Peace in Our Time

     We are going through a time of intense political controversy.  Candidates for president are telling us about everything that we want and need.  Certainly jobs, a better economy and then a number of things that seem to me to be simply political ends:  the repeal of health care, the elimination of abortion (or contraception in some cases) and the constriction of food stamps.   Sometimes I wonder where these people have been that they don’t see the deep need of the poor in this country who have so very little and  who are crying out in their need for their government to do something to ease their pain.

So what is it that we all need?  The collect for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany is pretty clear about what humans desperately want:

                           Almighty and everlasting God, you govern
                        all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully                                                      
                        hear the supplications of your people, and in our                 
                        time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our
                        Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
                        Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

     We want peace and we mean peace in our time.   This has been an eternal quest of the human race since we have been created.  But we constantly impose our will on others by the use of force.  We have been in a series of wars in our time, some of them inevitable like the Second World War, but Korea was controversial and so was Viet Nam.  What we did in Iraq is certainly up for question and Afghanistan has been the burial ground of empires from Alexander the Great through the Soviet Union to the United States today.  And now there are those who are advocating that we begin a war with Iran over its nuclear potential.  Here is a horrible threat to our peace, not the nuclear threat of Iran, but our hostility that pushes us into another war.  It seems to me that the loss of any life over such a cause must give us pause and make us wonder at our motivation.

I think that we need to put international affairs  and our national hubris aside in our quest for peace in our time and think of our own lives.  How we achieve our own peace is essential to our basic living.  I know that this above all things requires our relationships to be whole and constant.  We often forget that peace is something necessary for our soul’s comfort and that finding it involves God’s grace and forgiveness.  Peace isn’t necessarily about a lack of conflict.  This is the place that we have to start.

When I worked in Western Penitentiary, I had a group of men, all of whom had killed someone.  They were in prison for life.  In Pennsylvania, a life sentence means just that.  They had no prospects whatsoever of ever getting out of jail.  They stewed in their guilt and always wondered how on earth that God, or anyone could forgive their crimes.

What we worked toward in our group was that they could find enough comfort to talk to each other about what they had done and find that somehow in the telling there would be help.  That was an enormous task in the prison because one of the basic rules of the place is silence.  One never knows when a fellow inmate will come to the witness stand during any subsequent proceeding to tell the court what you said to him in prison that makes your guilt obvious.  So we had a lot of work to do.  It took years, but the group made a profound difference in a number of lives as the silence rule became of less importance than the relationships within the group.  

  When Jesus went into the synagogue in Capernaum, he met a man with an unclean spirit.  The spirit cried out to Jesus asking: What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.  Jesus’ response to this was simple:  Be silent, and come out of him!  And the spirit came out of the man and the onlookers were astonished.   Mark’s gospel goes on to say that Jesus fame spread throughout the surrounding area of Galilee.  What is interesting in this story is that the unclean spirits recognized Jesus and knew his power even when the religious leaders didn’t.  Here is an instance of God’s power unleashed on earth to provide peace.  Not peace for all of mankind, but peace for that man who was possessed of an unclean spirit.  There is no discussion of how the “unclean spirit” got into the man in the first place, only the story of its removal.  That is what I discovered in the prison.  Forgiveness is the issue, not the sin in the first place.

That is the same issue that we all deal with every day.  How do we find peace in the middle of all of the sins and the turmoil of our lives?  That is why we find community in our church and the nourishment of the sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord.  We receive absolution from our God for all that we have done and certain acceptance, just as we are.  That is intended to be a comfort and a healing, just as Jesus healed the man with the unclean spirit in the Capernaum synagogue, so we are also healed and forgiven so that we can get on with our lives in the certain peace of God.  That is peace in our time.