heroes include stories of great heroism and endurance.  Sometimes we would like to think that life of time and change should be a life of ease with continuous smooth transitions.  But in our actual experience, personal growth and community growth is fraught with great eruption caused by the necessity to make creative advance.

Jesus is called the Prince of Peace.  He is the one who said to his disciples, "Peace be with you."  Peace indeed is most desirable in our inward lives and in our interactions with each other.  But peace should also be viewed as something like the function of rest in music.  The contrast of the rest of silence in music with the sounding of musical notes is what creates the fullness of musical experience.

In today appointed Gospel, we read that peace is not the static indifference of things always being the same.  Time and change involves dynamic movement and within the community, the dynamic movement can mean significant paradigm changes and shifts in the foundational definitions and practices of people.  The tectonic paradigm shifts can result in anything but peace.

Jesus himself in his time was the pioneer of faith; he was the pioneer and the instigator of a major paradigm shift for the people of his time. Jesus said, " Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son  and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

Can you imagine the members of the community to whom the Gospel of Luke was composed?  What were they going through?   Their families were divided by the message and the practice of the Gospel.   Some people remained ritually observant Jews within the synagogue, and they could not accept the changes and the dispensations permitted by Peter and Paul for the Gentiles members of the Jesus Movement.  There was conflict; there was mutual excommunication of one another.  The Christian expositors were totally re-writing the meanings of the Hebrew Scriptures with new meanings which arose because of Jesus Christ and because of the mystical experiences which the early Christians had of the Risen Christ.  The religious setting could not remain the same.  There was anything but peace.

"But I thought that my new mystical experience of the Risen Christ should be universally winsome and persuasive and accepted by my family who were members of the synagogue.  Why can't they understand and embrace my new faith experience."  The members of the synagogue wanted their heretical Christian relatives to be re-programmed and be purified of their heretical ways.  Anyone who has moved away from one's cradle religious loyalties has probably known the intensity of conflict which can occur between people who live in different faith paradigm.

The words of Jesus about the lack of peace, were the oracular words of the Risen Christ within the early churches, assuring people that paradigm shifts do not always happen with peaceful and smooth transitions.  Why?  Religious experiences are very individual and personal and they occur in serendipitous and  uneven ways.  Why, because each person has individual circumstances and individual personality which qualify their receptivity to new and different experience.

So the words of Jesus about conflict, were the oracle words of the Risen Christ in the community of Luke's Gospel to assure people about the normalcy of the results of time, change and freedom.  Yes, the peace of Christ is still possible.  It is the silence, like musical rests, which makes possible both the notes of harmony and the cognitive dissonance of open disagreement coming to conflict.

Faith, conflict and disagreement are real to life.  Jesus was real to the conditions of life.  We are called to be "child-like" in our faith, but not childishly naïve about the reality of the life of freedom, time and change.

Faith then is learning to live with the conditions of freedom, time and change.  How can we do that?  Faith is focus upon perfection and completion.  Faith is focused upon the model of what is complete and perfect and ideal; what is not yet.  This means we should live as those who mean to complete the faith of people of the past.  It means that we should live toward the people of faith who will complete what we do not attain perfect outcomes in our time.

If we are settling for old answer to old questions which prohibits us from interpreting the events of our time with wisdom, perhaps we need to experience the conflict caused by trying to give and live old answers to new question.  Perhaps we often need to lose our peace of tacit complacency in order to embrace the dynamic peace of Christ which enables us to ride the roaring waves of the cauldron of time, change and freedom. Amen.