Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 12, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Three weeks ago we marked International Day of Peace during our worship on Sunday morning. Our focus was on external peace, peace in the world. External peace, the absence of war and the practice of nonviolent advocacy for justice, is of course profoundly important, and it is the calling of the Christian. There is, however, another kind of peace, a peace that is every bit as important as world peace. It is internal peace, peace in our hearts, peace in our souls. The two kinds of peace are not unrelated. The Buddhist tradition, in which there is a great deal of wisdom, for example teaches that the way to peace in the world is through peace in the souls of individuals. Moreover, if your experience is anything like mine, you know that internal peace is every bit as rare as peace in the world.

For us it may be even rarer. After all, no one here, as far as I know, has been personally involved in an actual war for a very long time; but I’m pretty sure that we’ve all felt internal turmoil, an internal absence of peace, pretty regularly throughout our lives. If you’re like me, and I suspect that in this regard at least you are, you feel anger, fear, and maybe even hatred a good deal of the time. If you’re like me, and I suspect that in this respect at least you are, you worry a lot about a lot of things. I know that I worry a lot about work issues, family issues, money, politics, global warming, and a lot of other things. In the last couple of weeks we’ve all have another great big thing to worry about land in our laps, the current economic meltdown, the most precarious economic situation our nation has faced in since 1929. So now more than ever many of us, myself included, worry about our retirement income either now or when we eventually retire. Or we have to worry about our jobs, whether we will still have them as the economy continues to slide into recession and the financial markets continue to collapse. So perhaps in these days in particular internal peace can be a pretty rare commodity for most of us. I certainly know that it is for me.

So it was with a decided absence of internal peace that I encountered anew Paul’s famous phrase “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding” this past week. And it struck me that this internal peace, the peace of the soul that I’ve been talking about here, is precisely the kind of peace that Paul is talking about. So, since peace in our souls is so rare for us, and because that internal peace is so devoutly to be desired, perhaps it will reward us to take a closer look at just what Paul says about this miraculous peace of God that is so amazing, so mysterious, so mystical that, as he says, the understanding of our minds simply can’t get around it.

The first thing to note about the peace of which Paul speaks in our passage this morning is that is the peace of God. That is, it is not of human making. Nothing and no one human or worldly can give us this peace. And then a second thing to note: The peace of which Paul speaks is a peace that “surpasses all understanding.” In a way that’s saying the same thing as the peace is of God. God of course surpasses all understanding. God’s peace does too. It is a peace that we can’t understand. We can’t explain it, we can only experience it. We can’t reason our way into it. We can’t talk our way into it. Paul is telling us, however, that it can be ours.

It can be ours, but the way Paul presents the matter it seems that we have to do something to acquire it. The verse that contains the phrase “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” begins with the word “and.” That verse is then a continuation of something that comes before it. What comes before it is this: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God.” So Paul’s reference to the peace of God that passes all understanding comes after and is connected to an admonition to do something, namely, to bring everything to God in prayer with thanksgiving. Paul’s “And” means that if you do that, then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding can be yours. The necessary implication, of course, is that if you don’t bring everything to God in prayer with thanksgiving, then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will not be yours.

Which raises something of a problem, doesn’t it? We proclaim that God’s grace is unconditional, that we can’t do anything to earn God’s grace, and that we don’t have to. It sort of sounds like Paul is saying here, however, that the peace in our souls that God can give us is not unconditional, that we do have to do something to earn it. Does this passage contradict the unconditional nature of God’s grace by making us do something to earn one of the fruits of that grace, namely, the peace of God that surpasses all understanding?

Well, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to those of you who know me well that my answer to that question is no, this passage does not contradict the unconditional nature of God’s grace. Here’s how I understand the matter. A peace that we cannot comprehend and that the world cannot give us can be ours as a gift from God. God offers that peace always, to everyone, unconditionally. We don’t have to do anything to prompt God to offer peace for our souls. We don’t have to meet some divine test before God will extend that peace toward us, before God will reach out to us and to everyone with a gracious offer of that peace. From God’s side of the relationship, the offer of a peace that surpasses all understanding is truly unconditional.

What Paul is talking about is not a condition on God’s offer of surpassing peace but about what we have to do to take God up on the offer. As with all of the fruits of the Spirit, all of the fruits of God’s grace, God doesn’t force surpassing peace on us. God offers it freely and unconditionally, but it’s up to us whether we take God up on the offer or not. As we all know from personal experience, we are perfectly free to live in as great a state of internal turmoil as we want. We can, and most of us do, live much of the time with a high level of internal unease, with high levels of tension, anger, and anxiety. Or at least I know that I do most of the time. In this passage Paul says that there is way out of our emotionally or psychologically violent way of living. He says that there is a way to open our souls to the surpassing peace that God offers us at all times and without condition. Now let’s take a look at what that way is.

Paul actually gives a rather narrow and specific statement of what that way is. He says that we must “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let [our] requests be known to God.” This is an admonition to what we call the prayer of petition, or intercessory prayer. It is the prayer of asking God for things. It seems to me that what Paul is doing here is less proscribing a particular spiritual practice as it is giving an example of a spiritual practice that can be helpful in opening our souls to the peace that God offers. It would put what I think Paul is getting at this way: The peace of God that surpasses all understanding can be ours, but to make it real in our lives we have to cultivate our relationship with God. We have, frankly, to work at our relationship with God. God isn’t going to break through the walls that we so commonly throw up to the gifts that God offers us. God is not going to use force to break through our self preoccupation, our excessive concern with the things of the world, our addiction to violence, material gain, prestige, and the other temptations of the world to which we so readily give in. We have to give God an opening, and we do that through the traditional spiritual practices of all of the great spiritual traditions. The chief of those is of course prayer. Prayer is more than anything else paying attention to our relationship with God. It is opening ourselves to the reality of God in our lives and in the world. A life of prayer, when pursued diligently and well, will indeed open our souls to God’s surpassing peace. But there are other spiritual disciplines that will do that too. Regular participation in our worship together, of which prayer is of course an important part, will do it. For me and for many of us regular participation in the sacrament of Communion will do it. For others, communing with God in nature, or merely sitting with God in silence will do it. There is no one right way to open our souls to God’s surpassing peace. My point, and I think Paul’s point, is only that some such spiritual discipline is necessary if we are to make the peace of God that surpasses all understanding real in our lives.

And my friends, as any of you who have ever felt that peace can testify, entering into God’s surpassing peace brings benefits that are almost beyond description to those who have not felt that peace. The surpassing peace of God drives out all fear and quiets all anxiety. It dispels all anger and all hatred. Over time it eases all grief, not making the pain of loss disappear but giving us the strength to keep on going with our loss when we know that if left to rely on our own resources we would just stop and never move on. The peace of God that surpasses all understanding is indeed the greatest of all of God’s gifts, as I say every week when I invite you to pass the peace of Christ, which is of course the same thing as the peace of God.

And so this morning I invite you to consider what spiritual discipline works best for you to open your soul to the surpassing peace of God. It won’t be the same thing for all of us. It doesn’t have to be. The great good news is that God’s surpassing peace will come to us down a great many different paths if we will regularly and sincerely open ourselves to it. The peace of God which surpasses all understanding can indeed be ours if we will but open ourselves to it; and that, my friends, is very good news indeed. Amen.