“Do not think
that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace,
but a sword.”[1]
Wait, what? What happened to the gently peace-giving Jesus we know and love?
Instead we get a Gospel lesson
about following Jesus. About becoming an imitator of Christ, of making Jesus
Christ the pattern by which we measure ourselves. Imitators of Christ act like Jesus
so they may become like him over time.
Yet
being imitators of Jesus involves that word many of us don’t like:
sacrifice. Jesus’ description when he speaks about the challenges and
difficulties of following him is risky business. Imitating, or following Jesus,
asks things of us we likely don’t want to do, let alone think about. The great
Episcopal writer Verna Dozier once said, God wanted His people "to follow Jesus and not merely worship
him,"[2]
We have
easy lives, you and I. Some of you may have grown up in households where food
was scarce, but I’ll venture that most of us don’t worry too much how to get
that food on our plates now. Most of us don’t worry about shelter or clothing.
We may budget, but we can get what we need, and likely more than we need, to
sustain lives of comfort and comparative ease.
Our materially
easy lives have given us a sense that the gospel is easy too. We come to
church, we listen, we pray. We pray for the poor of the world, most of us
without thinking much about where the poor actually live. The poor are not next
door to us. They are not highly visible here. Our own households fill our
horizons, and a problem these days is coming up with the money for a down
payment on the next car or van.
Yet
in this gospel Jesus speaks about sacrifice. Jesus speaks about believing and
acting and being in a way that alienated him from his own family. He turned his
life and that of his followers upside down and inside out. And, he died a
horrible death. Some of the people who have imitated Jesus through the
centuries also made that same sacrifice and went to their deaths because they
followed him. Does that sound peaceful?
Do
you suppose the peace Jesus speaks of elsewhere in the gospels is the peace
that comes through sacrifice? Is it possible that if we want to really be
imitators of Christ, we must find a way in our own lives to sacrifice so we may
know God’s peace?
What does peace
mean to us when we are willing to give all of ourselves to imitate Christ? Can
it mean that we will no longer have the ease and prosperity to which we are
accustomed? Could it mean we would feel some deprivation in order to know the
deprivation of others?
I’m
asking us to think about sacrifice; sacrifice in all areas of our lives, not
simply financial. Because the peace which passes all understanding – the peace
Jesus holds out to us – is a peace that comes at a cost. The cost is sacrifice.
It means the difference between sticking your toe cautiously into the pool to
check the temperature and instead running off the diving board and leaping
without testing the water first. It means being willing to examine one’s life
and to ask ourselves, “What do I need to move from worshiping to following
Jesus?” What would it take, to paraphrase Verna Dozier, if we approached God
the way she described: "What we do from
Monday to Saturday is most important and we come to our Sunday experience to be
refueled."[3]
When we
move from worshiping to following, we expect to lose something of our lives.
But we will find our lives in the losing.
We may expect we will not have enough if we give something up. Yet we
will gain much more than we lose. We may expect that we will struggle. Yet our
struggle will open us to the peace of God.
When we are
willing to lose our lives for the sake of Christ we will find our lives. And in
the finding will be the everlasting peace Jesus offers us. AMEN.
The
Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2017
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