Sermon – Advent III – Peace in the Storm – December 14, 2008
Recently the father of our bass guitarist, Denis Allman, read this Scripture, a passage that has layers of meaning and has brought strength and consolation to millions over hundreds of years:
Psalm 23:1 A psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. 4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Denis’ father read this passage, and then he closed his eyes and passed into glory. Into the presence of Jesus. Into the immediate company of the One whose birth we celebrate during this holy month of December, this time of Advent.
This is a passage of peace and quiet confidence in the guiding hand of God, the reviving breath of God, and finally the banquet God prepares for His beloved. It is a passage that has brought peace to many a heart.
For those of us who have been Christians for a really long time, we all run the risk of forgetting…forgetting that whatever peace we know in our lives today is not first about circumstances, it’s not about our character, it’s not even about how we’ve chosen to abide in the peace of Christ, whatever that may mean to us. The peace we know is rooted in the character and calling of the One Christians think of during this Advent season as the Christ Child. This Prince of Peace.
So as I thought of Denis’ loss of his father this past week, and as I reflected on the Psalm…the song, the poem inspired by God that led Denis’ dad in peace into his death, as it took on special meaning for me as of course it did for Denis and his family…I considered our Advent theme of peace for this week, one that I don’t ever recall preaching on during Advent.
And it, frankly, made me wonder about a bunch of different things. It made me wonder, “Why does God care so much about us living with a deep peace inside us, when He knows that life and circumstances around us will always be somewhat unstable and we will always be vulnerable”?
I wondered “Why does the world around us exhibit such despair, such chaos, such a feeling of teetering on the precipice (especially evident now as the world waits to find out just how devastating the current worldwide economic meltdown will be)”?
And I wondered how we as a community could make a step closer to Jesus during this season. What is it about the Christ Child that makes approaching God somehow a little easier that it can seem otherwise.
So I hope you’ll humour me as I consider these questions out loud today. Let’s pray. Holy God, Lord Jesus Christ…May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, our Rock and our Redeemer.
Let’s listen carefully as these few passages are read to us: [Have readers read the following passages on Peace]
Isaiah 26:3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.
Colossians 3:15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.
Romans 8:6 The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace;
Romans 14:19 Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification.
Luke 2:14 "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."
Let’s consider the first question I mentioned: God knows there will often be turmoil around us that will impact us.
We are vulnerable to the things that go on around us. Why does God then care that we live personally and collectively in peace?
Recently my family was in a car accident. Yes, I was driving. Yes, I was at fault. It was one of those ‘black ice’ situations where you attempt to stop, hit ‘black ice’ and have no control over the car. No one was hurt, but our car was damaged significantly, the other car much less so.
So I spent much of the week on the phone dealing with insurance companies and insurance adjustors, auto body shops and then contacting the people in the other vehicle to make sure they were ok. It became clear that the repairs were going to be costly, would wipe out the slight savings we have and would impact our insurance for another six years.
Bummer, eh? During the week I was quite aware of the potential of this event dragging us down. Of the potential drama and upset that the incident generated.
I was aware that I could let the thing that happened control me, this accident that I couldn’t change or rearrange or deny happened. I was aware that there was plenty of room for upset. I felt bad that I was behind the wheel, that I’d inconvenienced the other driver.
I could have easily got to condemning myself and really gone quite far down. But I didn’t. You know why? It’s not that I’ve got any great ability to deal with tough circumstances. I’m actually not great with crises. It’s not that I’m super-spiritual…not even close.
As I was here last Sunday, the day that it happened, I just kept thinking to myself…You know what. You know what really matters here, Matthew? What matters is that Jesus is Lord. What matters is that nothing can ever change that reality.
It could have been a smaller accident, it could have been a much larger accident…but nothing touches the importance of the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord.
A close second for me is that Jesus Christ is my Lord…that He personally rules my life, that I live in the light of His loving grace. Does that mean that nothing bad will ever happen?
I realize that that idea…nothing bad should ever happen to a follower of Jesus….it is very, very wrong, and will ultimately cripple our faith if we live with that assumption.
In seminary I did some studying about the early Christian martyrs…how they stood uncompromisingly for Christ when the culture around them thought them to be mad, and how they willingly were led to their violent deaths, always, always with the promise that if they just recanted their faith, I they just gave verbal allegiance to Caesar, they would be spared death. And not one of those hundreds of Christian martyrs denied Jesus.
Brothers and Sisters. Bad things will happen in the world around us, and maybe even to us. If we deny that reality, if we think that belonging to Jesus insulates us entirely, our faith will not mature enough to deal with tough things that will happen because of sin, because of the broken world we live in, because of invisible black ice that will randomly appear and cause us to crash.
Got wants us to have peace in the midst of this broken world because He wants us to be near Him.
The alternative…to live in fear, to be freaked out when anything goes wrong, causes us to live very self-involved lives; consumed with and distracted by our own situations instead of being focused, as God intends us to be, on the well-being of others.
I want to suggest that having peace is rooted in a deep commitment to Jesus Christ. God wants us to have peace…that’s another way of saying God wants us to know Jesus. I know of no effective “how-to” method of having peace. Peace is in a person, Jesus Christ, and the way to have peace is to commit our whole lives to Jesus, and then to live in the Way Jesus calls us to live.
Reflecting on Psalm 23 and considering the Advent theme of Peace was also quite a contrast to the general climate of our world today. There is currently a massive recession going on that threatens to be as bad or worse than the Great Depression of the 1930’s. President-Elect Obama (thank God for him, eh? And please pray for him and his family…)
Obama is considering a one trillion dollar plan to boost the recession-hit U.S. economy. One trillion dollars. How many zeros is that after a ‘1’. I think it’s 12 zeros. That’s a lot of zeros. This is on top of the 10 trillion-dollar debt that the U.S. currently is carrying (that puts my VISA balance into perspective).
Canada’s government is in the weirdest situation it’s ever been in with a minority government being threatened by an effort to create a coalition government that depends upon the Bloc Quebecois, a party whose reason for being is to fracture Canada by creating an independent Quebec state. Friends…the world around us is in turmoil. How long will it last? Will it get better or worse? We don’t know.
So considering the theme of Peace is quite a challenge in this climate. Feels like going into the middle of the Iraq war and shouting…”Shalom! Shalom already”.
But you know, this chaos is nothing new. Jesus said in Matthew 24:6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains. 9 "Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. 10 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. 12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, 13 but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. 14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
Now compared to what Jesus says will happen here, we ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s simply the reality that we face. We live in an unstable world. It doesn’t always seem that way. Six months ago very few people realized that things were so shakey with the world economy.
Six months ago seems a very long time ago now, eh? There is despair, there is chaos, we are teetering on the precipice. So…what are we to do? Do we panic and despair?
Most of you know Bill Ryan. A neighbour of one of Bill Ryan’s friends, a senior man, discovered that he lost a large amount of money when the market fell recently. What did he do? This elderly man hung himself. He had no hope…he thought, without his money.
Now without hope, without faith…despair is an understandable response to the vulnerability that we feel. But is that necessary?
By no means! What is the alternative to placing our faith in the systems of the world around us that sooner or later, we are told, will crumble? Is there an alternative, or are we stuck?
What is the solution? The solution is a Person. The solution is a powerful Person.
The solution is a powerful Person who comes to us, knowing that the power and authority and majesty He possesses is too much for us to grasp initially, too much for us to not recoil in fear from.
A Person of grace and love and compassion who comes to us this season as He came to us that first Christmas, to a world of chaos and despair.
I speak of course of the Christ who entered the world as infant. Lowly, needy. Vulnerable, at risk. A little bundle of need. Dependant entirely on His mother and step-father.We feel shakey and unsure of our ability to cope sometimes.
A human infant is the most vulnerable being on the planet. And yet God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Creator of all the galaxies out there that we’ve just begun to map, the Alpha and Omega, became a human child. Why? Well, in part to become for us the warmest and most tangible of expressions of the character of God
I’ve been aware of the Incarnation for a lot of years, but it remains a jolting thing to me, a marvelous mystery.
How could all that power and authority get squeezed into a human? What would all that power and authority and love look like in a human being.
Well, the answer is given to us in the life of Jesus.
The fully human, fully God person who would reveal to us the thoughts of God, the heart of God. Who would walk the streets of Jerusalem, who would talk with the people and walk with the people and heal the people.
Who would be tried before Pilate and unjustly condemned. The Christ child grows up to be the one who suffers for our sakes on the cross; motivated and spurred on and incarnating the mighty love of God, Jesus dies on the cross.
And He defeats death and triumphs over the grave. And all our hope and purpose and love are somehow bound up in His whole magnificent life. Born in abject poverty, in a vile, stinking stable. Humble. Weak. Yet so incredibly powerful and world-changing in his passionate love for humankind, for you, for me.
We began today with a story of Denis Allman’s father’s last minutes and seconds here on earth. It was for him a reading of the famous Psalm 23. That part of the Word of God was his company into eternity.
I found a poem by Judy Booth that is based on that Psalm and that brings into focus why it is that we need the Prince of Peace whose first coming we celebrate this advent season. As we close today, let’s consider this poem as an offering that perhaps expresses the desire of our heart.
"The Lord is my peace. I shall not live in anxiety. He puts me under his wing of comfort and calms my spirit within me. He takes all my anxieties on Himself and helps me to focus on Him. Yes, though I walk through a time of grave uncertainties and fierce anxieties, I will not fret-for You are my peace. Your Word and Your presence calm me now. You hold my uncertainties in the palm of Your hand. You soothe my anxious mind-You smooth my wrinkled brow. Surely serenity and trust in You shall fill me all the days of my life. And I shall keep my mind stayed on You forever".
In this world we will, as Jesus told us, have trouble, and yet Jesus has overcome the world and He is the Rock of our lives. We confess in our hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father; can we do that outloud as we have done before, church?
Can we say boldly this one critical, beautiful, unchangeable fact that God means us to anchor our lives on…that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father!?
May we say ‘yes’ in our hearts to the Christ Child who comes to us this Christmas with God’s invitation to draw near, to freshly put our trust wholly and completely in Christ who died for us.
Let’s pray. God, you know all things. You invite us this season into Your peace. Grant us faith, O Lord, that we may each take a step closer to You this season, that we might receive all Your promises and that we might live in Your peace.
In the matchless name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
The God of peace be with you all. Amen.
