World peace, when I hear
that phrase it reminds me of Sandra Bullock in the movie Miss
Congeniality. She played the role of Gracie Hart, a very
tomboyish FBI agent who went undercover at the Miss United States
Beauty Pageant to capture a terrorist who dubbed himself “the
Citizen”. When she received her orders to go undercover Gracie
expressed her disdain for beauty pageant contestants as “stuffed
bikinis who want world peace”. She was making fun off how beauty
contestants so simplistically and generalistically answer those
philosophically "heavy" questions that are meant to make
their intelligence shine. The host will ask, “What is the one thing
you want most in life?” to which the standard answer is “world
peace”. Oddly, later in the movie when Gracie is asked that sort of
question, we are given a dramatic pause as we expect her to rant on
her view of beauty contests. Yet, she bites her tongue and says,
“world peace”. Is world peace only something that beauty
contestants want?
Well, peace is a hard
thing to imagine. Really, it is. Truly we need to ask ourselves what
do we mean when we say peace? I think we have a predisposition to
think about peace as being among nations when it can also mean peace
among neighbours. Moreover, in this world of talk shows, we have also
been brainwashed into an understanding of peace as inner peace.
Unfortunately, there is no peace with oneself unless there is peace
with one’s family and friends and immediate community. On the
subject of inner peace we frequently get reminders of how damaging a
lack of inner peace can be especially among our young. I remember a
few years an incident in Omaha, Nebraska because my sister lived
hardly a mile from where a troubled nineteen year old, took the route
of mass murder/suicide because he did not have inner peace, meaning a
healthy love of self and others. His suicide note reflected that he
believed himself to be simply a pain in the bum to everyone in his
life, a far cry from inner peace. Although, we can contribute a good
bit of his disposition to mental illness, we can not help but also
chalk one up to the failure of family, friends, and his social
community to have the courage to get involved in the life of one of
their own. I don’t say this to blame anybody but rather to expose a
culture that let’s someone who is suffering so painfully slip
through not just a crack but a crevasse because mental health is a
“private” matter. To that effect, we are all to blame.
Peace among neighbours is
another hot topic these days particularly when houses are being built
en masse hardly ten feet away from each other. In the compact world
of the sub-development neighbours frequently commence to feuding when
one neighbour does something that the next-door neighbour considers
to have a negative impact on their property value because they all
look more or less the same. It is a strange world when the first
thing a person does upon moving into one of these urban sprawl
subdivisions is build a fence, a fence which will require their
neighbours approval and assistance if built on the property line
(negotiate your way through that sometime) or you can just say “to
heck with my neighbour I’m building it one inch on my side” which
is exactly what your "neighbour" was hoping you would do in
the first place. Neighbour gets worry-free fence and you pay for it.
So anyway, peace –
peace is such a hard thing to imagine. It seems that in order to have
it on the global level we have to learn how to do peace at the
neighbourly level. In order to have it at the neighbourly level we
have to learn how to do peace at the individual level. But, and a big
one at that, the prophet Isaiah does not lead us down that road of
thinking. The way he “sees” things is quite different. I use the
word “sees” quite particularly. His vision, his imagination, of
what things will be like when the Triune God of grac finally says
“enough” is quite different than our saying, “I’ve got to get
myself together and then get things right between my neighbours and
me and then hopefully when we’ve all got our patchouli together, we
can work on world peace. That is not what Isaiah sees for the
Trinity's world after he, not us, has put it to rights.
Isaiah’s vision, his
imagination (and please don’t think imagination here in the sense
of he’s just imagining things. Imagination to the Old Testament
Prophets was seeing the way things are/will be from God's
perspective.) is that One will come, the One whom we’ve come to
know as Jesus Christ, and in the end he will put things to right. The
Spirit of God will be upon him. He will judge according to
righteousness and equity giving the poor what they need. He will
strike the land with the Word of the Truth and his breath shall put
to death the wickedness and the wicked, those who have worked against
God and his people. Isaiah's vision of that day calls us to
re-imagine our world back within the bounds of the first days of
creation when God spoke the Word and the aspiration or breath of that
Word brought things into being out of nothing.
Let me step aside here
and talk about the Trinity creating things out of nothing. There is a
Russian physicist, Alex Vilenkin, who has written a book Many
Worlds in One: the Search for Other Universes in which he
describes what a good many, if not a majority of theoretical
physicists, are saying about how our universe came into being.
Without mentioning God, he says that the only reasonable,
theoretical, and mathematical conclusion we can come to when talking
about the origin of our universe – or any universe for that matter
– is that it came into being out of nothing. In the midst of
non-existence, no space and no time, a very dense particle out of
nowhere began to do something called quantum tunnelling creating a
false or unstable vacuum which exploded or rather big banged to
become our stable vacuum of space-time. Now, fourteen billion years
later under conditions more unique than New York City being levelled
by nuclear bombs and suddenly out of the nothing that is left emerges
a fully functional Boeing 747 life emerges and there’s you and I
conscious life on the planet Earth, a planet that is in a Hell of a
mess…and…and...and it appears quite probable that there are an
infinite number of parallel universes where we may or may not exist
and where things might be better or worse. The parallel universe part
is just theory but it is comforting to me that in a parallel universe
somewhere there is a me who hasn't messed up so badly.
We who are used to
thinking of a universe according to Isaac Newton might think Velinkin
has gone off the deep. Newton's universe, the universe of the
Enlightenment and Modernity, was a static empty container into which
things have been put that function according to set laws which we can
understand and use to our benefit through technology. But, things
have changed with the discovery that atoms are made of protons,
neutrons, and electrons that are made of even tinier particles that
are acted upon by forces. James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish
mathematician and physicist' did a lot of work in the area of
electro-magnetism published and in 1879 published his paradigm
changing work The Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in
which he opened up the world of radio waves and Field Theory. This
work inspired Albert Einstein who has in turn given us a dynamic
understanding of the universe in which everything is related to the
one constant of the speed of light.
Newton's universe only
needed a God to create the big machine and set the law's for it to
operate. In the end, Newton's empty container universe and his
Deistic understanding of God left God ultimately unnecessary even as
Creator. Atheistic Scientism and the Kantian reduction of religion to
moralism are its byproduct. On the other hand, Einstein's universe
with its emphasis on relationship much more resembles its Maker who
is the personal, relational communion of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit who give themselves to each other in love so completely that
they are One. Moreover, Einstein's universe is much more open to the
Incarnation of God the Son; the Light in, by, and through whom all
things were created and are held together.
Back to Isaiah, when this
One, this Jesus Christ, returns and sets things right – imagine
this – (and if you think parallel universes seems crazy) wolf will
lay down with lamb, leopard with kid, lion with calf, cow and bear.
Lions will eat straw instead of hunt and kill. Predation will not
exist in this new creation. Moreover, Isaiah calls us to "see"
a world where not the old and the wise lead, but rather a little
child. This may seem odd until we remember Jesus pointing out that
the FAITH like that of little children is what we are called to have,
indeed gifted by the Holy Spirit to have to be rightly related to
God. Finally, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where
everything is full of the knowing of God.
The Enlightenment world
of Modernity to which we all owe our antiquated understanding of
reality says that God is outside the system and therefore cannot be
known. Yet, the Bible says that God who is indeed outside the system
can be known as he has revealed himself in the system in a way that
human conscious life can know and understand him. God has revealed
himself and made himself knowable to us as the Triune God of grace
in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son and his
relationship with God the Father in God the Holy Spirit, a
relationship he has by grace made us able to partake of in the same
Holy Spirit who unites us to Jesus the Son. Isaiah “sees” that
one day the whole earth and not just the people on it, the whole
earth will know the Trinity by partaking of his life, indeed, be
filled with the knowing of God as the loving communion of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. Peace on earth, world peace, if you can imagine
it, looks like the loving communion that is the Trinity, loving
communion not only among people but among the animals where predation
rather than self-sacrificing love is the rule of life, and among the
tiniest particles of which all things consist.
For Isaiah, world peace
does not come about by me getting myself together so that I have
inner peace and then, having inner peace, I can work with my
neighbours to have peace among neighbours and then, having peace
amoung neighbours, we can work together and bring about world peace.
Isaiah says that God himself will intervene and fill everything with
the knowledge of himself, with the loving communion of the Trinity,
and then there will be peace, peace in which there will not even be
predation in the animal world. Can you "see" that?
Well, believe it or not,
God has given his creation a foretaste of this peace. Paul’s letter
to the Roman Christians exhibits this particularly through Paul's
encouraging them to welcome one another. Paul wrote Romans to address
a problem in the Roman churches where Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians
were not welcoming Jewish Christians into their midst. There was a
wave of Jews and Jewish Christians returning to Rome at the time Paul
wrote the letter. Boldly, Paul, who had no prior relationship with
the Roman churches says, “Welcome one another, just has Christ
Jesus has welcomed each of you.”
Hospitality in the name
of Jesus Christ is a core component of world peace. In the Biblical
imagination, the “seeing” of the prophets and apostles and of
Jesus himself, there will not be world peace until Jesus returns and
God puts all things to right. But until then, we are to offer
hospitality to one another just as Jesus showing divine hospitality
through the giving of his life over to death has welcomed each of us
to himself to partake through him in the abiding presence of the Holy
Spirit in his relationship with the Father. He has quite hospitably
made us partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).
Isaiah’s “seeing' of
peace has been given partial hands and feet in the communion of the
church. The way we Christians welcome one another is the linchpin of
world peace. We are not gathered here on Sunday morning just to sing
hymns, hear a sermon, and drink some coffee. We are here to show
hospitality to one another, to love one another as Jesus has loved us
each as a sign and foretaste to the world of the Trinity's
New/renewed Creation coming.
Jesus has shown loving
hospitality to us each by giving us the gift of the Holy Spirit so
that we know personally the relationship that he and God the Father
share, a relationship marked by steadfast love and faithfulness.
Churches are not clubs marked by philanthropic gestures. Churches are
communities, communions of people who because they know the love God
in Jesus Christ by the free gift of the Holy Spirit where people show
steadfast love and faithfulness to one another because they have
experienced this from God in Christ.
Please do not think that
I am insane in saying that we have a foretaste of world peace here or
even that we are the foretaste of the healing of the entire universe. In Newton's universe they think that if it cannot be observed or measured, then it does not exist. In Einstein's universe there is so much we cannot see but know is there by the way things relate to one another; i.e., the effects the unseen have on what we can see. Therefore, it is certainly not a stretch to say that the more openly we model the love of God in Jesus Christ to one another and all peoples
before the community around us, the more hospitality we show to the
world around us expecting nothing in return, then the more we foreshadow the world peace that is coming.
Friends, showing hospitality is central to Christian faithfulness. Therefore, welcome one another, indeed welcome all peoples with the same love
that Christ Jesus has welcomed us each. Amen.
