When Jesus first appears to the disciples after his resurrection, the first thing he says to them is
“Peace be with you.”
The disciples are full of joy. It’s Jesus! The wounds are still visible on his hands and side. Jesus speaks to them again—with those same four words.
“Peace be with you.”
Only after Jesus offers the disciples peace twice does he breathe on them and command them to receive the Holy Spirit, so that they can be sent out into the world as Jesus himself was sent out from God to be with us and to be one with us on this earth.
The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, refers to this peace that Jesus gives to the disciples. “May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Paul understood that God’s peace is a gift of God that we irascible human beings cannot receive on our own.
The power of the Holy Spirit gives us the grace to accept the gift of peace that Jesus offers to each one of us.
During this time of COVID-19, John Philip Newell, who is a teacher in the Christian Celtic tradition, has been offering brief conversations that he calls Wisdom from the Pandemic each week from his garden in Edinburgh, Scotland. I particularly liked Episode 2, in which Newell turns to Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century mystic. Newell quotes Hildegard as saying that everything is on fire with the divine. The divine fire burns deep within everything.
Hildegard’s statement helps me to understand the radical nature of God’s peace—the peace that Jesus gave to the disciples, the peace that the Holy Spirit empowers in us.
God’s peace is that divine fiery peace that we hold in common with each of our brothers and sisters on this earth. This divine fiery peace is also present in all of creation. God’s peace is the fire that can burn away the fears and anxieties that threaten to destroy us.
And God’s peace in us works to burn away the things that separate us from one another and from creation itself.
But this God-given fire that burns within us and draws us together, can, if we misuse it become a raging and destructive fire within us that destroys rather than refines, and that shines not with love, but with hatred.
A great example of this sort of destructive fieriness is the practice of cross burning, which dates back a thousand years and in our lifetimes has been used by the Ku Klux Klan who burn crosses to intimidate African Americans and other people of color.
In addition to tending this fiery peace within us so that our God-given peace is refining and loving, we also must tend this fiery powerful peace carefully for another reason—if we do not tend it, this divine fire of God’s peace within us may die, leaving us cold and lifeless, passive and withdrawn from the world around us.
Sometimes we’re tempted to let God’s fiery peace in us burn out because we cannot bear to gaze at what we see because in the light of that peace. We don’t want to be wounded by what we will see if we look. I would rather not look at the image of a police officer with his hand casually in his pocket kneeling on the neck of a man who lies helpless on the ground begging for his life while three other officers look on. That image of George Floyd is seared into my mind. And every time I see it again, a fiery rage wants to burn in me because I’m so angry that things like this still happen to people of color in this nation.
God’s fiery peace though, if I’m tending it well, helps me to see this horrible image with compassion for each person in the scene, knowing that only the peace and love of God, active and present, can burn away the disregard for life on the part of the people in power that made George Floyd’s death possible. I want to be a person who can act out of my sorrow with compassion rather than with hate for the haters that then fuels the fires of hate.
I know that God’s fiery peace and burning compassion are the only fires that will ever fight the fires of hatred with any success at all—fighting fire with fire– because Jesus himself used that fiery compassion and his fiery peace while he was here on earth, both in his life and ministry, and also in his suffering and death on the cross.
The cross of Jesus burns down through the centuries, but not with hatred. The cross of Jesus burns hot with radical, life giving peace and love. This burning cross of love is the one that Jesus tells us, his disciples, to take up and carry if we wish to follow him.
In the sixties, my family went on vacation during one of the summers that the cities were burning because of racial tensions. At one point, we got lost and ended up in I can’t remember which northeastern city, and found ourselves driving through a neighborhood that had just burned. The destruction was everywhere. We were scared. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief once we found our way back to the road we had meant to be on. We kept going and didn’t look back.
Now we see those same fires burning in cities around the country again, as they do periodically when people feel so enraged that their anger turns into fire that burns down everything around them.
And we don’t want to look—just get back on the figurative road and keep on driving. But– those fires in our cities will continue to burn until we, the disciples of Jesus, intentionally go where those fires are, and put the fiery love of God that we have been carrying and tending to work to counteract these destructive fires that burn so bright.
These fires set by enraged people burn bright because the divine fire of God’s love in our brothers and sisters has gone unrecognized or has been actively stamped out by others for far too long. Jesus sends us out to recognize and to acknowledge the fiery love of God’s peace in our brothers and in our sisters because in that recognition and acknowledgement of the divine fire in another, healing can begin.
Not just physical fires, but also political fires are burning wild in our country right now. Every time we, in either camp, hate on or distain people in the other, we are feeding the fires of hatred rather than the fiery love and peace of God that is the only thing, in the end, which will bring us together as one nation under God. We are all guilty. Holy Spirit, give us all the power to look for and feed the divine fire in one another rather than to be so quick to dwell on our differences.
Hildegard uses another great Pentecost image, that of a bird in flight, in her efforts to help us tend our divine fires of love.
Hildegard says that we need to fly with two wings of awareness—
One wing is the awareness of life’s beauty and the sacredness of all of life. Life’s beauty and sacredness, the beauty all around us, has comforted many of us during the challenges and the anxieties that this pandemic has brought. When I intentionally gaze at the afternoon sunlight in the trees, my anxious heart grows calmer.
The other wing that we need to fly is the awareness of life’s pain and struggle. To open our hearts to the pain of over 100,000 deaths from the virus in our country, to open our hearts to the pain of people arguing over how to best help one another through this crisis, to open our hearts to the pain of our ongoing divisions—this opening of our hearts allows us to see with compassion, to act with love, and to kneel in reverence for all of life with the help of the gift of peace that Jesus has given to us.
When we fly with both these wings, aware of the beauty as well as the pain in this world, the Holy Spirit fills us with the strength and the power and the stamina that we need—so that as the prophet Isaiah says, we can mount up with wings like eagles, we can run and not be weary, we can walk and not be faint. We can go in peace to carry the fiery compassionate peace of God out into the world.
“As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” Jesus said.
Go in peace, blazing with love, bearing the light of God’s peace out into the world.
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.