A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Johanna S. Morrigan
Amos 7:7-15
Psalm 85:7-13
Ephesians 1:1-14
Mark 6:7-13
"Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."
That's such a beautiful greeting isn't it? When I looked through the epistles I discovered that Paul included some version of that greeting in all of his letters. Scholars suggest that the Letter to the Ephesians was the last of Paul's letters; that it was written from a Roman prison cell shortly before Paul was executed ; and that likely he knew his death was near. Yet he still included this lovely greeting - wishing for his sisters and brothers in Christ those two great blessings of the Christian faith.... grace and peace.
Grace, coming from the Greek work for charm, reminds us that there is a certain loveliness in the Christian life. It describes a gift which we can never buy or earn for ourselves - the gift of the sheer loveliness of the Christian life and the sheer undeserved generosity of the heart of God.
Out of the dank, musty, miserable filth of a Roman prison cell, Paul calls on God to bless his Christian family with the radiance of God's infinite love.
Imagine being trapped in a small, dark hole whose stone walls are forever sweating with moisture. Imagine feeling that dampness creeping into the very marrow of your bones. You ache for even a single ray of warm sun light to relieve the endless chill that has taken over your body, so that even to write has become an excruciating task - trying to hold your arm and hand still enough to grasp the pen and form the letters.
Small creatures run over your legs, or brush against your arms making you shudder. Their bites are painful. Imagine those bites infected and festering covering your body. You long for some relief from the tormented shrieks of other prisoners who are mad with despair and pain. And finally when all but the endless drips of water falling off the rock walls have subsided into a blessed silence - and you are just beginning to doze off - you are jarred awake by the raucous jeering of the guards as they torment some poor unfortunate soul.
And yet somewhere, ...somewhere within this God-forsaken place, God's grace and peace touch you - and you pray for that grace to bless your loved ones. You seek to somehow convey the peace of the Lord to those whom God has called you to share God's message.
Peace..... what can peace even mean in such a place? It's filled with hate, filth, and misery. It's designed to strip you of every ounce of human dignity. People go mad in places like this. And yet Paul is talking about peace!
Imagine it..... perhaps he is mad. Or perhaps the call of God to be an apostle of Jesus Christ is merely a delusion and he has been mad all along.
What is this peace of God that it can call us to the most wretched kind of existence - and then convince us that we are in the right place at the right time doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing?
That's what Paul is saying... about himself, and about his fellow Christians... Despite the persecutions, despite the rejection, despite the ridicule which was heaped upon those early Christians - they knew the peace of God...how did they find it? How do I find it? It surely must be about the most amazing thing anywhere on this earth - a peace that glows in the midst of hell.
In Greek the word for God's peace is eirene - in Hebrew it is shalom. It means everything which leads a person to their highest good. Well, if I have to sit in a damp dungeon getting bitten by rats and listening to other human beings being tortured - maybe I don't want to get to my highest good.
Yet I really want to know that peace of our God. We exchange it every Sunday in our worship. What are we exchanging? Nice words? Some polite and meaningless greeting like -" hello, how are you?" "Oh, I'm just fine, thank you."
I don't think that's what Paul means when he offers God's peace from a Roman prison. And it's not what is intended when we exchange that peace during our worship service. In exchanging the peace, we are embracing the love and forgiveness we have for one another. It is the expression of our union together in God's love and mercy through Jesus Christ.
So how do we go about receiving this peace so that we might truly share it with one another? If we read the Gospels, if we study the Epistles, if we listen to the Old Testament prophets - they all seem to be saying the same thing. That we are to do the will of God.
Jesus tells the twelve apostles to go out with nothing but the authority that he gives them. They are to take no bread, no bag, no money. They are to go to strange towns and villages, completely and totally depending on the grace and peace of God to sustain them.
And what is it that God asks of Amos? He's a simple man, minding his own business, tending his flocks and sycamore trees when God calls him to speak the word of the Lord to God's people. And the people are none too pleased to hear what Amos has to say. After his encounter with the high priest, Amos is expelled and commanded to prophesy no more.
Amos risked the loss of his entire livelihood, not to mention his life, to follow the will of his God. And in some ways Amos' task is even more difficult than that of Paul or the other apostles. Because you see, Amos lived at a time when there was relative peace and great prosperity in the land of Israel. The people were content and life was good. Amos was given the thankless task of upsetting everyone's apple cart.
Perhaps Amos' job is not unlike the task of our prophets today... you know, the ones who continue to remind us that babies still starve to death in this great land of ours; or that depressions and suicide are epidemic among our young people.
Why did all of these people risk life and limb, home and family, reputation and respect to proclaim the message of their God? In each case, they were called. They were hand-picked and called to the task that God needed them to perform.
They could have said no....
"Ah, no thanks, Lord, I think I'll have to pass on this one... you see we're having a family reunion coming up and well, I really have to be there for that... I mean, my mother would kill me if I wasn't there..."
Or... "Lord, I really do want to do what you want me to do, but you see,...... I have a family and responsibilities.... and next month, Lord, well, you know - I ‘m finally going to get to serve in the Temple, and you know, Lord, that kind of opportunity only comes up once in a lifetime.... I know you wouldn't want me to miss out on that . I mean I would be honoring you there anyway, ... "
Or... "Jeez, Lord.... I would really like to help you out, you know? ....but I'm just a fisherman - and well, how would it look for a smelly old fisherman to be claiming that God actually called him? .... I mean, Lord, I would feel perfectly ridiculous, you know?"
They could have said no - and if they had, what would have been the price of their no?
What happens when we are doing something that we know we aren't supposed to be doing? Or perhaps even more importantly, when we are not doing something that we know darned well we ought to be doing?
There is always that nagging voice in the back of our mind somewhere - the one that won't be quiet, the one that wakes us up at night, or becomes so annoying that we start yelling at our kids and our employees, and we don't even know why we are behaving so badly... sometimes we have grown so accustomed to that voice that we don't even know there is a way to silence it.
When we say "no" to God's call, there is a price - and that price is the forfeiture of peace and contentment. But when we say "yes" - even when it is something that we really don't want to do, or that is very difficult and frightening to do, ....there is a wonderful gift that we receive from our God - a certain serenity in our hearts, a tranquil peacefulness that even a dungeon in ancient Rome could not extinguish.
As we continue on our journey of Total Ministry, God is calling each and every one of us to do God's bidding...God is calling us to live up to those baptismal vows that we just renewed again on the Sunday of Pentecost....
God is saying that God needs us to be God's hands... hands to repair the plumbing, and to serve the hungry; and to carry the cross; to be God's feet... feet to walk out of this beautiful old church building, and into the streets where our children are falling victim to drugs and violence every day; to be God's mouth...the mouth to speak the love of Jesus to those who don't have the slightest idea who God even is, much less how much God loves them; to be God's ears... ears to listen to the children, to their parents, to the aging, to the marginalized, and to the dying.......
God called Amos,
through Jesus, God called Peter and Paul,
through Paul, God called Timothy,
and through someone, God is calling you .....
AMEN.