Peace is Our Profession: A
Sermon for the Mission of the Church
Preached by the Right Reverend
Dorsey McConnell
The Bishop of Pittsburgh
In Saint Andrew’s Church, Highland Park
At Evensong
November 16, 2014
“At that time you were separated from Christ … having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were far off
have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
For he himself is our peace…. So
then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with
the saints and members of the household of God.”
—Ephesians 2: 12-14,19
“Then Jesus appointed seventy others and sent them on
ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about
to come. And he said to them,… ‘Whatever house you enter,
first say, Peace be to this house! And
if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest upon him. If not, it will
return to you.”
—Luke 10:1-2, 5-6
As many of you know, I am a son of
the military, the Air Force, to be exact.
I was born during the Cold War on a B-52 base in the middle of the Great
Plains, and one of my earliest memories is of lying in my crib listening to
those huge aircraft in a scramble drill.
Their flightpath was practically over our house and as they roared into
the air in quick succession, I watched the windows of my bedroom tremble in
their frames. I wasn’t afraid. It was a comforting sound, really, the way
some children might think of the tea kettle boiling in the kitchen. My mother had told me that those planes were
protecting us, and I believed her. One
of the first sentences I learned to read, emblazoned in a painted banner on the
side of every bomber, under a mailed fist that clutched both a lightning bolt
and an olive branch, was the motto of the Strategic Air Command: Peace is
our profession.
It took me years to grasp both the
true sense and the inherent contradiction of those words. On the one hand, it was frankly absurd: how
can you think of a flying machine carrying several megatons of mass destruction
as an instrument of peace? I don’t think
that is what the author of the prayer of Saint Francis has in mind when he asks
God to make us instruments of his peace.
On the other hand, it made sense, when I first dove into Saint Augustine’s great work The City of God. Augustine says that all human activity,
every effort of human society, even war, is in pursuit of peace. Of course, we never get there, because the
peace we are in fact yearning for is far greater than the cessation of earthly
conflict, greater than the fragile equilibrium that can be established by human
treaties or human concord. What we are
yearning for is the peace of God, and that can only come from God Himself. But what is this “peace of God?”
The author of Ephesians is pretty
clear that this “peace of God” is a complete reversal of our natural state. He points
out with stunning force that by birth and nature we are “separated from Christ, having no hope and without God
in the world.” That
would cause most people on the street to raise their eyebrows a bit don’t you think? When I first heard it, as a young man
considering Christ, I certainly thought it went too far. I mean, I had my flaws, but surely I was
still basically a good person, wasn’t
I? Yet, the more I showed up in church,
the more I started realizing how untrue this assumption was. Something began happening to me. My sin
became more visible to me. Habits that I
had indulged in without a moment’s
thought now began to give me pause; my own malice and anger, my utter
self-centeredness, my pride and gossip, actually began to grieve me a little. I
began to see the enormous distance between the person I was and the person I
might become, that God wanted me to become.
I began to intuit that the peace I had always wanted lay in my giving up
my own will to His will, accepting His judgment of my sin, and receiving His
mercy by acknowledging His rule over me; I came dangerously close to realizing
that this alone would lead me toward becoming the person I inwardly yearned to
be.
And yet, simultaneously, far from
wholeheartedly wanting to become that fulfilled, benign, and loving creature
filled with the peace of God, I discovered there were huge parts of me that
wanted to destroy that vision utterly, to drown it out, to get rid of the God
who offered it, and enthrone themselves in His place. And that scared me. It didn’t scare
me enough to make me a Christian, but it did get my attention, for a while; so
I did what any normal person would do— I
stopped turning to Him, stopped going to church, stopped reading Christian
books. Instead I filled my life with adventure and kept on the move. I moved every three to six months for two
years across three continents and (with a few nearly catastrophic exceptions) I
avoided churches like the plague. I had
made a fortress of my egotism and for a time I thought I was safe.
What I had not counted on is that
this God of peace chases us, through his human instruments. “Then
Jesus appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into
every town and place where he himself was about to come.” If you read the passage in Luke carefully, you
will see how clever a strategy it is, because if those disciples take what
Jesus is saying seriously, if they actually do what He says they should do,
they’re going to wind up looking an awful lot like the one
who sent them: they will be lambs in the midst of wolves, as He the Lamb of God
is content to be; they will trust the Father for their provision, not despising
any house or table, just as He does, who eats with anyone who asks, from
Pharisees to prostitutes; strangely, as they do this, they will begin to
resemble the one who sent them, and they will come with a blessing of peace,
from the one who is peace. And if a child of peace is there, that peace will
find its resting place, the way an arrow finds its mark, the way Jesus finds
those to whom he comes and says, “Follow
me.” Do you
see how brilliant this is? His
disciples, as bearers of His peace, in spite of all their flaws, will in the
main mysteriously show forth the character of their Master so that others will
be drawn not to them but to Him.
This peace they are carrying with
them is nothing less than this complete reconciliation between human beings and
God won through the blood of Christ; it is the peace that Ephesians is talking
about, a reconciliation that spills over into human relationships, our
relationships, changing them forever; it may not turn our enemies into friends— that’s their choice— but it does turn them into the beloved, and it does
mean that our whole life is now about putting others at the center of our
world, not ourselves, because that is where Christ is— with them, weeping with them, laughing with them,
begging to wash their feet. And a child
of peace, I think, is someone who, in spite of all reason, in spite of all the
parts of herself screaming, “Run away! Run away!”, in spite of his limitless capacity for relapse which
he will continue to prove— a child of peace is someone
who, for reasons know only to God, yearns for that peace; that yearning is
God-given, born of grace, and, I believe, in the end irresistible. So even someone who doesn’t look like a child of peace at all— who is restless, or contrarian, even vengeful and
violent— may indeed be one, having underneath all their
conflicts the deep-seated unconscious knowledge that in the end all that will
matter is their repentance, that they will only come to the peace they yearn
for by giving up and saying Yes to the God who alone is peace.
This yearning for peace is so
deeply woven into the mystery of human identity as to be indelible; it is like
an innate characteristic in someone, the way we say a person has her father’s eyes or his mother’s laugh. It emanates from some
strange ember burning deep within the ashes of the human soul, but it needs
something to call it into life, to set it on fire. That happens by nothing other than the word
of the one who is our peace, the word of Jesus, through His willing disciples,
who are on assignment to chase down the reluctant children of peace and throw
their entire lives into merciful chaos just by offering the Peace of Christ.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Apparently it is! Jesus had a
great time doing it— consider what he does with
Simon Peter for example: taking a hardened and skeptical fisherman, and in a
matter of hours swamping his boat, dragging his partners into the mess, making
him beg to be left alone, and then extending the completely nonsensical offer
that Simon might consider fishing for men, because he doesn’t seem to be doing very well with tilapia: seems like
a lot to go through for one disciple, but some cases are tougher than
others. Some need a quieter approach, as
with Levi the tax collector, the Lord just showing up where he works and
looking at him with all the force of an irresistible love, until he says
Uncle. Or coming to the grief-stricken
Mary Magdalene on a peculiar Sunday morning and showing her that there is a
love stronger than death. To each of these, in a way appropriate to each, He
says, Peace be with you; stop struggling, come to me and you will find rest for
your souls, and once they have done that, after his resurrection, He gives to
them essentially the same commission as He gave the seventy: He says, now take the word of this peace into
the world—
seek out my reluctant children, that they
may come into their inheritance, the peace prepared for them from the
foundation of the world. And, as
unlikely candidates for the job as they are, nonetheless that is exactly what
they do— Peter and James and John and Andrew and Mary and
Martha and Mary Magdalene and the rest, children of peace bringing the word of
peace to others who are called to be such children, but do not yet know
it.
That is certainly what happened to
me. Try as I might to avoid them, I kept running into Christians. Some of them were scary, and some of them
were boring, and some of them were clearly insane, but some of them had a
quality that was so compelling I can barely describe it. If I had to put it
into a few words I would say they had their Father’s eyes. They looked at me with understanding and
compassion; they showed me in the way they talked and listened, the way they
acted and prayed not out of a small part of themselves, but out of their whole
being, and they helped me see that the meaning of my life didn’t lie in my resolving my frustrations with my job or
my girlfriend or in overcoming the various other obstacles of ordinary
existence; rather it lay in that bright ember burning at the core of my soul, which
they knew because it was theirs as well— this
yearning for mercy, for peace, that had been answered by Jesus, who has made
peace by the blood of his Cross. When
they spoke of it, they seemed a bit sad that such a cost should be necessary,
and a bit wise as if they knew this need were everywhere, and overall joyful
because they knew they were finally home, no longer strangers and sojourners,
but fellow citizens with the saints, members of the household of God; and soon
I wanted to live where they lived, so I said Yes, and found the same mercy
creeping into every part of who I was.
It’s been nearly forty years, now since that moment; I’m not sure I’ve made
all that much progress as a child of peace, but as I frequently tell my wife to
console her for choosing me, just think of what I’d
be like without Him!
The terrors of this world are
always around us; our demons bite and maim and leave countless lives wounded
and neglected by the side of the road.
We stare helplessly at the results of the wrongs we have done, which we
would not do, and at the good we might have done which we never did. But none
of this is too much for God. He knows
all our wreckage, and He has chosen us
anyway. So if you’re here praying tonight, you can assume you are among
those he now sends out to preach peace to his reluctant children, to those who
are far off and to those who are near.
In a few moments, the Cross will lead us out; as it does see if you can
read the motto written through it in all but words: Peace is our profession. And if as you lie in bed tonight you doubt
you could be the one He has chosen and sent, then end the day with this prayer
or something like it: have mercy on me Lord Jesus, have mercy; by the power
of your Cross, join me to the household of your saints; let others see in me
your Father’s eyes, and help me
help them receive the blessing of your peace. I assure you: if the chorus of
the angels were audible after such a prayer, you would hear the riot of their
glory as they passed over you in quick succession, and the windows of your
bedroom would tremble in their frames.
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