The Upper Room/Peace

 1992 (Year C) 3 May / Easter 3

St Peter de Beauvoir Town and St Michael and All Angels, London Fields 

The television programme which we all figured in the other week had to do with stress. The interviewer who set most of it up tried to get people from here to say that they were stressed in their daily lives. She was particularly interested in stress brought on by lack ofmoney. In order to find, relief from the hardship we’re involved in, she wanted us to say that we turned to the church and God for help. She was a bit put out when she couldn’t find anybody prepared to say the things she wanted them to say.

We come, after all to church to find relief and peace - at least that’s one commonly conceived notion. And in a way we do, for peace is a gift from God – ‘Peace be with you’, said Jesus as he came and stood with his disciples after the resurrection. It was the first thing he said as they stood together.

We come to God to find release from the cares of this world, to find an absence of conflict in a world which seems to revolve around it. We come to find an hour’s quietness and refreshment; a release from all the things which cause pain and hardship. We come to find a friendship which radiates peace for it brings a knowledge that we are loved, valued, and cared for by God, and by those whom he has created. We come to be re-assured that no matter how awful we feel or how bad the things we face are – there is healing and a hope that things may not always remain as they are. We come to find consolation and support.

All this is part of the peace which God brings as pure gift to us. So why was it that the interviewer in the television programme could find no-one to say that to her? The truth is that people here know it’s as easy as that. The Peace which Jesus shared with his disciples after the resurrection – the peace of God – does not make all things better as if by magic. It does not remove us from the sufferings of this world, and people here know it only too well and so they don’t come for a quick fix.

For the peace of God did not mean that Jesus was released from crucifixion. I doubt that it made the passion any easier to bare. The peace of God does include all the things which the television interviewer wanted people to say but like so many things it’s not as simple as that.

Peace transforms our lives but it doesn’t remove hard things from them. It adds to them but it doesn’t substitute. Peace is a whole way of life although it seldom lasts very long. At some points God’s peace breaks into our lives and completely takes them over yet paradoxically makes us feel lonely. When we recognise we have been given the gift of peace, it seems to be the most personal thing in the whole world – yet .It is that which we share and joins us to our sisters and brothers in the faith.

The Peace of God, as the blessing says, is ultimately beyond all our understanding. Yet it is something of which we all know a little. A very famous monk wrote this about a period in his life. ‘Nevertheless, in the depth of this abysmal testing and is integration of my spirit, I suddenly discovered a new spring of life, a peace and happiness that I had never known before and which existed in the face of a nameless terror.’ He tried to describe the effects of peace and found that ‘as time went on, it grew, and the terror vanished.’ For, ‘it was the peace that was real, and the terror that was illusion.’

The peace he discovered, or which maybe found him, continued to deepen within him. Yet the peace was not of this world for it did not prevent him from overworking and ultimately falling ill. It did not prevent him from doing the things he thought unimportant, for he was so busy that he couldn’t write.

What he discovered was that the gift of peace is about allowing ourselves to be open to God so that the blessing, the gift, which he longs to give us, can enter our lives and transform them. It means that even in the face of the most appalling and draining experiences in our lives we can still receive this gift and be held within God’s arms and find peace. AMEN