Be the Difference--February 15, 2021

Be the Difference--February 15, 2021

"And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.  And be thankful." [Colossians 3:15]

I need to tell you two stories.  Both are true.  Both were from conversations I got to participate in or overhear in the last week.  (And both may have some details removed for the sake of doing my best to respect all persons involved.)

So, I was visiting an older member of one of the congregations where I serve--a woman who is a great-grandmother herself, and whose grandchildren are all grown.  And while I sat at this woman's pleasant kitchen table, one of those grown grandchildren happened to stop in to visit, too.  She lives in the city now, and had been raised with some kind of church affiliation in a different branch of the Christian family tree, and she sat around the same table with us as I visited.  And although this was my first time ever getting to have any kind of conversation with her, at some point in the visit she talked about how she had felt distant from organized religion since her parents stopped making her go, mostly because she had only ever experienced religion as a way of scolding people or getting lost in its own rules, its rituals, and its own rules about its rituals.  And when I invited her to share Communion, she was surprised that I would still include her, after she had been so honest.  It was a pleasant surprise to her, but then she said something that has haunted me since.  She said, matter-of-factly, "I didn't know there were Christians like this.  I never really have talked much religion with my Gram here (the grandmother whom I was visiting) or did much church stuff with her side of the family, but I never knew that there were Christians who weren't just upset all the time toward people who weren't exactly like them."

Wow.  That was disheartening to hear, but some part of me just wanted to tell myself, "Well, as she says, she hasn't had a very wide experience with many Christians.  Maybe she just got burned early on and never dared to explore beyond what she was first introduced to." 

But it wasn't more than just a few days later that I happened to be a few feet away from another conversation, with completely different people, twenty miles from that kitchen table.  And this time, it was a room full of Respectable Religious people--folks who dutifully serve their churches, know their prayers, and wear their crosses around their necks.  And out of nowhere, a conversation started up about whatever thing in the news had upset this informal gathering lately, and out spewed not mere anger, but sheer spite. Whoever started the topic was mad about the events of the day, and when someone suggested, "Maybe things will quiet down and we can just get along," the comment came back, "No--you have to fight!  We have to show them we're not done!  We can't let 'em think they've won!" And my heart just about sank to the floor, overhearing the vitriol from folks who each would say they love their Jesus and serve their churches faithfully.

Like I say, I've removed some specifics, because in a way it doesn't exactly matter what news item from what day in what place was aggravating them.  But what just lands like a one-two-punch in the gut for me was the rapid-fire succession of two instances of completely unrelated people, in entirely different communities, with entirely different issues, where the only common thread were the presence of people who called themselves followers of Jesus, and in both of these snippets of conversation, the people called "Christians" were the sources of meanness and strife, rather than the voices of Christ-like peace.  

Too often, that's all we're known for, we church folk, we Christ-followers: as the source of spite in situations, rather than the salve. Too often we forget our calling--which is also a grace to us--to embody Jesus' kind of peaceable reign that rises above needing to answer evil with evil, meanness with more meanness, rancor with rancor, to avoid looking "weak." 

It haunts me that there are surely countless granddaughters of nice octogenarian ladies whose only experience of Christians is, "They're the ones who are always angry at others--and that's why I don't want to be one of them."  And it haunts me that there are countless other gatherings of Respectable Religious People whose first impulse when things don't go their way is, "We have to look tough and fight their fire with fire; we can't look weak, or they'll think we're losers!" like they were all a bunch of junior-high school boys worried about being picked last for dodgeball.  It grieves me that for so many people, not far away in some foreign place but right here in a place that tells itself it is "Christian," people experience actual Christians as sowers of animosity and anger, rather than agents of peace.  It breaks my heart, too, knowing that for so many people, being a Christian is the last thing they want to do... because they have known too many Christians whose lives were marked by spite rather than love.

So when I hear these words from Colossians calling the early church to "let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts," I hear it with an urgency that goes far beyond our usual religious sentimentality.  So often, "peace" is one of those nebulous, fuzzy, vaguely emotional words we through around that doesn't make any difference in our actual lives.  But these words from Colossians call us to something vital--something the world is aching for but so often finds sorely lacking us.  The writer to the Colossians isn't merely saying, "Feel peaceful," or "Think peaceful thoughts," but rather, "Practice the way of Jesus--a way of life that seeks to restore broken relationship rather than to dominate... a way of life that looks to welcome people in rather than looking for ways to stand in condemnation over the."  It's about a whole way of life--and it's a way of life that sets aside the need to look "tough" or like a "winner," a way of life that isn't based on a never-ending cycle of "getting them back."  It's a kind of life that finds ways to invite and include rather than to keep people out.  It's a life that is less interested in punching back "because they hit us first" and more interested in breaking the cycle.  It's a life that is willing to risk being called "soft" or "weak" or like a "loser" for the sake of being the mature person, rather than needing to prove our toughness all the time.

And that, honestly, is a beautiful and compelling kind of life.  It really is worth it.  It really is revolutionary.  It really is worth giving your whole life to.  And the world so deeply needs it.  The world needs us to practice the peace and peaceableness of Jesus, and it needs us to step up today.  The world around us--not just in the abstract, but people you and I know and talk with every day--has seen already too much meanness, and too much of it has come from people like us... people who are us, when we have let spite stifle the peace of Christ in us.  

People are watching us, listening to our conversations around kitchen tables and in the next room, and looking to see whether this Jesus we talk about makes us more kind or cruel, more merciful or mean, more petty or peaceful.  And after letting them down plenty of times before, we can start again--today--and let Christ's peace reign in us. We can be the alternative to meanness that the world is aching for.  We can let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, and be the difference someone else is waiting for.

Lord Jesus, let your peaceableness become our way of life, now and always.