Friends of God: How Peace Comes

First Peter 3:8-11
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, October 17, 2004)

Peace can mean many things.

To a mother or father, it’s the look on their children’s faces as they sleep at night.

To a diplomat or soldier, it may mean combatants laying down their arms.

To a busy manager, it can mean an interlude of listening to music or sports talk radio in the car after leaving the hectic world of business.

All of those things can bring us some measure of peace, spaces within which we can appreciate our blessings, love our families, nurture our creativity, care about our neighbors, catch our breath, and grow as people.

But it’s been my experience that when we try to create peace on our own, those efforts don't result in lasting peace. Their effects are fleeting.

For real peace...lasting, down-to-the-bone peace, we need God. The Bible says of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh: HE IS OUR PEACE. The New Testament book of Romans says that because of what Jesus has done for us on the cross and from the empty tomb, “we have peace with God.”

Later in that book, Paul reveals the reason a relationship with Jesus Christ brings us peace (and this is critically important): “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...” We have peace when we know that God has set us free from the debt we once owed for our sins!

Gerald Mann tells about the first congregation he served as a pastor. Mann had been there a few months when one man proved to be a thorn in his flesh. Mann finally asked the guy what was it that had happened in his life that caused him to always be so negative and so critical. At first, this guy resisted Mann’s questions. But Mann said, “I’m not leaving this room until you tell me.” Eventually, it came out that the fellow had a super-demanding father. He had never measured up to his dad’s expectations and so now, every preacher who passed through the church (and every other person in his life) paid the price.

That guy had gotten cuffed around by life. There was no peace in his soul, just static. In all his growing up years, he felt constantly condemned. As a result, He didn’t see God as a joyous, forgiving, loving Father, but as a demanding, grim-faced legalist.

Folks, if you peel away the layers of most conflict situations, you’ll usually find that at their root are one or two people who are reacting to voices of condemnation, whether from others or from inside themselves. They fight back at the condemnation.

But usually, the people against whom conflicted people fight have nothing to do with what makes them feel conflicted. They may actually be engaging in war against their past, their shame, their guilt, their fears, their disappointments, their parents, or someone or something else. As a former conflict manager for our Lutheran denomination, I've learned that this is true of virtually every conflict in life: People feel condemned and because of that, they condemn others.

The church is meant to be an oasis of peace in a world in constant conflict, a place where we share and live the freedom from condemnation that Jesus gives. An old song says, “If you’re happy and you know it...clap your hands, say "Amen," stamp your feet...” and so on. The idea is that when the peace of Jesus Christ lives in us, it should be observable by others.

That’s why Peter says what he does in our Bible lesson for this morning at the conclusion of a section of a letter in which he gives codes of conduct for Jesus-Followers in first-century Asia Minor. He begins it this way:

“8 Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. 9Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing.”

The very first way people know that Jesus has risen from the dead and living in the lives of those who call Him Lord is in the peace they observe among church members.

Back in early 1991, as we were preparing for Friendship’s first worship celebration, a fellow by the name of Roger Holmgren served as our first president. (Roger and his family later moved to another town.) Roger said, “One thing I think, Mark, is that we should have the sharing of the peace every single Sunday.” At first, I resisted this idea. I was afraid it might take too much time.

By that time, I may have heard a true story that should have convinced me that Roger was right and I was wrong. It involves what happened when a young pastor named Walt Kallestad went to serve at Community Church of Joy, a Lutheran congregation in the Phoenix area. His first Sunday, a man walked up to him and asked, “Whose side are you on?” Kallestad didn’t know there were sides! But as he watched his dreams of a loving church being killed by people who wanted to wage World War Three, he became more and more discouraged.

Then came the night when he received a telephone call from the local fire department. Someone had been so angry that they set fire to the church building. As Kallestad sat in the front seat of his car, watching firefighters, he began to weep and he prayed. “Lord,” he asked, “what shall I do?” As he wept and cried, a plan crystalized in his mind.

It was simple. He would love these people. He wouldn’t condemn. When he was criticized, he wouldn’t criticize back. He would live with the crucified and risen Jesus at the center of his life and he would hug every person who worshiped there.

At first, people reacted awkwardly to his hugs. But soon even the most hard-bitten old saints looked forward to their hugs. Today Community Church of Joy (CCOJ) is one of the largest Lutheran congregations in North America.

Without the trauma of a fire, we made a decision to unabashedly love people here at Friendship as well. Except for three Sundays, I think, we’ve been sharing Jesus’ peace during every worship for thirteen-plus years! On one of the Sundays I neglected to include it, one woman approached me and said, "Don't ever let that happen. The sharing of the peace is the most important part of the entire worship celebration for me!"

Of course, the peace of Jesus is more than a ritual. It’s a way of life created by Jesus in the hearts and lives of those who know that God forgives their sins and frees them to live forever with Him!

And Jesus’ peace has made Friendship a compelling, attractive fellowship of which people want to be a part. In my hotel room in Chicago the other day, I jotted down the names of those individuals who have become members or regular participants in Friendship just since we moved into this building twenty months ago. The list runs to seventeen households.

The peace of Jesus is causing our congregation to grow (slower than I might like, but growing nonetheless) and as you and I become more intentional about sharing Christ with others, even more people will experience the blessings of following Him.

How can we make certain that the peace of Christ is always central at Friendship and in our lives?

First: We need to want it and we need to ask God for it. At the end of today’s Bible lesson, Peter says, “...the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayer.” Someone once asked a pastor, “Who’s going to hell?” The pastor said, “I can’t tell you who will go to hell. But I can tell you that only those who want to go to hell will be there.”

Similarly, I can tell you that people and churches who aren’t at peace with God or others are in that condition because they haven’t wanted peace. Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead to give us peace of mind, heart, and conscience. If we’re not living in that peace, it means we’re not praying for it, don’t really want it, or can’t imagine that God is big enough to give it to us!

Second: We need to let God change the ways we think. Paul says, “Let the same mind be you that was in Christ Jesus...” In other words, we need to surrender each day to God and let Him reconstruct our whole way of thinking about life so that we begin to see things as Jesus does.

In his fantastic book, Living Faith, former president Jimmy Carter says that one morning while trying to complete an earlier book, he saw the date pop up on his computer screen and realized that he hadn’t bought his wife Rosalynn a gift for her birthday, that very day! He briefly considered purchasing an antique item at his cousin’s nearby shop. But then, he thought of something else.

All their married life, Carter, a former Navy man, had been impatient with Rosalynn because she wasn’t as prompt as he thought she should be. He realized that for four decades he had been unreasonable and unfair toward his wife, triggering many arguments on this subject of promptness. And so, for his birthday gift that year, he typed out a note to Rosalynn. It read:

“Rosalynn, I promise you that for the rest of our marriage, I will never make an unfavorable remark about tardiness.”

For the most part, Carter concludes, he’s kept that promise and his wife considers it the best present he ever gave her. You see, with a conscience quickened by Jesus Christ, Carter made peace with his wife and really, with himself. That’s what happens when we want and pray for the peace of Christ and when we invite God to help us think like Jesus.

When the peace of Christ lives in a church or a family or a marriage, it doesn’t mean that we will always agree on everything. The Bible advises for example, “Be angry; but do not sin.” And Jesus gives procedures for resolving conflicts, procedures we’ve built right into our congregation’s constitution.

But our call is clear: Confident that God has taken away our condemnation and that He loves us, we can be at peace with God, ourselves, and others. We’ll experience that peace and others will see that peace in us when we want it and pray for it and we let God help us think more like Jesus.

As we approach Friend Day on October 31, I hope that you will join me and invite your non-churchgoing friends to worship with us on that special day so that just like us, they can experience the awesome peace that only comes from Jesus. Amen!