A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

April 27, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Peace of Christ

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 16
Exodus 15:1–11
John 20:19–29

There is a great old Scottish folk song that I thought would be particularly apt for the choir to sing as our introit this morning. It’s called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Those of you who were here last week were in a sanctuary that was absolutely filled with flowers. Easter lilies and tulips up here in the chancel and on the pillars; even the pulpit was covered with white flowers. Now everything is bare.

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” They call this “Low Sunday.” That’s the traditional name for the Sunday after Easter. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church tells us it’s so called “probably in contrast to the high feast of the previous Sunday, Easter Sunday.” That’s certainly true for this church. As my colleague Donna Gray alluded to earlier, we might even ask, “Where have all the people gone?”

I begin, as well, with an apology to some of you who may have been looking on our website or in some of the published materials that said the preacher this morning would be Ophelia Ortega, the president of the Presbyterian Seminary in Havana, Cuba. We learned some weeks ago that Ophelia was unable to get a visa, so you’re stuck with me. I did manage to get a visa. One of my friends asked, “Why don’t you preach in Spanish, then?” I’m sure John Buchanan would say it wouldn’t matter because you can’t understand me anyway.

Low Sunday. A good day to gather together and to remind ourselves that Easter is not a day but a season. It’s a season in the Christian year running from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. We call it the season of Easter. But more than that, it is a season not in time, but in the sense of a state of being. In that great phrase, as people who seek to follow Christ, “we are an Easter people.” We’re always an Easter people. Sometimes we’re an Advent people as well. We wait for the Coming, the Incarnation. Sometimes we’re a Lenten people, in preparation and confession; but always we are an Easter people.

Our focus as Easter people is put so well in the words of Desmond Tutu, which we have used here in particular occasions of fear, or anxiety, or sadness. Around the events of September 11 and in coming into this time of war, we’ve used those words: “Goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness. Life is stronger than death.” There, in Tutu’s words, is the heart of the Easter message. You’ll find it in our Old Testament text this morning, the text from Exodus, Moses’ song of praise after the deliverance of the children of Israel through the Red Sea.

Martin Luther King preached a sermon on this text. The sermon was titled “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore.” King’s words are good for us to hear this morning:

The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of Egyptian soldiers, for we should never rejoice in the death or defeat of human beings. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and unjust exploitation.

Isn’t that a good word for us as we face the dangers of triumphalism as the conflict in Iraq winds down? That is why we read from the Exodus story at Easter. Easter is precisely about the death of evil and of oppression and exploitation. Jesus says the same thing in a different way. Jesus says, “Peace be with you.”

A story, a favorite of mine, frames our reflections this morning on the Gospel text. It’s a story about the breaking down of barriers:

When Brother Bruno was at prayer one night, he was disturbed by the croaking of a bullfrog. All his attempts to disregard this sound were unsuccessful so he shouted from his window, “Quiet! I’m at my prayers.” Now, Brother Bruno was a saint, so his command was instantly obeyed. Every living creature held its voice so as to create a silence that would be favorable to prayer.

But now, another sound intruded on Bruno’s worship. An inner voice that said, “Maybe God is as pleased with the croaking of the frog as with the chanting of your psalms.”

“What could please the ears of God in the croak of a frog?” was Bruno’s scornful rejoinder.

But the voice refused to give up. “Why would you think God invented the sound?” So, Bruno decided to find out why.

He leaned out of his window and gave the order, “Sing!”

The bullfrog’s measured croaking filled the air to the ludicrous accompaniment of all the frogs in the vicinity. And as Bruno attended to the sound, their voices ceased to jar, for he discovered that if he stopped resisting them, they actually enriched the silence of the night. With that discovery, Bruno’s heart became harmonious with the universe. He discovered the real meaning of peace and understood what it means to pray.

The breaking down of assumptions and barriers. Think of that as we look at the text of Jesus appearing to his disciples. His first words are “Peace be with you.” It is the regular greeting. It’s the same as saying, “Hello” or “How are you?” The word is “Shalom.” Peace be with you. But this is no ordinary day, therefore no ordinary greeting. The scholars help us by pointing to this text in John’s Gospel as being a climax to the story that’s told in the Gospel. Now, however you approach or understand the Gospel—whether as biography or as a kind of history—the Gospels are certainly story. The evangelists, the writers of the Gospel, are imaginative people weaving together a narrative and using different types of literary devices. At this point, the scholars tell us, we are to go back and hear Jesus’ words in the middle of the Gospel, at the fourteenth chapter of John. We call this section “Farewell Speeches” or “the Farewell Discourses,” when Jesus is saying to his disciples that he will be leaving them in the future. Many of the words are very familiar to us: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” “I am going away and I am coming to you.” Then, these words: “Peace, I leave with you. My peace I give to you.” “If you loved me, you would rejoice at me going to my Father.” Then in our text this morning we see in Jesus’ encounter with the disciples as a group the giving of peace, the rejoicing of the disciples, and then the sending, the commissioning, of the disciples.

When Jesus comes and says, “Peace be with you,” this is a fulfillment of the promise of God’s presence with us in Christ. The peace greeting is at the heart of the Easter experience and of the experience of the disciples—and us—with the risen Jesus. And this happens on two levels; on a corporate and an individual level.

First, Jesus comes to the gathering of the disciples. Gail O’Day, a biblical scholar from Atlanta, has a great phrase around this. She says that when Jesus commissions the disciples, the church’s identity as a people (that’s you and I) “is shaped by the gifts it receives from the risen Jesus.” These are the gifts of peace and of joy and the gift of commissioning—the command to take those gifts of peace and joy out to the world in the forgiveness of sins.

Don’t let this be a difficult point for you, this piece about the forgiveness of sins. Sin here is not a simplistic or childish understanding of doing something wrong or a moral transgression. Sin is that state of being in which we are turned from God, in which there is a chasm between how God wants us to live and how we live our lives, a barrier between God’s will for us and who we actually are. And the forgiveness of sins is the breaking down of those barriers and the carrying out of forgiveness of sins; it is the witnessing to the breaking down of those barriers. We are called as a people to live into that and to take that into the world.

Then the individual level; the encounter between Jesus and Thomas. How many of us sitting today with this familiar story think, “You know, I can really connect with that. I can really relate to Thomas, because it’s hard to believe sometimes and I know what doubt is”? That’s important, but the story is not primarily about Thomas. It is about Jesus giving himself to Thomas and, therefore, breaking down the barriers of unbelief in Thomas.

It’s put in a beautiful way in a sermon that I heard this week on tape. A sermon preached by the emeritus pastor of this congregation, Elam Davies. It was, I believe, his last Easter sermon at Fourth Presbyterian Church. This is what he said about Thomas and Jesus:

That story means that you’ll never meet a God that doesn’t have nail prints in the hand. And you’ll never meet a God who doesn’t have a wound in the side. You’ll never meet a God who doesn’t know the depths of human suffering and the human condition.

The story of Thomas and Jesus is not a story of Jesus reprimanding Thomas or judging Thomas. Rather, it’s a story of hope and of promise about the beginning of new life. It does us good to attend to Bonhoeffer’s words when he said, during a sermon, “The Gospel must be understood in such a way that people long for its fulfillment in their lives.” What we’re talking about today is not just what happened 2,000 years ago in Palestine but about today and our encounter with the risen Christ. What’s at the forefront of our minds when we hear the greeting “Peace be with you”? Many of us are concerned about war, about Iraq, about the hopes of peace in the Middle East seemingly ever being dashed. What does peace mean in this struggle that we have in a world where there seems so much that is not peace and wholeness?

I remember Thomas Hardy’s satirical poem Christmas, 1924:

“Peace upon earth,” was said, we sing it
and pay a million priests to bring it.
After 2000 years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison gas.

Could be Christmas 2003.

What does the peace of Christ mean? What does it look like? Let’s go back to that understanding of sin again. Not sin as moral transgression but as distance from God. Peace, then, is the opposite of that. The peace of Christ is reconciliation with God and with each other.

I can’t find a better illustration of this than a story I have been reading this week, which will be known to many of you. It’s from a book called The Gift of Peace by the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Bernardin tells the story of how he was wrongly accused of sexually abusing a seminarian under his care and how after a period of time, he says, they both “sought reconciliation.” The Cardinal and his accuser had a meeting after the allegations were withdrawn, and during that meeting, the Cardinal invited this hurt and broken young man to receive communion. This is what Bernardin says:

Never in my entire priesthood, have I witnessed a more profound reconciliation. The words I am using cannot begin to describe the power of God’s grace at work that afternoon. It was a manifestation of God’s love, forgiveness, and healing that I will never forget.

This is the peace of Christ. Not an easy peace. Rather, a peace that knows what it is to have nail prints in the hand and a wound in the side. Peace that grows out of struggle but lives in love and justice and reconciliation.

“Peace never comes without cost.” Those are the words of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury in a letter that he wrote to Christians in the Middle East this Easter.

Peace never comes without cost. So the deepest enemy to peace is always the spirit of grasping and clinging to what makes us feel safe while the truth is, we shall only be safe when others are not frightened of us; when others do not feel silenced, despised, or suffocated by us.

Peace, as Brother Bruno learned, is not about a false and forced silence. Brian Wren, the hymn writer (some of his words are on the front of your bulletin this morning), writes about the quiet of oppression and the cacophony of peace; peace being “the sound of children at play, the babble of tongues, the thunder of dancing, a voice singing.” The poem ends like this

Say no to peace,
If what they mean by peace is a rampart of gleaming missiles,
The arming of distant wars,
Money at ease in its castles
and the grateful poor at the gate.

Tell them that peace is the hauling down of flags,
The forging of guns into ploughs,
The giving of fields to the landless
And hunger, a fading dream.

May it be so in our lives and in the life of our world. And may the peace of Christ dwell richly in our hearts and in the hearts of all whom we love this Easter season and always.

Amen.