The God of Love and Peace
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2020 by Ms. Holly Huff.
After a week like this week, or really, a year like this year, our reading from 2nd Corinthians comes as a change of pace. On this Trinity Sunday, we find ourselves lonely, or stir-crazy, exhausted, perhaps bored, or worried about loved ones far away, or looking for work, as we are now months into a pandemic that keeps stretching further into the future as the death toll grows. We mourn these souls, now more than 110,000, as we can, though we’re still in the middle of it. I don’t expect we’ll feel the full weight of collective loss until we’re through.
And then, this past week, came a flashpoint: the death of George Floyd, a Black man murdered almost casually by police officers in Minnesota, has sparked civil unrest across the nation and the world, a conflagration of protests, riots, and civil demonstrations. The anger and fear are palpable right now. We are witnessing a rage and demand for change in the face of the racist violence that seems so stubbornly embedded into this country’s make-up that it’s hard to tell what will be left, when this rot is at last burned out?
So Paul’s final farewell to the quarreling Corinthians comes at a contrast to our moment, to put it mildly:
Brothers and sisters, farewell—[or as some versions put it, rejoice!] Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.
It’s almost hard to imagine. Things in order, agreeing with one another, living in peace. All the saints do greet you, via Zoom, at least, but we still don’t know when we’ll be able to gather next. And nevermind Paul’s unsanitary ideas for passing the peace with a holy kiss!
“Live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you”?
How do we hear this scriptural injunction to live in peace? These words come at a contrast, perhaps a relieving contrast, to the circumstance of our moment. Lord knows we could use some peace. There is a danger, though, of retreating into sentimentality, a danger of asserting an idolatrous false peace, a schmaltzy world-denying delusion that produces quietism and complicity with oppression in the name of God.
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and peace activist, described the difficulty of clear-eyed speech about divine love:
“A theology of love,” he said, “cannot afford to be sentimental. It cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying “peace” with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. […] Theology does not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established.” (Merton, Faith and Violence, 1968, 8-9)
In scripture, we encounter this issue of the proclamation of a false peace. Speaking through the Old Testament prophets, God decries those who whitewash in the name of God, blessing what is unjust. In the mouth of Ezekiel we hear this: “Wo to the foolish prophets who have seen nothing,” with their “false words and lying visions.” Wo to them “‘Because they lead my people astray, saying, “Peace,” when there is no peace, and because, when a flimsy wall is built, they smear it with whitewash.” (Ezekiel 13:1-11)
Similarly, in Jeremiah we find a denunciation of the prophets and priests who “have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
To preach peace when there is no peace—this is religion as antacid, something to soothe the stomach and quiet the conscience. When our idea of peaceful times in this country has also included the frequent killings of Black people in our streets by instruments of the state—that status quo is no peace. Sentimental talk makes a mockery of love and peace, and turns God into an idol, the rubber stamp of divine approval on the way things already are.
And we’ve seen faith held up as a legitimating prop this week: a Bible in the President’s hand, in front of St. John’s, an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C.—and absent from the photo, the protestors chased out with smoke canisters and pepper balls to clear the foreground for a photo op, leveraging symbols of Christian faith in an attempt to sacralize worldly power in all its routine violence.
The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington resoundingly denounced the President’s misuse of scripture and the church: He “used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority,” she said, “while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands” (NYT Op-Ed, Jun 4, 2020). Another Episcopal bishop called the scene “blasphemy in real time” (Rt. Rev. Greg Brewer, Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, Twitter, Jun 1, 2020).
These are strong statements for interesting times. No matter our partisanship, we should pray for our President, and all our leaders. And we cannot afford a faith that ignores and anoints the violence of our business as usual. The living God is not a prop but the source and end of all creation.
Let’s go back to the beginning, for a bit, back to the very beginning. Before the beginning, there was only God, a dance of love and light flaring up, the love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit overflowing, desiring to be poured out and shared.
And in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Holy Spirit, the breath of life, brooded over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
I love the soothing rhythm of this first chapter of Genesis, the account of how this world came to be. The first day, the second day, the third day. God speaks, and it is so—“on earth as it is in heaven”—the waters, the dry land, the great lights, the lesser lights, the creeping things. God speaks each into being and calls them good. You can almost hear the primal harmony, each piece in exquisitely ordered balance, fully being what God made it to be, with all its attendant virtues and graces. The 6th day sees the creation of humankind, bearing the image and likeness of God. And then the 7th day with its Sabbath peace, Shalom: creation resting in the pure enjoyment of God. A garden paradise, undisturbed: and God saw that it was very good.
And then, betrayal. You’ve heard about the snake and the apple. And then Cain kills Abel, and it’s all a screeching dissonance disturbing that harmony; breaking the peace and betraying the love we were made for. The call to love is intrinsic, because we bear the impress of the God of love and peace. We were created to love God and love our neighbor, and sin is a betrayal of that call to respond to the other with an outpouring of love and care. A neighbor in need tugs on our hearts, and this is good and proper to our nature.
Gregory P. Yova, founder of St. Innocent Orthodox Orphanage in Mexico, writes about this tug on our hearts (as he reflects on the writing of St. Basil). “When we see suffering and are pained by it, it is the image of God within us yearning to do what we were created to do—to be a child of God and help alleviate that suffering. But we hesitate, and at that moment our own soul suffers” (foreword to On Social Justice, St Basil the Great, Popular Patristics Series, p. 10).
When we resist the call to compassion, so core to our divinely created nature, and guilt wells up. We’ve betrayed ourselves, and somewhere inside, we know we’ve gone crooked—and so begin the attempts to justify ourselves. Almost instantly, without effort, our minds fill up with stories about why actually we really could not respond to the one who so moved us only moments before, why actually we could not have offered that much help anyway, and probably they didn’t truly need it, and finally why it may even be that this person did not deserve our sympathy, not really. Seeking Grasping for self-justification like this tells us that in our hearts, we know we’ve gone wrong, but often we deceive ourselves and slander our neighbor. Resisting the call to love, that counterfeit $20 bill suddenly takes on a headlining role in the story we’re telling.
Resisting the love we were made for, we start to drift. We become less ourselves. Severed from the vine, the branch begins to wilt. The impression of the divine image in our face fades, and we can’t see it so clearly in others. Evil and death take up their reign of terror. As Mother Teresa once wrote: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
But even when we betray ourselves by betraying our neighbor, God still pursues us. God, that eternal dance of holy flame and fire continues to hold the fallen creation in being, and loves us still. God sees our need and does not fail to respond. We were made for love, and love will not let us go. God comes to us, in the middle of all our broken violence and casual cruelties.
The second person of the Trinity takes on human form: in Christ, God comes to “share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us” to the God of peace and love.
And God came to us as Jesus, incarnate as a particular person, a poor Jewish man with brown skin in the backwaters of Israel under Roman rule. God could have come as a proper king, a strong man with glittering tanks, tinsel and trappings. Instead, this king rides a donkey. God comes to us among the lowly. God is with us among the lowly.
Jesus’s life affirmed that God’s heart is for the poor, the despised, the lowly. Jesus spent his time with a bedraggled gang of ne’er-do-wells: fishermen, prostitutes, those afflicted with various diseases and conditions that set them outside ritual cleanliness, embezzling tax collectors, and even centurions—despised for their brutal enforcement of the Roman occupation.
Jesus’s death was a declaration of divine solidarity, too. He was crucified, dying a wretched and shameful death. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave and suffering death on a cross. His brown body the violence of the mob, the violence of the state. The breath of life snuffed out. A knee to the neck. He was lynched, essentially.
And through the lens of the cross, all victims begin to look like Jesus. The vulnerable, the weak, the grieving, the lonely, the hopeless and crushed. Jesus tells us that what we do to “the least of these,” we do to him, and Christ is perpetually present in the face of the downtrodden. Can we see Him?
The resurrection is God’s answer to our sin, and God’s triumph over it. As the song goes—the cat came back! Jesus just won’t stay dead. The power of death is no match for the primal love that made the world. The mighty are being cast down, and the poor are being lifted up.
The earliest Christian confession of faith—“Jesus is Lord”—has always carried an echo: “Jesus is Lord—and Caesar is not.” “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” said the resurrected Jesus. Christian discipleship is a brighter vision than one particular version or another of contemporary American partisan politics. We are talking about the kingdom of God--“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven”—and about the restoration of humanity, rooted once again in the love of God, which lies deeper within us than our very selves (St. Augustine).
Last week on Pentecost we renewed our baptismal vows. The waters of baptism recall the primal watery depths over which the spirit moved at creation. Christ reimpressed the fading image of God on human nature, and to be baptized is to be born again as a new creation—a new creation that is really a restoration of that initial, original goodness that God saw and called good.
Baptism is a strange initiation ritual, because Christians are initiated not into an exclusive club of tidy insiders but instead into greater solidarity with all people. The baptized life is murky, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says: “When we are brought to be where Jesus is in baptism we let our defences down so as to be where he is, in the depths of human chaos” (Being Christian, 6).
Christian life is characterized by “An openness to human need, but also a corresponding openness to the Holy Spirit,” Williams says. He goes on, “In the life of baptized people, there is a constant rediscovering, re-enacting of the Father’s embrace of Jesus in the Holy Spirit. The baptized person is not only in the middle of human suffering and muddle but in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. … We are in the middle of two things that seem quite contradictory: in the middle of the heart of God, the ecstatic joy of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in the middle of a world of threat, suffering, sin and pain. And because Jesus has taken his stand right in the middle of those two realities, that is where we take ours” (Being Christian, 7).
Even in our contemporary unrest, God is pursuing us, and calling us to greater holiness. We are being drawn into the scalding flame of the life of the Trinity. Mercy and love and judgement, all at once. “Our God is a consuming fire”—and “What is not God’s will burn.” (Hebrews 25:29; The Rev. Bailey Pickens, Twitter, May 30, 2020). Our nation’s history of racism is not yet in the past; and repentance is scorching. Idolatrous accretions blurring and distorting the image of God will be swept away as ash. Trust this frightening salvation. Jesus comes for everyone, but the claim on us is to join Him in something particular. God’s fiery vision for us is specific.
The call is always to turn back, turn to God, repent, choose life, choose to love, choose peace.
We can always be sure: this is God’s world. That’s the assurance of Genesis: this is God’s beloved world, and even when we are faithless God will not abandon us. Evil and death will not have power to corrupt us forever. A mighty wind from God is moving over this present void of chaos and disorder. In all our actions, despite our frailties and self-justications, through our frailties—even through our sin!—God is working, working for transformation and the inauguration of a new creation, slowly prising out our hearts of stone and implanting the hearts of flesh we were always meant to have. Love God and love neighbor, in solidarity with those closest to God’s own heart.
Amen.