April 7 — Second Sunday of Easter

Listen to this sermon HERE.


“The peace of Christ be with you always.”

[Share a sign of peace with just 2 or 3 people who are immediately around you...]

This is how Jesus greets the disciples in this post-resurrection account.  And this is why to this day we share the peace ritually in church...when Jesus meets the disciples in fear and in doubt, and says lovingly, “Peace be with you.”

“As a conclusion to the prayers of intercession, the peace enacts both a prayer and a proclamation…[functioning as a kind of seal on our prayers, a sign that we are serious about our praying.  It is as if we were saying, with our gesture, ‘O God, help the world with the very peace and mutual forgiveness we are trying to show here.

“And yet, God has helped and is helping the world with a heart far bigger than our own.  The peace is also a proclamation of the presence of a down payment on the very things for which we pray: ‘The peace of the risen Christ is the answer to our prayer, God’s gift to us all’” (The Sunday Assembly, Augsburg Fortress 2008, 172).

How many of you like this practice of the sharing of the peace on Sunday mornings?  How many don’t? 

I’ve heard all kinds of things:  Some love it because they feel it’s a time to really connect with the people around them, to introduce themselves to someone they don’t know; some like it as a chance to visit with people and catch up briefly — a little “at ease” after sitting still and quiet for so long.  Some, I’ve heard, find it very distracting to the flow of worship, they’ve said should just be between you and God; I’ve heard it described as feeling more like the 7^th inning stretch or an intermission, than a part of worship, so some think it ought to be left out of our liturgy.  

It’s worth thinking a little about this today...

...because this is the first thing we’ve heard from the resurrected Jesus this year at SVLC: “Peace be with you.”  Remember, last week’s Easter Gospel from Luke, Jesus had no lines.  But here this 2^nd week of Easter, we jump over to John and hear Jesus’ first words in this church since, Good Friday, where he said, “It is finished. [te-TELos-tai].” (Julian sang, and then we all paused.)  And now this is the first words we’ve heard from Jesus:  “Peace be with you.”

Jesus says this so much (and so do we on Sunday mornings) that it’s easy to go in one ear and out the other.  But first words are very important in ancient writing, particularly Bible writing, and Jesus says this first: “Peace be with you.”  

The sharing of the peace in our worship service acts as both a prayer and a proclamation.  It is a prayer in that we’re saying “God, help the world with the very peace and mutual forgiveness we are trying to show here.”  [expand/repeat] And we are proclaiming what is already true, as we share the peace with one another: no matter what, no matter where we are in our lives, no matter what we’ve done, or what others have done to us, the risen Christ’s peace is with us!  Sharing the peace is both our prayer (“God, make it so.”) and our proclamation (“God’s made it so!”).  

Sharing the peace with one another is at the center of the Easter gospel.  

Bishop Bob Rimbo of the Metro New York Synod says in his book Why Worship Matters: “[The passing of the peace] is not merely sharing a nice hello with a friend, not only words of welcome to a stranger, not checking in on how Aunt Tillie is doing.  It is the end of war.  It is the reconciling of enemies.  It is the rescue of the slaves.  It is the resurrection of the dead.  It is the demolition of barriers between us and God.  It is the recreation of human life by the presence of the risen Christ.”

Personally, that was pretty much new to me when I read it.  I’ve always thought the sharing of the peace—which, like many of you, I’ve been doing in church for my entire life—was an opportunity to connect with the people I’m worshipping around.  I always liked to shake as many hands as I could, get up, move around.  Yeah, stretch.

But I had a professor in seminary encourage us, in less than timid ways, to only shake a few hands with those immediately  around you, lest the sharing of the peace turns into coffee hour without the coffee, which is great but can lose this rich symbol of being both a prayer and a proclamation of Christ’s very peace in our midst, the end of war, the resurrection of the dead, etc.  He said, it’s not unfriendly to greet just a few people—sometimes it’s actually more welcoming.  Visitors can often be left feeling awkward during the sharing of the peace, if they don’t have anyone to talk to.  If you’re the social type, he would say, catch  everyone after worship, and thanks be to God that you do.  But now, he would say, is this beautiful time of both prayer and proclamation.  

These are just things to think about.  I had never thought about them before...for at least 20-something years.  And sometimes rituals can have more meaning when we understand where they come from and why we do them.  

In the end, share the peace how you will, but this Sunday, friends in Christ, remember that we share the peace of Christ with one another, because Christ breathes peace on us first — offering us forgiveness for the the things we’ve done wrong.  So we offer one another forgiveness, for the things we’ve done wrong to each other.  Ever shared the peace with someone in church who you were really upset with?  We offer forgiveness to one another, because Christ forgave us…  

We love one another, because Christ loved us.  We are the church of Jesus Christ, and we are rooted and grounded in peace — despite our fears and our doubts.