Christ's Peace Is Disruptive

Christ’s Peace Is Disruptive
Mark 10:2-16

Christian Community Presbyterian Church, Bowie, Maryland
3 October 2021


Our Presbyterian theological tradition lifts up the link between pulpit and table. Our formative documents talk about Word and Sacrament. One of our three ordained offices is minister of Word and Sacrament (often called pastor). Ministers of Word and Sacrament, serving as preachers and teachers of the Word, “shall preach and teach the faith of the church, so that the people are shaped by the pattern of the gospel and strengthened for witness and service [and] when they serve at font and table shall interpret and ‘show forth’ the mysteries of grace in word and action.” (G-2.0501)
    John Calvin, our Presbyterian spiritual grandfather, considered the font and table as equally important as the pulpit in worship. Much to the horror of many Presbyterians since, Calvin thought that the table should be used weekly, not monthly, or quarterly or, as some of our dour Scottish faith ancestors thought, once a year. (And then they didn’t think themselves worthy enough to come to the table that often.)
    So I like to preach from the table on communion Sundays. Here, I am on your level, one with you, all of us the people of God. For you at home, think of me as sitting with you at your kitchen table or on the other side of your coffee table. All of us are one, as Word and Sacrament are one, as Christ is one with the Church.

We have heard the words of Mark’s scripture. As Pastor Susan said last week, Mark’s gospel is filled with difficult passages. They challenge things we take as normal and ideas about which we have already made up our minds. Not all words of scripture are snug and cozy, nor are they harsh and offensive. Today we have a mixture of both. We pray the Spirit to help us to look behind the words – whatever human language we encounter them through – in order to seek the “Word made flesh.” Frequently we find the enfleshed Word in words of holy disgust at the way human beings manipulate others and make them of lesser value.
    Just before today’s reading Jesus told a crowd of listeners, “Be at peace with one another.” Earlier in our worship time we engaged in the Passing the Peace, using the call and response:
    The peace of Christ be with you.
        And also with you.
We enacted the Peace with fist bumps, elbow taps, and verbal greetings. This activity is more than an opportunity to catch up with people we haven’t seen since last week or, for some of us, last year.
    By mingling with our sisters and brothers in Christ we affirm our unity and solidarity with them. Each of us recognizes that we are less than we can be without everyone else. We cannot be the Church of Christ without each other. We are incomplete without everyone else. Everyone includes those who have gone on before us – the saints – as well as those who are physically present within our sight and hearing, and, in these Covid-19 times which stretch the wonders of digital technology, those across the screens from us locally and globally.

We all have our personal definitions of peace. Let me be disruptive of your thinking by suggesting a definition:

    Peace is completeness.

The traditional reading of a line in Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’ is, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). As a rule, “perfect” means without a flaw, having no imperfections, not able to be improved upon.
    A decade ago The Common English Bible, a contemporary translation, produced by a consortium of Protestant biblical scholars, broke with tradition and used the word “complete” instead of the word “perfect.” That way the verse reads:
    Just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone so also you must be complete.
    Yes, grammarians, that may be a slim nuance of meaning, but the change of word is insightful. If something is complete, then it lacks nothing, and nothing additional is needed. Therefore, I suggest to you that peace is completeness. The peace of Christ lacks nothing. There is nothing additional required. Christ’s peace is whole, entire, complete in and of itself.
    Completeness is the order of creation as God intended it. In the Genesis 1 story of creation, as each creative step was accomplished, God declared it was good. At the close of the sixth and last day of creation “God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). In the Genesis 2 story of creation, which explores more deeply the creation of human beings, God determines, “It’s not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner” (Genesis 2:18). The initial human being is incomplete without the partner who is “perfect” to complete the other.
    The wordy psalmist of Psalm 119 waxes eloquently for 176 verses praising the perfection, the wholeness, the completeness of the law.
    The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews uses the notion of perfection and completeness in talking about Jesus, saying: 

It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of salvation perfect through sufferings. (Hebrews 2:10)

Jesus is perfect. Jesus is whole. Jesus is complete. Jesus lacks nothing. He has completely, utterly, totally experienced everything that life encounters. He did not shy away from the things we do, the things that hurt, the things that rip us apart. He allowed himself to be vulnerable to everything. There is no human pain that he did not include in the suffering that he bore on the cross. Jesus was complete in his humanity as well as his divinity. 

    When we say to each other, “The peace of the Lord be with you; and also with you,” we are seeking the wholeness, the perfection, the completeness of Christ for each of us.

The trouble is that we are resistive to that peace. Christ’s peace disrupts the fragile framework of our lives. We do work-arounds for the gaps in our lives. We fool ourselves into thinking that things are all right when that isn’t the case. We are used to being incomplete. Perhaps we can’t imagine what wholeness, perfection, completeness might look like in our lives. However miserable we might be, we are unconsciously happy with being the way we are. We settle for our incompleteness and accept it as completeness. We take our vastly imperfect peace and assume that’s all there is.
    Christ’s peace is disruptive. That seems inconceivable. Peace is supposed to put everything at rest. Peace is supposed to smooth everything out. But since we have come to accept an imperfect peace as all there is, when Christ’s peace comes near to us and dares to address our incompleteness, we are thrown into a tizzy. Our thoughts are upended, our knowledge of reality is undermined. Our spirits start to churn like a bad case of indigestion. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:51). Christ’s peace divides us from all that is false within us.
    The Pharisees were disrupted as they tried enforce their view of life on Jesus. His teaching, his presence, his demeanor, his perfection, his completeness set off confusion and anger. They became defensive. They were brought face to face with the incompleteness of their lives and their faith. The lie of their life was made bare for all to see. They couldn’t stand that Jesus was complete and they weren’t. The peace that he brought negated all the incomplete, false peace that had become so ingrained in the lives of God’s people.
    We reject the very thing we desire, the thing we need. Christ’s peace disrupts our selfish, ingrown worlds. It doesn’t matter what the subject is: marriage, divorce, women’s reproductive rights, irresponsible gun violence, face-coverings and vaccination, spousal abuse, critical race theory, gender diversity and fluidity, climate change, affordable health care, child rearing, pornography, election fraud, poverty, addiction, arrogant ignorance. Christ’s peace disrupts it all and we can’t take it.
    As long as our hearts are unyielding, as long as we repel the peace of Christ, as long as we refuse to let Christ disrupt our imitation peace, we will be incomplete and imperfect, and in no way filled with the peace that Christ seeks to bring us.
    That’s why it is so significant that Jesus tells the disciples that “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” The youngest children have not yet bought into the false peace that years of living have weighed us down with. They haven’t lived long enough to learn racism, hatred, narrow-mindedness. It’s not that they are already complete. They aren’t, because they often can be self-centered, greedy, gullible. Nevertheless they are often unswerving in faith and loyalty. They are open to the fullness, the perfection, the wonder, the completeness of life that Jesus lives, teaches, gives.

This table is an opportunity to become like a child again, to welcome Christ’s peace, to receive the completeness that he offers. For Christ is complete here. He is totally here for us – his body, his blood, his unrestricted offering of himself for us. Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim Christ’s saving death until he comes again in glory, until he comes in the fullness, the perfection, the completeness that God has intended from before creation began.
    We come to this table to shed our false peace and taste freshly the peace which is Christ. And every time we taste the bread and sip the cup we have the opportunity to be more fully infused with Christ’s peace for our lives, for the lives of all God’s people, and for the life of creation itself. This ongoing disruption will one day rid us of all that separates us from Christ so that we may share his complete peace.
    The peace of Christ be with you all.
    Thanks be to God.