St. Alban's Episcopal church
Our mission is to proclaim the love of God in Christ Jesus for all
The Episcopal Church in Stuttgart, Arkansas
A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 22, 2022 The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Jesus gives this promise in our reading from John. He is speaking to his disciples at the Last Supper, and he knows they will need his peace in the coming days. They will not need a cheap peace, the kind the world gives. Cheap peace is here today and gone tomorrow. Instead, they will need abiding peace, the peace of heaven. As St. Paul says, this is the peace of God that passes all understanding, and keeps our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God. Jesus gives his disciples this promise of peace because he knows they will need it. In only a few hours time, he will be betrayed by one of the twelve, hauled off, tortured, and killed. Their hope will be lost as everything they thought they knew is turned upside down. Even after he is resurrected and ascends into heaven, the disciples will need this heavenly peace. They will need to know the peace of God as they are dragged before rulers, thrown into prison, persecuted, and eventually martyred for the cause of Christ. The peace that Christ gives them today will stand the test of all of that. It will last, for it is peace from heaven, peace from God, peace that is everlasting and abiding. This leads us to state the obvious: having the peace of God does not mean we will never know trouble. Jesus will still go to the cross, and his disciples will be troubled, indeed. The disciples will still be persecuted and killed for preaching in the name of Jesus. We must say, therefore, that the peace of God is not an absence of hardship and trouble, but rather the ability to persevere through hardship and trouble, confident in our Christian hope that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. This is what St. Paul means in Romans 8 when he writes, "If God is for us, who is against us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:31b, 38-39) The peace of God does not exempt us from hardship and trouble. That’s just the world we live in. However, the peace of God does give us the strength and confidence to persevere, even in hardship and trouble. The peace of God helps us to hold onto our faith in God and in what Christ Jesus has done for us; to hold onto our hope in God’s power to save, even in the most troubling and difficult times; and to hold onto the love of God that has been shown to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Like the disciples, we live in a time of trouble. Our hardships are not the same as theirs, but they are still real. We struggle with weakness and loss, with pain and suffering, with despair and shame, with sin and death. All of these things are impossible for us to carry alone. But Christ has come so we do not have to carry those things alone. As he carried his cross from Pilate’s headquarters to Golgotha, he carried all of those things, too. He carried our sin, suffering, shame, and guilt. He even carried our curse of death. The resurrection on the third day confirms that he defeated all of those things on our behalf. So what are we to do? We give thanks for all that he has done for us. We trust in our salvation because of his life, death, and resurrection. We live in the peace that he gives us: the peace that passes all understanding. And then, we persevere, following Jesus wherever he leads. Comments are closed.
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