Gen. 21:8-21 Ps. 86:1-10, 16-17
Rom. 6:1b-11 Matt. 10:24-39
Lectionary Link
Until January 6th of 2021, the people of the United States touted our peaceful transition in the change of political administrations as proof of the strength of our form of democratic governance.
What the passage of time and what our Gospel reading today reveals is that peace can be a very ironic notion.
We can wax poetic like old hippies crying, "Peace out." We can pass the peace in our liturgies even while the conditions in our temporal situations can betray the reality of peace.
Churches for hundreds of year passed the peace in their liturgies while retaining slaves, subjugating indigenous peoples and women, and making unjust war. The irony of peace begs the question, peace for whom, and how is that peace actualized?
The Gospel words of Jesus indicate to us that the Jesus Movement was warned about the complacency, the irony, and ambiguity of preconceived notions of peace.
The Jesus Movement was a sect of Judaism which was often in conflict with the more established groups of Jews associated with the synagogues.
While the channelled words of the Risen Christ were saying to their community, "Peace be with you," it was obvious that many other people were saying, "Woe be unto you, and we wish you no success at all." And some of those unconverted foes were in fact members of one's own family.
The big peace question for the Jesus Movement and for people in all ages and for us today, is this, "How is God's peace compatible with time and change?"
Our romantic notions of peace seem to present it as a perpetually sweet, calm sleeping baby, free of any conflict and totally protected by shielding parents. But the passage of time and change does not allow peace to be constituted as a static state of sameness.
How is that we can conceive of a peace which is compatible with change in the passage of time?
I would submit that a more realistic notion of peace would be the continuing healing energy of justice seeking actual realization in life situations where justice has not yet been fully realized.
Such a notion of peace has to be understood as a process of peace when the world is seeking to be better healed by the practice of justice.
Peace is the hopeful not yet fully realized justice and includes our continual aspiration for a better justice for people. Such peace can be very naive since there are many who seek no enlightened justice but only their own greedy control and comfort. Some do not want the complacency of their current comfort upset by the vision of being much better human beings toward God and other human beings.
Wanting to be better upsets the settled satisfied comfortable souls whose comfort often resides upon the discomfort of those without means of wealth, knowledge, and power to provide for their own comfort.
While this dynamic notion of peace may seem to be a very challenging relationship to time and change; we should not forget to balance the outer apparent manifestations of peaceful and non-peaceful conditions with the interior notion of a deep, deep rest.
The interior notions of a deep, deep rest, a silence, can be the analgesic to tolerate the surface waves in the life ocean of time and change.
I believe the Gospel words which were channeled by the early Jesus Movement were words to get their members to be realistic about the rather profound changes which were happening within Judaism as the various communities resided within the world controlled by the Roman Empire.
The Gospel of peace for us is this: God's peace is compatible with dynamic change as we as individuals and community try to surpass ourselves in justice in our future states. The discomfort of the upsetting our our complacent underdeveloped states of justice, is complemented with the deep sense of Holy Spirit's interior rest which is our solid anchor amid so many surface conflicts.
May God help us to embrace peaceful transitions in our lives as we are always trying to surpass ourselves in the practice of love and justice. Amen.
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