Peace to You

According to the Fourth Gospel, when Jesus first appeared to his disciples in the locked room after his resurrection, he said simply, “Peace to you.” (John 20:19) After such a series of momentous events, it would seem other words would have been at least as appropriate. I can imagine lines like, “Hey guys, surprise! I’m back!” or “Why the long faces? This was just a temporary interlude in the greater plan!” Perhaps even, “Victory, everyone! Bring out the fish and chips and let the party begin!”

In reality the disciples didn’t need a party or a theological lesson on the eternal plans of God. They needed what the Risen Lord gave them, peace. In the previous eight days they had gone from the high of a celebration as they entered Jerusalem through Jesus’ claim over the Jewish Temple to a memorable supper that stated out joyful and ended in grief and blame until they were finally the audience to their own failures, the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, and his death and burial. No wonder Jesus offered them peace. They were emotional and spiritual wrecks, afraid of the Jewish authorities and ashamed of themselves.

Jesus offered them peace. Perhaps it was a matter of perspective. Sample headlines from around the world reveal concern over the Ebola virus getting out of Africa and Russia testing illegal missiles. There is conflict in Ukraine and Nigeria. There is chaos on our border with Mexico and there are refugees caught in the war between Syria and a variety of rebels. Israel and Hamas continue their fighting, and Kim Jung Un says he and North Korea are prepared to take on the world if they should threaten him.

That’s today. The first disciples faced Jews who wanted all followers of Jesus dead. They lived in an Empire that asked only for taxes and obedience, but woe to anyone who refused either. In case of famine, you moved or starved. In case of disease, you hoped for the best. In the east the Parthians stopped Roman expansion in that direction and in the north the Germanic tribes were a thorn in the Roman flesh. As many as one out of every three people on the Italian peninsula was a slave. (Ancient History Encyclopedia) The rough times were hard to escape.

Jesus came to those first disciples and offered peace. In the midst of all this potential pain and suffering, Jesus offered peace. Perhaps it was and remains a matter of perspective. I remember an episode in which I hit someone’s thumb with a hammer while building a porch. His kind and generous words were, “Don’t worry. It’ll stop hurting tomorrow!” Peace can be a matter of perspective.

Some of us see pain and suffering in the moment to be ended by healing or the inevitability of death. Historians give us a bigger picture and help us see the human condition across the great sweep of time. Then Jesus shows up in the middle of all this chaos and say, “Peace to you.” It is a matter of perspective.

God calls us to see our moments, our lives, and history itself from his perspective. We are born, but life existed before us. We live and die, and life will go on after us. Time began with creation and time as we know it will cease when the created order also ceases. Yet God was here before the beginning of time and he will continue after the created order is finished. He tells us to be at peace. He asks us to see things from his perspective.

In the book of Hebrews, the writer says,

“To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see.” (Hebrews 11:1)

Faith allows us to go beyond the five physical senses and see the world and time in which it exists from a new perspective. That is what Jesus was offering his disciples, a different perspective on what they were experiencing. They were being invited to see events from the heavenly Father’s perspective. Only from there could they find peace.

And My Home Is…

I missed writing my last blog entry due to another family crisis out of state. In March of this year I lost my father. Now the trips revolve around the battle against cancer being fought and lost by my mother-in-law. The generation preceding me is disappearing one by one. With them goes the link to earlier years, and all that is left to us are the memories of what once defined home.

For the first twenty-seven years of my life, one address defined home, that Kentucky farm. I may have left to go to college and seminary for eight years, but that was time spent away from home, not establishing a new one. Mom and Pop were always there. The old farmhouse was always there. That address represented stability, acceptance, and peace, concepts sometimes hard to find out in the bigger world.

Now the farm has been sold to the neighbors who continue to till the land. My father died four months ago, and Mom resides in a nursing home. Since graduating from seminary and getting married, I have lived in three other states and had ten other addresses. Not what you would call a prime example of stability.

“Home is where the heart is” is an anonymous proverb many of us have used to try to describe our effort to replace a sense of rootlessness with some sort of security. It has been a movie title and song titles unnumbered. It is a way to say when earthly roots no longer exist, we can find a place of security and acceptance wherever we find relationships based on love.

When we look at the life of the Apostle Paul, we see someone who could have readily identified with the old proverb. Born in Tarsus in what is now eastern Turkey, Paul studied in Jerusalem (Acts 22:3), and then found himself settling in Antioch of Syria as a Christ-follower (Acts 13:1). From there his missionary journeys took him through various parts of the eastern Roman Empire and perhaps by some accounts into France and/or Spain. The Apostle would have had a hard time defining a geographical location he could call home.

Perhaps that is why he felt so strongly about another destination (Philippians 3:20). His calling as a missionary with the Gospel of Jesus Christ had left him without roots in any city or region. He could claim to be Jewish by blood and tradition, but that had all been superseded by his relationship with Jesus Christ. This world was no longer his home. Though born a Roman citizen, his primary loyalty was to the Kingdom of God. Home was in the Divine Presence.

Living in four different states, watching family members move farther and farther away, and then eventually watch them die all contribute to destroying the sense of stability that living on one plot of ground can provide. When time becomes less important and relationships become the priority, then home takes on a new shape, a new definition. Home is where the heart is.

Our lives are in this world until death takes us out of it. Our hearts are in the hands of the One who purchased them with his blood at Calvary. He resides in the presence of his heavenly Father with his Holy Spirit as the guarantee of his presence with and in us. Home for the believer becomes the presence of God, the presence of his Kingdom. Thus we can say home is where the heart is for that is where we reside in the presence of God.

Eternal life in the Kingdom of God begins with surrender and obedience to Jesus, the Son of God (Luke 17:20-21). With that miraculous transformation which can only be understood in its fullest form by God, our homes are transferred from the world of the profane to the world of the sacred. My home is now where my heart is, held close to the heart of God and awaiting my final journey into his glorious presence.

When Compromise Won’t Work

I may have grown up on a farm in rural Kentucky, but I had a father who constantly reminded my older brother and me the world was a lot bigger than the farm or the county which we rarely left. A bookcase in the guest bedroom was filled with books in which were written the words “Lamkin Library”. A set of encyclopedias was always available. The biggest book I had ever seen sat on the middle shelf, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. We got a couple of farming magazines, but we also got the National Geographic. It was well read before it was passed on to another family or the local school.

My parents made sure my brother and I knew a greater world was out there. My father would have loved to have seen one of his sons take over the farm, but he was still proud of one becoming a geologist and the other a minister. He never wanted us to feel the context in which we were raised was a hindrance to our fulfilling our dreams. Compromise did not come easily for him. He didn’t want it to come easily for his children.

That is much the point Jesus was making for his disciples when in his high priestly prayer he says, “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to You. Holy Father, protect them by Your name that You have given Me, so they may be one just as We are one. While I was with them, I was protecting them by Your name that You have given Me. I guarded them and not one of them is lost, except the son of destruction, that the Scripture may be fulfilled. Now I am coming to You, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have My joy completed in them. I have given them Your word. The world hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.” (John 17:11-14, HCSB)

Two phrases stand out in this passage from the prayer of Jesus. The first is “they are in the world”. We cannot deny the context and condition in which we live. Believers and non-believers alike must move through this world one day at a time responding to it based upon their value system and willingness to compromise. The second phrase is near the end and says, “they are not of the world.” Through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the believer’s obedience to him, we have been changed, new creations (II Corinthians 5:17).

These two phrases taken together form a mantra for the Christ-follower. We are in the world, but not of the world. As such we cannot make compromises with the world just to be accepted. We cannot make compromises with the world to get our message of the gospel accepted. We cannot make compromises with the world to save our own social positions or possibly even our lives. We are no longer “of the world”.

There are times when we choose to go along with the rules and expectations of society. These are times when there is no conflict with the rules and expectations of the Kingdom of God. We must live in the world, but we cannot live as the world.

Every believer faces these types of decisions. Every church faces these kinds of decisions as it seeks to impact the world. Do we go along with the world so we can be accepted? Do we adopt the priorities and mores of the world so we can increase our numbers? At what point in our compromise do we stop being at heart a fully devoted follower of Christ? At what point in our compromise do we stop being a church who has one priority and that is to glorify our God?

We must live in this world until God calls us home. Until that moment arrives, we must remember that we are children first of a divine family, citizens first of a divine Kingdom, and servants first of the King of kings and Lord of lords.

When Freedom Comes

This Independence Day our United States will mark 238 years of struggle to find freedom, define freedom, and provide freedom for all people across our land. Obvious to all, we have not reached our goal. We have thrown around the word equality as a benchmark for this idea of freedom, but we realize quickly even that word is subject to a thousand interpretations and applications.

What will it take to make all men free (mankind, personkind – how do you avoid the gender issue as we seek equality)? How can we reshape society so as to allow everyone to be equal? Is this truly a dream, an ideal that is humanly impossible? Is it even a good thing? How close is close enough to the ideal before the solutions cause more problems than they solve?

What prevents freedom in our land, or more so around the world, and keeps it just beyond our grasp? What stands in the way of equality being the natural law of society instead of another series of manmade laws that perpetually fall short of their goal?

First perhaps we need to see freedom does not “equal” equality. To be free does not lead automatically to equality. In fact to be free may even give one the power to reject equality as an undesirable status in life.

Freedom offers one the opportunity both to move toward and to move away from. Freedom offers the opportunity to make decisions without being answerable to the influence of others. Freedom in its extreme offers the opportunity to think and act without repercussions for one’s actions. That is a freedom society rejects and will not allow. No one can exist as a part of society and be free in every sense of the word.

The life of the follower of Jesus Christ is founded on and guided by the paradox that to be free one must surrender everything. John’s Gospel records,

Joh 8:31-32  So Jesus said to those who believed in him, "If you obey my teaching, you are really my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (CEV)

Neither the power of the sword nor the laws of man will ever bring about the freedom God intended for his creation. Only insofar as we know the Truth will we become free. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” (John 14:6) The Truth is not a philosophical postulate or treatise. Truth is a Person. That Person brings real and eternal freedom.

Freedom does not come from a release from all restrictions. Freedom comes as we choose to follow the path designed for our nature as children of God. Only as we seek, find, and give ourselves over to the way that matches our divinely intended nature can our freedom find its fullest expression.

The author of the biblical book of Hebrews writes:

Heb 12:1  As for us, we have this large crowd of (faithful) witnesses around us. So then, let us rid ourselves of everything that gets in the way, and of the sin which holds on to us so tightly, and let us run with determination the race that lies before us.

Heb 12:2  Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from beginning to end. He did not give up because of the cross! On the contrary, because of the joy that was waiting for him, he thought nothing of the disgrace of dying on the cross, and he is now seated at the right side of God's throne.

Heb 12:3  Think of what he went through; how he put up with so much hatred from sinners! So do not let yourselves become discouraged and give up.

Using our freedom to place self above all else leads only to the chains which can only hold us down.

We live with the paradox. Only as we surrender our wills to the Spirit of God can we know true freedom. Life finds its fulfillment as we find our freedom in obedience and surrender.