A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 15, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Philippians 4: 7
I recall asking each member of a small congregation I oversaw 30 years ago their favourite part of the service. I’ve forgotten most of the replies, but one I still remember. ‘That part at the end when you say, “The peace of God…” and then you say, “passes all understanding.” That’s what I come to church for – to find that peace.’ I didn’t have the courage to ask how often she found it. I don’t know if she knew the phrase came from the passage from Philippians we heard this morning. But I’m guessing she speaks for all of us. What is that peace? And where can I find it?
The letter to the Philippians is punishing reading, because half of it’s about what it’s like to face hostility from the outside world, while the other half is about how to face up to conflict in the church. Anyone who’s living in the fantasy that the church used to be united and it’s only this latest lot who’ve messed it up hasn’t read the New Testament. We never got it right. Deal with it. Peace isn’t a nostalgic past state to which we’re returning – it’s a not-yet-realised destination to which we’re heading.
Let’s walk through what Paul says about peace, to guide us in perceiving what we’re looking for. He refers to the ‘peace of God.’ So we’re not talking about any common or garden peace – not a nap in the afternoon for a weary parent of young children, not a massage for tired feet, not the busker in Trafalgar Square relenting on a Friday night and not blasting the speakers out beyond 2am. No: this is the big one – ultimate, eternal peace. Then Paul says, ‘which passes all understanding.’ So it’s not a human achievement, even one rewarded by a Nobel Prize. It’s more like a miracle – something we can’t fully get our heads round, let alone manufacture, but breaks out, like dawn suddenly spreading its rays above the mountain. Then Paul says, ‘will guard your hearts and your minds.’ We’re more familiar with the word ‘keep,’ but to say ‘guard’ is telling us this isn’t like putting something in a safe box – rather more keeping vigil over it, ensuring no one else can endanger it. Saying ‘hearts and minds’ isn’t promising ‘bodies’: it’s not saying you’ll never be in danger. But it’s telling us this is a holistic kind of peace, not just an idea or a gesture of comfort. The last words in Paul’s promise are ‘in Christ Jesus.’ He’s saying Jesus holds the key to peace. Our question today is, in the midst of fightings within and fears without, what does all of that mean?
I’m going to suggest it means four things, all of which are distinctive about Christianity – in other words, all of which are things Christians believe but one with which probably the world as a whole wouldn’t agree. Which is why Paul calls them the peace of God. I’m going to take them in turn.
The first is, peace is more fundamental than conflict. We can recognise various origins of conflict. One is the mindset of scarcity. Scarcity says, ‘If you take all of that there won’t be enough for me.’ Scarcity impels us to steal, to take more than is ours, to consume more than we need, because of the deep fear there won’t be sufficient for us. Another source of conflict involves difference. It says, ‘I don’t understand you and I don’t have a category for you and you being around makes me question who I am and feel insecure.’ Insistence on sameness leads us to require others to be like us, finds difficulty in diversity of appearance, identity, value, story, demands conformity and uniformity, because if there’s difference we might not be in control. Another cause of conflict is indignity. This is about honour. I heard the former President of the Republic of Ireland describe her father like this: ‘He spent the last decades of life looking for opportunities to take offence.’ We responds with fury when we feel we’ve been demeaned, disregarded, humiliated, suppressed or degraded, because even when we know we can’t all have the same or be the same, we can’t bear to feel we’re worth less than others.
Pretty much the whole of political theory is based on these sources of conflict: we don’t think we have enough, we fear others are stronger, brighter, more talented than us, and we feel others disrespect us. Political theory starts with a sense of original conflict, and then constructs the notion of the state to ensure fair distribution so all have enough, equal opportunity so all can flourish, and appropriate respect so no one is pushed aside. These often lead to fair, just and equitable laws and customs. But they’re all based on a fundamental myth of original conflict.
By contrast Christians believe these things, while powerful and provocative, are not the fundamental truth about existence. The fundamental truth is not conflict but peace. The peace of God. The peace of God is that God is always more than enough, so we needn’t finally fear scarcity. Indeed our biggest problem is the opposite – that God is too much for us. The peace of God is that creation is almost infinitely diverse, that diversity is creation’s glory, and that the unimaginably diverse creation is the poetry of the breathtakingly many-splendoured Trinity. Difference is not a reason for conflict but an icon of God’s grace. The peace of God is that Jesus came among us in human form, so our dignity derives from Christ’s identity with us. Conflict is temporary. Peace is permanent.
The second thing to say about the peace of God might sound like a contradiction. We are at war. It’s not a contradiction because none of our wars are fundamental or permanent. Yet we are still at war. Recognising this is like an addict at the start of a twelve-step programme saying, ‘I admit I am powerless over alcohol and my life has become unmanageable.’ Everything in us wants to pretend we’re not at war. But we are at war. We’re at war with God, with ourselves, with one another and with the planet. In Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House, the character Harold Skimpole is a playful, entertaining man who is always getting into scrapes, especially financially. He then prevails upon his friends and wider circle to bail him out, often to their considerable disadvantage. All the while he keeps saying, ‘I am but a child in such matters,’ waving away any sense of his own responsibility. The story reveals him to be a man who, by not facing the truth about himself, simply continues to make problems for others. We are just the same if we seek an idle peace and won’t accept how profoundly we are at war. Just think about how much energy we expend avoiding people we don’t want to see or who we know we’ve hurt, composing cutting replies to people who’ve made us cross, plotting the downfall of our enemies, exploiting the unrenewable resources of the planet. Just think how much of what we call peace is preserved by the threat of violence. And before we denounce or bewail or even lament a war in a far-off land, we might pause to consider whether our own country by its weapon sales or import of resources or desire to play off one enemy against another is actually complicit in the war we’re berating.
Only once we’ve named how deeply we’re at war can we find our way to the third thing about the peace of God, which is that we’re either in a peace process, or we’re ok with being at war. Peace is active, not idle. A peace process starts with admitting how much we diminish ourselves by shrinking our imagination down to enmity towards another person or community. It goes through a series of commitments, gestures, self-examinations, understandings, confessions and undertakings before it can get anywhere near the restoration, forgiveness, reconciliation and healing that are its goal. The point to grasp is that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Gently, persuasively, pleadingly, insistently, the Holy Spirit is saying to us, ‘This is the way to life, this is my work, this is the route to joy: this is the programme – get with the programme.’ Life comes down to a simple choice: remain at war, or get with the programme. The name of the programme is the peace of God. If you get with the programme, you may feel broken, fragile, frail – but you have the power of the Holy Spirit, you’ll mount up with wings like eagles, you’re surrounded by the communion of saints, borne up by the everlasting arms, living God’s future now. It’s not always an instant thing: you may have to wait for the right time, you may be under such attack that any path to peace has to wait till at least a ceasefire, you may feel so vulnerable you need to start by understanding better what’s happened and why. But when you do cross over from waging war to joining the peace of God, you’ll find you’re not operating in your own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit: you’ve embarked on the journey of truth. If you’ve ever faced a big moment in your life surrounded by tension yet felt a remarkable inner calm, you’ll have experienced what I’m talking about.
And so to the fourth and last thing about the peace of God. Which is that peace is coming whether we advance it or not. Because peace is the ultimate truth about the essence of all things. One day, perhaps in a very long time (who knows), existence will cease, and there will only be God’s eternal essence, and we shall be drawn into God’s dazzling presence and we shall finally experience true, everlasting, dynamic, interactive ever-wondrous peace. Just as we believe peace is the very character of God, so we trust that peace is God’s ultimate purpose for all creation. So any activity, any plotting, any thought that works against peace is actually going against the grain of the universe, which runs toward peace.
So when we read the words of Philippians 4 about ‘the peace that passes all understanding,’ or when we hear them spoken in the blessing at the end of the Eucharist most Sundays, we have an opportunity to reflect on how far our lives work in the same trajectory as Christ’s life. Because Paul’s words ‘in Christ Jesus’ indicate that the New Testament word for peace is Jesus. It’s in Jesus we discover and henceforth trust that the origin of creation and the heart of God is peace. It’s in Jesus, through the multitude of hostile reactions to him from ruler, occupying power, religious leader, common criminal, courtyard taunter and his own inner circle, we realise and henceforth cannot deny how deeply we are at war. It’s in Jesus, and in his way of the cross, commands to be reconciled with one another, forgiveness of those who crucified him, and reunion with Peter, we witness and henceforth understand what the steps of peace look like. It’s in Jesus and his resurrection that we see and believe that war does not have the last word and death has no dominion.
When we seek the peace of God, what we’re looking for is Jesus. Seek and ye shall find.
