6th Sunday of Easter
May 1, 2016
John 14:23-29
I spent some time this week looking into the phrase
“peace like a river.” If you consider the phrase by itself, it’s mean to evoke
a sense of peacefulness. If you walk
down alongside a river, the whole atmosphere can be one of peace. Yet, the river itself is not always very
peaceful. For one, it’s always moving. A river is not at rest. Then, if you
take a river like the Gunpowder River near us (pictured above), it’s got a series of falls and
twists and turns. The river itself is not peaceful, yet the whole scene all
taken together, with the woods and sun and the path along the river, all of
that together, can be quite peaceful. I was trying to find the history of this
phrase, and everything I found attributes it to one of two songs. There’s the
song we just sang, “It Is Well with My Soul,” written by an Englishman in 1873.[1]
Horatio Spafford lost his family in a
trans-Atlantic voyage from England to the U.S.
When he later made the trip, he asked the ship’s captain to stop over
the spot where the previous ship had gone down.
From that spot, he wrote the words to this hymn. And there’s the
African-American Spiritual, “I’ve got peace like a river, I’ve got peace like a
river, I’ve got peace like a river in my soul…”[2]
While the spiritual probably predates Horatio Spafford, it’s hard to know if he
knew the spiritual or if he coined the phrase separately or had heard it
elsewhere. The phrase is not in the Bible, and yet it’s in these two Christian
songs, songs that were composed by persons walking through their own “valley of
the shadow of death,”[3]
and showing great and steadfast faith while they walked through a time of
darkness.
One of the things you know, if you’ve had peace coursing
through you while walking through the valley of the shadow of death, is that
there is no way that peace came from you. As we read in our Gospel this
morning, peace, true peace, comes from
Jesus. He says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”[4]
Jesus gives us his own peace. And that’s how then we can not be troubled or
afraid or worried or upset. When we try to create our own peace, then we often
are still anxious or tense. When it’s Jesus’ peace, then it just flows through
us. I think we’re pretty comfortable saying love comes from God, yet we don’t
often extend that to the other fruits of the Spirit. If it’s a fruit of the
Spirit, though, then it obviously comes from the Spirit, from God. Peace is one
of those fruits, and I think we tend to forget that it comes from God, too.
Peace does not
come from us, initially. One December I helped the angel tree organizer
deliver Christmas presents to a Hispanic family. Like many volunteer positions
in any church, she was starting to feel burned out from doing this particular
ministry for so many years and in our conversation in the car she tried to
rationalize it, saying, I know God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.
It’s a common enough saying, I’m sure we’ve all said it at some point in time.
Except, that’s not actually what the Bible says. It’s a poor paraphrase of what
Paul actually writes in 1 Corinthians, which is that God won’t let you be
tested beyond what you can bear and that God will provide you with the strength
to endure the test.[5]
The other thing I pointed out to her is that sometimes we give ourselves more than we can handle. Sometimes we take on
burdens that God didn’t mean for us to take on. Either we didn’t pray about it
first, or we didn’t listen to God’s response to our prayer, or we just assumed
that because it’s a good thing to do, therefore, we should do it. We’re not
always good at setting boundaries and saying no when we really need some rest
and to take care of ourselves. It’s hard to say no when we see a need, yet if
we feel some hesitation about meeting it, then we need to pray first. At the
last District Clergy Gathering our presenter was a nutritionist and in talking
about taking care of ourselves she said, “If you can’t solve it right away,
then give it back, it’s not yours to solve.” And I thought, aha! That’s
how you get peace: giving back problems that are not yours to solve. I
mentioned last week that sometimes we put stumbling blocks in our own way;
well, sometimes it’s our own fault that we don’t have peace. We’ve taken
something on that we shouldn’t have. We didn’t pray first. We figured we could
handle it, because we always have. Yet what God wants us to do is to lean on
him, “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own
understanding.”[6] Leaning only and exclusively on our own
understanding is what often gets us into trouble, or in a place that is the
opposite of peace.
Peace
does not come from us, and it does not
come from the world, either. Jesus says, “Peace is what I leave with you;
it is my own peace that I give you. I do not give it as the world does.”[7]
Which then begs the question, how does the world give peace? After violence,
after a war, after conflict. The peace of the world seems to be a peace you
have to fight for, a peace you have to earn, and it seems to be a peace that only means the absence of conflict. Yet
when we talk about peace like a river or peace that you can feel in your soul,
we’re not simply saying that there’s no battle going on. There’s more to a
feeling of peace than just a lack of conflict. Uneasy truces are not peaceful. Peace is more
than that. After a war there can still be anxiety and fear, but Jesus says, “do
not be worried and upset; do not be afraid.”[8]
What he offers is a peace with no fear, a peace that is not restless or
nervous, a peace that may not always make sense, given the circumstances.
See,
probably the most famous Bible verse about God’s peace is Philippians 4:7 where
Paul writes, “God's peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep
your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus.” God’s peace is the peace
that passes all understanding. We don’t always understand this peace, we just
know when it’s there, and we can feel it. This is the peace that let Horatio
Spafford say “it is well with my soul,” in spite of circumstances that would
have declared otherwise. The world may look at you and either a, help you throw
yourself a pity party, or b, say, “no wonder you’re tired and anxious! You
should get your doctor to give you some Xanax.” Jesus looks at you and says,
“Come to me, all you are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”[9]
Jesus says, come find your rest in me. Come find peace in me. Come, receive my
own peace. You don’t have to earn it; you just have to receive it, it’s offered
freely. Just as Jesus told the wind and the waves on the Sea of Galilee so long
ago, “Peace! Be still!,”[10]
let him also tell whatever storm is raging in the river of your soul, “Peace.
Be still. Don’t be troubled or afraid. I am with you.”
I don’t know if peace is what you’re lacking in your life
right now, although I imagine there’s probably at least one area in each of our
lives where we’re not at peace. It may an outright conflict, or just an uneasy
truce. I invite you to pray about it, to bring it to God, lay it at his feet,
and wait a minute before you just leave it there. Wait a minute, so that you can listen for
God’s response to your prayer. The response may be to just walk away and leave
it with him. It may be that you need to talk with someone. It may be that you
need to give back a problem that’s not yours to solve or put down a burden that
God never meant for you to carry. I invite you to continue in prayer about it
while we move into our prayer hymn. For the month of May, we’ll be singing “In
His Time.”[11]
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