I’m not sure there is a more foundational element to the Christian faith than peace. We want peace, we crave peace. Peace to us is safety and security. It is silence and quiet. It is solitude in chaos. It is the sound of birds chirping and streams bubbling when we are resting in the grass. It is the knowledge that our children made it home. It is the feeling of completing a major project.

Peace is foundational and it is amorphous. It fits into everything we do. And it is manifest in a variety of forms. It is a sense (relief, hope, relaxation, epiphany, joy, pleasure) and it is a state (without conflict or with safety).

Peace is a really big term and means much more than we give it credit for. That’s why I often prefer the Hebrew word, Shalom. By making it a non-English word, we can realize that it is the biggest, most important concept in Jesus’s theology. And worse for us, means and requires so much more than we normally give it.

'Shalom isn't just the absence of violence but the presence of peacemaking.' Share on X

Shalom

We have to reorient our understanding of peace from the Greco-Roman understanding we are used to. We think of peace as a negative word because it is almost exclusively used to describe absence:

• Absence of war
• Absence of chaos
• Absence of sound

Those other things, such as war, chaos, and sound are treated as positive, meaning that they are added. Dig back into your Intro to Psychology days and remember positive/negative and reinforcement/punishment: positive is something added and negative is something taken away; reinforcement is something encouraged and punishment is something discouraged.

So Peace is often treated as a negative, and in some ways as a negative punishment (the least effective motivator, by the way), because it is the taking away of something (war/chaos/sound) for the purpose of discouraging a behavior (violence/rebellion/loudness). That means we often positively reinforce war.

So if we dig much further back and read through our Old Testament, particularly the Torah, we see an expectation of building Shalom through a great ordered society, balanced on love, respect, and mutual benefit. You see the central laws as relating to respecting GOD and our parents and our neighbors; giving shelter to the stranger; protecting the weak. And keeping the Sabbath.

And why is keeping the Sabbath important? Sabbath is all about Shalom.

Sabbath as creator of Shalom

We think of Sabbath as the 7th day. That it’s just the last day (or first day) of the week. It is the day of rest, we know. We are to honor it “and keep it holy.” We recognize that commonly as not working that day or by passing laws restricting work or consumption that day. In the latter case, these were known as “blue laws” and often meant that businesses could not be open on Sunday and alcohol could not be sold. Many of our neighbors pine for those days. I usually go “meh.”

Sabbath is more than rest, it is the honoring of GOD and creation by doing as GOD did in creation.

But Sabbath and its impact don’t end with the last day of the week, it extends to the teaching on the 7th year: that every 7th year is to be treated as a Sabbath year. This means that the landowners and the poor are fed from the fields alike, slaves are to be freed, and balance is restored while injustice is removed.  Then, every 7th 7th year (so either the 49th or the 50th year, depending on how you choose to count it) is the Jubilee, when all is reconciled and property returns to its original owner.

Sabbath, as we know it, is not only rest, but the engine of reconciliation. And Shalom is that reconciliation.

Shalom isn’t just the absence of violence but the presence of peacemaking. It is not the absence chaos, but the presence of order and justice. It is not the absence of distractingly loud sounds, but the presence of attunement to the natural world and creation. Shalom, for all of its great power, as a word for peace, for greeting, and for blessing, it is also a word which connotes action and participation. Shalom is about doing.

We make peace. And peace is justice. Peace is hope. Peace is love. Peace is equality. Peace is protecting the weak. Peace is clothing the naked. Peace is housing the stranger. Peace is turning swords into ploughshares. Peace is making work. Peace is making love.

The Peace

In worship, we conclude our great sequence of praying, confessing, absolving, with a proclamation of peace. In my tradition, we say

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

And the response is

And also with you.

This demonstrates that reconciling/co-equal character of peace as the priest invites the people into a reconciliation and the people respond in kind: peace be with you, then peace be with you. 

Notice, though, how this flows from our outward prayer, these prayers for the people who suffer, for the world, for its leaders and its care. We pray for all who suffer or grieve or are challenged. We pray all together for people who aren’t us, for ministries which aren’t ours, and for a place that isn’t here. We pray out.

Then we confess. We confess that we haven’t done everything that we could do. We have messed up. We’ve sinned. We need to repent. And we do. And here, the priest blesses us. She frees us of the burden of sin by inviting GOD’s blessing over us, our repentance leads to GOD’s mercy.

It is from this space, this confessed, forgiven, state in which we are invited to reconcile with one another. We share in the peace of Christ.

We save the friendly how-are-yas and the welcome-homes for coffee hour. This is about reconciliation. If there is anyone you need to be reconciled to, it is time to find them. Because you have confessed to your sin – your breaking of relationship with them. And they have confessed to their sin – their breaking of relationship with you. Now it is time to get back together, to mend the fence and prepare for the great moment of unity, the Eucharist.

For at the table, we are all united, we are all worthy, we are all one. And if you are harboring hatred for anyone else in the room after confessing and absolving and peacing, then you are doing something wrong. You aren’t holding up your end of the bargain.

But the funny thing about this? We might best believe that GOD holds up the other end anyway.

Ask Yourself

How best might we express the love of GOD but through the passing of the peace? Is not the practice (originally a kiss rather than a handshake) the embodiment of intimacy and true forgiveness?

In reconciling the world, bringing true justice, do we have any room in our hearts for the division? Can we be different and still be one in spirit?

Waging reconciliation and making peace in our world are active and participatory actions. In what ways do we promote these pursuits? How might we make our congregations hubs of activity for these actions?

What is the cost of peace? What do we already sacrifice to maintain our division, violence, and broken relationships?

 

[This is Day 20 of How to start deconstructing church. The next in the series is “Trinity”. To start from the beginning, read the introduction here.]