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Foundry United Rev. |
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The Gospel of Peace Sunday, December 18,
2005 |
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Ephesians 6: 10-17 |
Stopping
to get gasoline on Then I
was chatting passionately with someone at a social event. He knew I was a minister. He told me he had not attended his church
in more than a year. “I can’t stand
going to a church,” he said, “that by doing nothing and saying nothing seems
to be blessing the war.” Then I
got an e-mail from Jim Vitarello on behalf of the Washington Interfaith
Alliance for Middle East Peace. It
said, “Jesus was born in More
than two thousand years after the birth of the Prince of Peace, the world
today appears to be just as violent as ever.
Nations where Christianity has been the dominant religion appeared to
be no less violent or prone to war than other nations. It is hard to believe in the possibilities
of peace two thousand years after the birth of Christ. I am afraid our problem is this: we don’t
believe in peace anymore. We don’t
believe anymore in the possibilities of peace. I’d
like us to turn this morning, once again, to the book of Ephesians one last
time. We have been reading the book of
Ephesians all fall and winter, and I’ve been preaching on texts from the book
of Ephesians all this time. We have
now come to the part of the book which, like when a sermon that has gone on
too long, finally comes to the word “finally.” “Finally,”
the book of Ephesians says, “finally, be strong in the Lord and in the
strength of the Lord’s power. Finally,
be strong in the Lord.” One of the
defining characteristics of the book of Ephesians is that Ephesians was
written by the students of the apostle Paul, who had come to the realization
that the present age would not be ending as quickly as the apostle Paul had
supposed. We would not suddenly be
rescued from the difficulties of life in this world and taken up into
another, better world. Instead, the
writers of Ephesians began to see that Christ is working in this world, in
this cosmos, that Christ is working from generation to generation to
generation through time into eternity.
God is working in space and time.
Christ is present in the universe and in us. One of
the concerns of the writers of the book of Ephesians is how the Church will
remain faithful over time, throughout the generations. How will we keep the hostile spiritual
forces of this world around us from defeating us? How will we keep the negativity, the doom,
the evil of the world, how will we keep that from filling us so that we get
caught up in the forces of doom and evil so obviously at work? The
image that the book of Ephesians uses to describe how the Church is to be
faithful is the image of the armor of God, the whole armor of God. Ephesians concludes by saying: “Take up and
put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand the forces of
doom and evil in the world around you.
Like a soldier dresses in armor to protect him or herself, the Church
is to dress itself in the spiritual armor of God and armor of spiritual
attitudes.” Ephesians
lists the parts of the armor:
So how
do we proclaim the good news of peace two thousand years after Christ was
born when the little town of Two
thousand years after Jesus Christ was born in a country that was nurtured in
the crucible of Christianity, I confess that I have a hard time most mornings
believing in the possibility of peace.
It’s hard for me to believe, to even hope, that we might be a nation
and a world at peace. The book of
Ephesians suggests that I have become too open and vulnerable to the
attitudes of despair and doom around me and that, if I am to be in Jesus
Christ, the part of what Christ is doing in the world, I have to look to
Christ for what I believe rather than the world around me. Four
spiritual attitudes in the book of Ephesians prepare us to be proclaimers of the possibilities of peace, the good news
of peace. One is
the belt of truth, the belt of truth that looks at truth without avoidance or
denial. There’s no possibility to
proclaim peace unless you look at the truth of war and of violence. I mentioned this before. Periodically, I go to the CNN website. CNN lists the pictures of the 2,153
American soldiers who have died in It is a
temptation to forget it, to avoid and to deny it. But there is no way to be
messengers of the gospel, the good news of the possibility of peace, without
facing the truth. 16,061 soldiers have
been wounded in action, many of whom lost limbs. If you go to the website, www.iraqideathtoll.com, the
verified civilian deaths in The
breastplate of righteousness is to protect our hearts from becoming cold and
hard. When violence and war go on and
on, it is easy to stop caring. It is
one thing to look at the pictures of the 42 on www.cnn.com
who died in December. It is another
thing to feel the pain of the families who have lost their loved one, to feel
the pain of the Iraqi people who have died, to feel the pain of the people
behind the walls of the little town of The
shield of faith, which keeps us from becoming cynical, this attitude that we
can’t make any difference anyway, that nothing we could do would matter. The
helmet of salvation. We need to
experience the saving power of peace in our own relationships. The reason that the early church was able
to believe in peace was because they had experienced a wall of hostility
coming down between Jew and Gentile. They knew that it was possible for
people who had been enemies for millennia to come to be brothers and sisters,
people who loved one another in the God
longs for peace. It is why Christ was
born, to bring peace to our troubled and violent world. God has broken down all the walls of
hostility between all people who see themselves as different, against one
another, and as enemies. God
longs for peace. It is hard, I know,
to believe in peace in a world at war, to believe in peace when the little
town of God’s
intention is that God’s people will live in peace. God believes it so we need to believe it
and not settle for violence and war in our lives. May the Prince of Peace be born again in
the mangers of our hearts, our churches, our homes, and our nations this Christmas. www.foundryumc.org |
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