Peace, Not As the World Gives (May 25, 2025)
Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29
At the Last Supper, Jesus said: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
Jesus promises his disciples his peace … which is not the peace that the world gives. In New Testament times, the Roman Empire was famous in for having brought peace to the world, but the historian and politician Tacitus once famously described the way the rest of the world looked at the peace of Rome: “They make a desert, and call it peace.” The empire crushed all opposition with overwhelming violence, with crucifixions and gladiators and lions, and then the absence of any visible opposition was considered “peace.” That is the way the world gave peace in the days of Jesus, and in many ways today as well. By suppressing all conflict. But this is not how Jesus gives peace.
Now, many of us dislike conflict. When congregations are looking for new pastors, they are invited to fill out a questionnaire which is sent to potential candidates. And one of the questions is, “On a scale of 1 to 5, is your congregation comfortable with conflict and people expressing a diversity of opinions, or do you tend to avoid conflict?” And I’ll tell you that almost every congregation says the same thing: We avoid conflict. Right? Because we don’t like conflict.
And for good reason. Conflict can tear a congregation apart. Some of you have been here at Epiphany long enough to remember times like that in the history of this congregation. Conflict can tear a nation apart, as we see with the political polarization that we have today. We are losing shared values and narratives, which seem less important than which party or tribe you belong today. And many of us have had experience of conflict tearing families apart. Conflict is scary.
And yet. We are all different people. We all have different experiences, we all come from different perspectives. And so we all see things differently. All of us see things that other people here don’t see, and all of us fail to see things that other people around us can see quite clearly. We all have blind spots. Together, we can see a lot better – if we are able to harmoniously bring our different perspectives and opinions together. But that kind of peace is very difficult. And the process, as we’re going through it, as we hear all the differences of opinion first before we hear the consensus that comes at the end – the process can feel like the conflict is driving us apart, and that’s what makes it so scary.
But when we suppress conflict – when we pretend that there’s no differences of opinion and we all agree and everything is fine – we are doing what the Romans did. We’re letting the most powerful people set the agenda and define what’s acceptable, and everyone else is afraid to do anything but fall in line. Bishop Gohl, the bishop of the Delaware-Maryland Synod, has a saying that I think about a lot: “We often sacrifice the most vulnerable people on the altar of church unity.” We let the most powerful group, the largest group, determine the way things go in the church, and everybody else knows you’re not supposed to cause conflict, so they just silently go along, or perhaps stop coming to church altogether. And that’s not the way of Jesus.
Our reading today from the book of Revelation tells us what we are aiming for, what God is calling us to become. In the New Jerusalem come down from heaven, we read today that “people will bring into it the honor and glory of the nations” – all the nations, all the peoples of the world, with all their uniqueness and all their diversity, and therefore with all of their differences and (potentially) all of their conflicts. It is true that nothing unclean can be brought into the city, and so ultimately the diversity of all the peoples coming into the New Jerusalem brings peace. And even though certain things are excluded, ways of acting towards people that are unjust are excluded, the gates of the city importantly are never shut. So if anyone is outside, it’s because they have not yet chosen to come in. The welcome is always extended to all people, no matter who they are.
The diversity of their experience in the New Jerusalem, in the kingdom of God, brings peace because what people will have in common is the New Jerusalem itself. They share in common this gift they have been given by God of this new community into which they are being drawn. That is how the peace of Christ is manifested to them. And for us who have not yet reached the New Jerusalem, but who are still on the way, we come together in church as a Christian community to practice the peace of Christ – recognizing that our relationships to each other, like the relationships to come in the New Jerusalem, arise because of our relationship to Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book Life Together, has a wonderful discussion about how we do not have direct relationships with other people once we have been brought into Christ, but we always relate to other people through Christ and see them as people through Christ’s eyes. Bonhoeffer writes:
“Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them. As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself. This means that I must release other people from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate them with my love. Other people needs to retain their independence of me; to be loved for who they are, as people for whom Christ took flesh, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brothers and sisters, even before I could begin to act, I must leave them their freedom to be Christ's; I must meet them only as the person that they already are in Christ's eyes. This is the meaning of the proposition that we can meet others only through the mediation of Christ. Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which they have received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all people.” (Life Together, 85-86, translation modernized)
We relate to other people not as people with whom we share some things in common and other things not, with whom we agree or disagree, whom we like or don’t like. As Christians, we relate to people as who they are in Christ, people for whom Jesus died, people who bear the image of the Crucified One. People who are being redeemed by Christ right now without any merit of their own, just as we are being redeemed by Christ without any merit of our own. And this is what allows us to live in peace with others – leaving them free to be who they are called to be in Christ.
Our first reading today gives us a concrete example. Before the text from Acts that we read today, Paul and his companions are traveling to different cities where they hope to bring the gospel, and the text says that they were “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word” in some of these places (Acts 16:6). They came to a city and wanted to go there, but the text says “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” Paul thought it would be a great idea to bring the gospel to particular places, and he found that he couldn’t – and he experienced this as God saying no to my plan for right now, and I don’t know why that is, but I’m going to trust that God knows what God is doing. I know that I’m not ultimately in charge of the mission I’ve been given from God, and I trust some place and purpose will be revealed to me about where I’m supposed to be.
And then, in our text today, Paul has a vision of a man from Macedonia, which isn’t anywhere near where Paul was at the time. It was across the sea; they had to go through all these different cities that ___ had to try to pronounce while doing the reading today to get there. And when they get to Philippi, you might think he’d be looking for the man he saw in the vision. Instead, Paul meets a group of women. Two women in particular – one, Lydia, who is mentioned in today’s reading, and an enslaved girl who we will meet in next Sunday’s reading.
And normally, when Paul goes to a new city, he goes to the synagogue and starts his ministry there. But that’s not what he did in Philippi. Instead he goes to what seems to be a place of prayer, outside the city gates, alongside the river, where a group of women were gathered. We’re not told why Paul didn’t follow his usual practice of going first to the synagogue, and we’re not told why these women were gathered for prayer outside the city, along the river, and not in the synagogue. We’re not told why, but we can wonder.
Perhaps they did not feel welcome in the synagogue. Perhaps there had been conflict there. Perhaps they were tired of being second-class citizens, even wealthy businesswomen like Lydia. And when they heard the good news about Jesus, they come to know that they belong to Jesus – and Lydia becomes the host of the church that gathers in her home. Perhaps the people who needed to hear the good news were the ones who had been sacrificed on the altar of church unity. Perhaps Paul knew this, or sensed it, or was led to these people who were on the outside. And Paul discovered that was where God was calling him to be – at the place of prayer outside the city, outside the formal structure, alongside the river.
In Revelation today we read that in the New Jerusalem there will also be a river. A river flowing from the throne of God, sustaining trees that feed people with fruit year-around and that have leaves to provide hearing. Alongside that river we can expect that we will find people with whom we literally have nothing in common, people we would never associate with and who probably would never associate with us. But we’ll discover that they are there for the same reasons that we are, and we know that the gate will never be shut. And in the community that we will find there alongside the river, in the community that we are hoping to begin to experience as we gather this morning at the Lord’s table, in that community we will discover the peace that only Jesus can give.