Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
We just replaced our twenty year-old van with a newer vehicle. When Luke saw our new ride, he said, “You need some sort of sign on it like, ‘The Bilynskyj-Mobile!’” My family discussed that suggestion, coming up with various alternatives. I offered the proposal that we get the Covenant logo emblazoned on the sides. “But Daddy,” my daughter Susan chastened me, “if you did that you would have to be good when you drive.”
Whatever it might say about my personal driving habits, Susan’s remark highlights one of the major features of our lives in twenty-first century America. Every day, who each of us is and the way we behave is fragmented and compartmentalized across several different areas of our lives. I am one kind of person sitting in my office at church; another behind the wheel; another on the racquetball court; and yet another at home with my family. And all those different people I am may very well not be consistent with each other. The people with whom I interact in those different spheres usually aren’t the same. It’s not too hard for me to get away with being good at church but being bad on the road. It’s only rarely that I encounter one of you driving down the freeway with me. Though I’m usually careful on my way Sunday mornings. It would be awfully embarrassing to tailgate some slowpoke down Bailey Hill Road only to have him turn into the church drive ahead of me. I would be tempted to just keep going.
Our text today arises in the situation of first century Christians who also found their lives fragmented and compartmentalized. In one sphere of their lives, Greek or Roman Christians ate and drank any sort of meat or wine with their pagan neighbors or in the privacy of their own homes and thought nothing about it. Yet in the church they sat with sisters and brothers in Christ who believed that Jewish dietary laws still applied to them. Those Jewish believers continued to believe that pork and some other meats are “unclean” and it was wrong to eat such things. For the Gentiles, it would have been very tempting to let one’s behavior be different within the different spheres in which they lived.
Paul wants to mend this fragmentation of our lives. He wants us to live in such a way that we take account of who we are in Christ in every sphere. In verse 15, he argues that our eating and drinking cannot to be separated from the fact that Jesus died for us and for those who might be offended by what we eat. In verse 17 we learn that the kingdom of God is a bigger reality, a bigger sphere than all the little ones in which we live. It’s not about eating and drinking, nor about driving, nor about any kind of private realm where I simply do what I please. God’s kingdom is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.”
Today we are considering that middle term, “peace.” It’s the third fruit of the Spirit. Peace is the fruit which works against the fragmentation of our lives. In the Bible, “peace” means much more than simply the absence of conflict. You probably know the Hebrew word for peace, shalom, the greeting that many Jewish people still use. Shalom implies the opposite of dividing our lives into different spheres. It means “wholeness,” “completeness,” “harmony,” “well-being.” When the prophets promised God’s peace to Israel, they meant that wars would cease, but they meant much more.
Isaiah 55:12 promises,
“You will go out in
joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.”
That’s not just pretty poetry. It’s the concept that “peace” means everything in the world comes together in completeness. It’s not just the absence of violence. Peace in the Bible is the positive presence of the wholeness God has always intended for us. Even the natural world will join in the harmony when His peace is finally fulfilled.
That’s why the Bible very seldom speaks of peace as a private matter, a kind of individual mental or spiritual condition. Peace in Scripture hardly ever means only “peace of mind.” We are not meant to have peace individually and by ourselves. We are meant to enter into the shalom which is God’s whole and complete redemption of the world in Jesus Christ. In our Gospel lesson, it was this whole peace, this shalom which Jesus was praying for when He asked the Father to give His people unity.
John Stott suggests that the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 are organized in three groups of three. The first group, love, joy, peace, has to do with our attitude toward God. The second, patience, kindness, goodness, with our attitude toward others. And the third set of three, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control deals more with internal qualities of our own selves. But the divisions are not sharp. And in particular, the fruit of peace is placed as a transition from one’s relationship with God to one’s relationship with others. There is no Christian peace, no peace with God which does not include and lead toward peace with the people around us in every sphere of our lives.
This all means that we cannot be content with the way our lives are fragmented and divided between different groups of people. It particularly means that we cannot simply accept the common notion that we are each entitled to a private sphere of self-interest which does not need to take account of others.
Adam Smith is the famous philosopher of the eighteenth century who is often regarded as the father of economics. His most famous idea is that there is an “invisible hand” which guides a free market. What he meant was that there are certain market forces which will ultimately produce a harmony and balance of public welfare if every individual person is given liberty to conduct business purely in his or her own self-interest. Just look out for your own good and the “invisible hand” of the market will take care of the public good.
Whatever you might believe about the economic theory, or its sister notion in politics that you should always vote for what’s in your own best interest, Scripture calls for a different attitude. In Philippians 2:4 we find Paul telling us, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.” He makes it even stronger in I Corinthians 10:24, “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.”
The peace of God is not a private affair. You and I cannot be at peace if we simply go about our own private business without giving thought to how it affects others. That’s what Paul is saying here about eating and drinking in verse 15. It’s not love, nor is it joy or peace if our behavior causes distress to sisters and brothers in Christ.
You might wonder, then, how anyone could ever have any peace. If peace depends on relationships with others, how can you and I possibly experience it? At any given time, various sphere of our life are in conflict. You may be fighting with your family. You may be struggling with a co-worker. You may be upset with someone at church. And there are wider spheres in which peace seems hard to grasp. We are dividing up to take sides in a presidential election. As a nation we are involved in a war we don’t all agree with. On every side we are beset with what seems to be the opposite of peace.
Paul shows us the source of peace here at the end of verse 15, “Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died.” Jesus died to mend the fragmentation of our lives. He wanted to bring the parts back together. Paul talks about this mending in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 14 where he tells us that Jesus “himself is our peace.” The situation in Ephesus was much like that in Rome. The Greeks and the Jews in the church were struggling to get along with each other. And Paul reminded them as he reminded the Romans. Jesus died for you both. He put your hostility to death on the Cross and made peace, peace between very different sorts of people.
I like how St. Athanasius put it. There was a symbolic reason for Jesus dying with His arms outstretched on the Cross. It was so that with one hand He might reach out toward God’s ancient people, the Jews, and with the other hand reach toward those who would be His new people, the Gentiles, and then draw them together in Himself, in His own body.[1]
One of the classic gags in movie history is from the Red Skelton film “A Southern Yankee.” Skelton plays a loveable bellboy who becomes a spy during the civil war. At one point he attempts to cross the middle of a battlefield by wearing half a blue Union coat on one side facing the Union troops and half a gray Confederate coat on the side facing the southern troops. He’s also carrying a flag that has the stars and stripes on one side and the Confederate cross on the other. He’s cheered on both sides until the wind shifts and the flag is reversed. Then he’s caught in the crossfire.
Jesus deliberately placed Himself in the middle of a crossfire to bring us peace. It was no joke. As the “Passion” film shows, His crucifixion came about partly through the political divisions between the Romans and the Jews. His death played on the jealousy and fears which were on both sides. Jesus aroused the antagonism of both Jewish leaders and Roman politicians. He died in the middle of their politics. But His death in the middle means that Paul can then appeal to Romans and Jews to be at peace with each other in Christ. He died because of them both and for them both.
So the fruit of peace grows best in ground near the Cross. We can be at peace with each other only by recalling that our peace was purchased dearly. It cost the death of God’s own Son. There is no other way to successfully bring a whole peace to our lives than by trusting in the person of Jesus who died and making His body our sphere of unity.
Some of you may have read the story of Don and Carol Richardson’s mission among the Sawi tribes of Papa New Guinea. When they arrived among these people in 1962 they found warring cannibals with a mind-boggling code of ethics. The men most admired among the Sawi were those who successfully pretended to make peace with an enemy, cultivated a friendship, and then betrayed it by murder committed when least expected. When the Richardsons told these people the Gospel story, they thought Judas was the hero!
The Richardsons had brought medicine and steel tools. Jealousy for those gifts only made the Sawi’s more war-like, more ready to kill each other to gain what one tribe had. Convinced they had failed, Don Richardson prepared to leave. Not wishing to lose the medicine and tools, the tribes promised to make peace. Don wondered what possible means they could have for real peace in a society that honored betrayal. He then witnessed an amazing custom. The one guarantee of peace honored among all the Sawi was an exchange of infants between the villages. A father gave up his son to go and grow up in another community. The chief of the tribe took his newborn son from his wife arms and placed the baby in the hands of the chief from another tribe. Richardson watched and asked what it meant. The baby had become a “Peace Child,” he was told. As long as he lives the peace is kept.
Richardson saw his opportunity. He explained to the Sawis that Jesus was God’s Peace Child who died but rose again. He will never die and so the peace He makes will last forever. The Sawis finally understood. They gave their lives to Christ and found real peace.
By God’s greatest gift of peace, we are called to be people of peace, to be a community of shalom, to be an orchard where the fruit of peace grows and flourishes. That means we will do what Paul asks here in verse 19. We will “make every effort to do what leads to peace.” But how will we do that? What will lead to peace?
To begin with, we must confess our division and fragmentation. Consider how many different people you are in the different spheres of your life. In which of those spheres are you living a life that is less than peaceful in relation to others? With whom are you in conflict? Confess it to God.
We must also confess our divisions in the church. Last year we acknowledged how divided we are over the war. That division remains among us. Some of us are thoroughly outraged by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Others of us are more outraged by the beheading of Nicholas Berg. On one side we weep for the children of Iraq. On the other side we weep for American parents who have lost sons and daughters in the war. Our feelings run strong and it’s easy to grow angry with those on the other side, even when they are fellow Christians.
Lesser matters divide us as well. Last Sunday night, our vote to go ahead with a new building for youth ministry was 41-8. One hotly debated amendment was defeated by only one vote, 24-23. United about our mission to youth, we were still divided over the financial matters. We need to confess that division.
Yes we must admit our divisions. Then we must seek our unity in the Peace Child, the Child who grew to be the Prince of Peace. Jesus prayed for us to be at one with each other. I believe He prayed thus in order that we His people might be a demonstration to the world of what real peace looks like. He means for the fruit of peace to grow in us like strawberries grow. Those delicious red fruits grow on plants which send out runners which begin new plants a little farther on, slowly spreading themselves across the ground. The peace of Jesus is planted first in one place among His people and then sends out its runners, creeping outward, taking more ground, until the earth is covered with His love, His joy, His peace growing in every place.
“Make every effort to do what leads to peace.” That means not just confessing but working at bringing the fruit of peace to ripeness. The work of peace begins by extending the hand of fellowship and hospitality to those who irritate and anger and hurt us within the Body of Christ. We cannot expect to bring peace and freedom to people on the other side of the world if we remain divided from brothers and sisters in the Lord in our own congregation.
Which means that we must let Jesus break down the walls between some of our compartments. We look around and most of us are white, perhaps too many of us. It may be that we need to think more about whether a wall of race separates from other Christians, and others who don’t yet know Jesus. There is also a wall of economics. A few of us here on Sunday morning are very well off. Others here among us have practically nothing in comparison. Many of us are in the middle. Suspicion and prejudice abound in every direction over those walls of income and social class. “He can’t understand my struggles,” one of us assumes, while another feels hurt and stigmatized by that assumption. Bless the ministry of Supper 8, it’s a little work of peace. You sign up to have a dinner with some others in the church without knowing who it is. That’s one shot at breaking down some of those walls. We need to think and pray about what other works of peace we might attempt.
Most of all, I believe, we must let the Lord open the compartments of our lives we wish to keep to ourselves, those supposedly private spheres where we believe we are responsible to no one else, where I do only what pleases me. That’s the hardest one. We live in an individualistic culture. We claim a right to privacy. We have been raised in a world which teaches us that one’s first duty is to yourself. Yet Paul wrote to Christians in Rome and told them that even what they eat affects their brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus warned the disciples that “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be revealed.”[2] If we belong to Jesus, then even our so-called private lives belong to Him and what we do there affects the rest of those for whom He gave His life.
So let the whole fruit of peace in Christ come to us. Let it invade every compartment of our lives and grow over the walls which separate us. Let us become living gardening tools by which God plants peace in all the world.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj