The Week of Peace...the week of fracture

I am just fuming! I spent my day preparing one of two sermons I will preach on Sunday. The first is from Micah 5. It’s context is the Fourth Sunday of Advent – The Sunday of Peace. Peace = Shalom. Shalom is a very broad Hebrew concept. It includes non-violence, but it includes the much broader understandings of wholeness and unity. So on this Sunday when we look forward to the Kingdom ethic of peace – ie unity – and commit ourselves to work doggedly to bring peace to our world, I tune in to The News Hour with Jim Leher and find this story,

“Schism:

A reporter discusses why seven Episcopal parishes in Virginia decided to leave the Episcopal Church and form a rival denomination in the United States.”

This just makes me puke! We are the CHURCH who stands as the presence of God’s kingdom in God’s world. And yet we continue to fracture ourself rather than healing our fractures. Will we ever learn? None of the great reformers ever wanted more than a reformation of the CHURCH. And yet we ended up with thousands of denominations rather than a CHURCH. Luther? A Roman Catholic priest seeking to reform the Church. Now we have the Lutheran Church and its splinters. Wesley? An Anglican who sought only revival in the Church of England and now we have the Methodist Church and all her offspring.

Will we never figure out that peace (unity) can never be made by violence (fracture)? There is a clinical word for people who intentionally break their own body. We lock them up for their own safety because it is simply crazy to break one’s own body. Yet it is somehow OK for us to break the body of Christ? Those who break off do so in with the dillusional grandure of being holier than thou. They split as a reaction to some great “evil” or “sin” in the church. Does it ever dawn on them that there just might not be anything more evil or sinful than breaking the unity of the Church?

How do we preach to the world a message of hope and love, peace and joy when we cannot ever practice those things within our own family?

Well, here’s to a peaceful Christmas. I’ll leave you all with the words Nick reminded me of from the amazing Longfellow:

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I tho’t how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along th’unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head.
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Till, ringing, singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day –
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!