So the other day, I had a hugely busy and stressful day. Normally I try to schedule some open bits during the day to catch up email and makes some phone calls and breathe between meetings, but not this day. For whatever reason it was packed with meetings all day long, with one downtown and a visit to the hospital. Some of the conversations were difficult and that takes a lot of energy and so I was bagged by the end of the day, but luckily I had no evening meetings. So I was really looking forward to coming home for dinner, visiting with my family and having a cup of tea. That post dinner cup of tea is one of the great joys of my life. It is hot and steamy, and I sit on the sofa lengthwise, so that I am taking up the whole loveseat. And it is next to the window which lets in fresh air. And I sit there and enjoy the breeze and my cup of tea and I read the paper or a book or just visit with Stephanie and see how her day has been. It is one of my peaceful moments of the day. I was so looking forward to that end of day, post-dinner, relaxing cup of tea. I sat on the sofa. And my children thought this would be a good day to get out the roller blades and skate inside the house around and around. One was okay. Then the other one. And then the little one on a scooter and they started laughing hysterically. So I asked them to keep it down. Then one wrecked, and another started crying and another started arguing that it wasn't her fault, and then the one hurt wanted a story and I wanted my tea and the other one got grumpy, and the third was upset because now the game was over, and I just wanted my tea! I wanted them all to go away, so I could have my tea!
I think a desire most parents want from time to time, and sometimes a very legitimate one. We want peace in our lives. I think this is a universal desire. We are crazy busy and so we look forward to the next day off, that often doesn't feel like a day off, or to the next vacation, but that never runs perfectly as the brochures picture them, and peace seems to be very illusive. We can catch glimpses of peace, but we might wonder if it is really possible to get to know peace well or if it is just an ideal. And then we read Jesus words from the Gospel this morning "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid." and we wonder if that is just some nice thing Jesus said, but not really for us.
Here is my suggestion: when the world, i.e., the non-Jesus way to do things. When the world talks about peace, it means the tranquillity, distance from the stresses of life where we can let everything go. What I call the Calgon understanding of peace. Calgon is a maker of bath salts and other products and the slogan is Calgon take me away! Let me shut the door from the crazy world and let me have peace. It is a very attractive and even common sense understanding of peace. Peace is what happens when you turn every thing off, stop doing every thing and get away from it all. It is very attractive; I know. I wanted the tea. But it is oddly not the Jesus way of understanding peace. At first glance, his way of peace doesn't seem very inviting at all. In this passage Jesus is giving a long talk to his disciples about things they need to know before he goes and when he says Peace I leave with you, he is not saying I am taking away all of the trouble in your lives so that you can have peace. No, he says things are going to get terrible. You will have tribulations and sufferings and he ends the whole thing by saying, "I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world." A beautiful verse, but one might ask, Jesus, could we have the peace without the side of tribulation please? If we have to have the struggles and difficulties, then we think we don't really have peace. How do they go together?
Personally as I have meditated on the Jesus way of doing things I have realized that there is a profound realism here, because if peace mean the absence of difficulty, then we will rarely find peace if ever. And even more difficult as I had an insight after my small tea episode, if peace is the absence of noise and clutter and chaos, then my children are the enemies of peace. My life is the enemy of peace, and I can easily grow to resent all of it. That is not what I want. I want to find peace in the midst of my life, my kids, my family, my friends, my community. I want peace to be integral to my life. So if peace in Jesus' understanding is not the absence of struggle, what is it? Quite simply, peace is a whole way of life. Because our vocation as Christians is not to retreat from the world, but to enter deeply into the world and infuse the world with the spirit of the Gospel. And we do that best by embodying peace. Again, peace is a way of life.
I recently got a fitbit. Many of you have them. For those who are not familiar with it, it is a glorified pedometer which counts my steps and several other heath related data. I am trying to get in shape again and what I like about it is that if I achieve my goals everyday all of the lines are green, and so I try to get all of the lines green. But the thing about health, is that we realize that it is a daily practice. I can't just get the lines green and say that I am healthy, it is a discipline that is practiced every day, some more, some less, but the point is that it happens over time as a result of working on it, and the opposite, health slips the more I neglect it. I would like to suggest that peace is similar. It is not something that passively happens; it is something we have to fight for, something we have to practice and struggle with everyday, and then like health, we find we have peace, not just here and there, but in the midst of all of life. But it is not easy. C.S. Lewis has a great description of this in his book Mere Christianity: “It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.”
So what does that look like?
I think peace is like a muscle. If you exercise it, it will get stronger; if you neglect it, it will get weaker. But there is no exercise machine for peace, so how do you exercise it? One could write a whole book here, but let me simply point our four aspects. 1) we center ourselves in Christ, 2) we live deeper into the truth that we beloved children of God, 3) we live intentionally and 4) we grow stronger and stronger in embodying peace for the sake of the world.
The first and most important is daily centering of yourself in Christ. I can't recommend highly enough a daily practice of connecting with Christ. Prayer in this sense though is not asking for a gift of peace which we passively receive. That I am suggesting is not the Jesus way. Rather, it is spending time with Jesus, both meditating on the scriptures and sitting in silence. Because when we sit for a time everyday in the presence of Christ and bring him our troubles, our perspective opens up. I don't know how to explain this other than when we centre on Jesus good things happen; we learn things about ourselves and the world. Like Jacob we wrestle with God, and in the wrestling we grow. Brian Zahnd puts it like this: "To live a peaceable life, patience is needed. Impatience instills a permanent agitation in the soul, an agitation that makes peace impossible. Prayer is the slow process by which patience replaces agitation. Learning to pray well has acquainted me with patience. Praying the ancient psalms and the centuries old prayers of the church cultivates an appreciation for patience. I’ve come to realize that the main purpose of prayer is not to change the world, but to change me...and I am under the assumption that this will take a lifetime."
The second aspect of peace that we have to practice is regularly reminding ourselves that we are beloved of God. In God's eyes, we don't have to prove ourselves. Jesus has won the victory. Our job is to live into it, and it makes all the difference inside when we know ourselves to be loved, accepted. Whatever failings we have or whatever we have done wrong, there is forgiveness and grace. Grace is the foundation of peace but we forget. And so part of the daily discipline is the daily reminder and meditation on this great truth that you are a child of God.
The third is the daily choices we make. We either live intentionally or fragmented, and fragmented is a lot easier to fall into. But we are constantly making decisions around the simplicity of our lifestyle, the way we spend our time, how we live in community. I think a large part of peace happens when our lives are focused on priorities, the things we know are important and are not frittered away in a hundred and one things that are not really important. Jesus said don't spend time worrying about things like what we will wear, and eat and sleep. First and foremost, focus our lives on the kingdom of God, and the rest will fall into place.
And finally, and crucially, we have to practice that peace in our lives. Years ago, what I hated most was conflict. I would avoid it, work around it, do almost anything than having a conversation with the person I was having trouble with. I would be racked with anxiety about picking up the phone and talking with them. But I learned that if I was going to have peace, I needed to deal with this. So I prayed about it, and read about good ways to do conflict, but the real issue was picking up the phone. The first time was horrible, so was the second, then the third went better and so on. The other day, I picked up the phone almost right away and had a great conversation and it resolved beautifully. I had such peace in my heart. It is not that the struggle wasn't there or that Jesus delivered me from it. He walked me through it; I grew stronger, and centered in Christ I can find peace in the midst of it. To my mind, this is the peace that passes all understanding.
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