For the newcomer to the Episcopal church, there is a time nestled in between the two large portions of liturgy that might seem to be standard to just about any service of any denomination. It looks like people wander around greeting people, being friendly and saying hi. Toward the end, in even a moderately informal parish, the priest tries to settle everyone down and might move into announcements.
An idea of the Peace in the Episcopal Church is that it is a time to share and affirm the peace of God in and with fellow parishioners. There is deep meaning to this – we are a community; we are in relationship; we are called to love each other deeply and consistently. It’s a time to clear the air, to reconcile, to affirm peace exists, to prepare for joining each other at the Table of Christ.
This is something that can be beautiful, or fun, or uncomfortable… or all of the above. Peace isn’t necessarily the absence of conflict, though we like to think of it that way. Peace isn’t necessarily a forgetting of wrongs, though that decreases the surface discomfort sometimes. Peace is an acknowledgement of process and of justice and of the presence of God’s grace among us.
While I may or may not be flirting with speaking heresy against the Episcopal church in my understanding and description of the Peace (a state that I find myself in repeatedly), this description touches on a broader understanding of love and community relationships within the Church as a whole.
In today’s sermon, our priest spoke about love: we are called to love in the form that shows up in Greek as agape. She defined that love this morning as a love that stays in the bleachers, even when our team is losing by 50 points. It’s a love that doesn’t require reciprocation. It’s a love that doesn’t bully or demand. It is, in short, God’s love for us.
We cannot perform well and get God to love us more, nor can we make a mess of things and get God to love us less. God loves us, period. That is agape love.
We are called to love others this way.
We’re not perfect at it. The vast majority of us aren’t even moderately good at it. We like the transactional love of phileo or the drama love of eros. We don’t particularly like the demanding (to the one giving it) love of agape.
The others are easier – when it’s no longer exciting or when we no longer get what we want or need, we can move on.
Agape love is hard. It is what calls us to love the difficult, the hateful, the abusive, the deceitful, as well as the beautiful, generous, and like-minded.
The idea of the peace is that we go to the Table of Christ with clear consciences, with nothing between us and our neighbor.
The older I get, the less I understand how that works.
Life is difficult. It’s messy. Humans, as a whole, are a selfish, sinful lot. But since we want peace and since we are supposed to love (agape) our neighbor, since we want to come before the Body and Blood of Jesus with pure hearts, we are tempted to trade out a pretty covering for a deep cleaning.
Often, we’re happy to deny conflict and call it reconciliation. The emotional reaction of instantaneous forgiveness, of cheap grace, of pulling the rug over top of the pile of poop is easier than doing the stinky work of scrubbing up the mess.
We don’t like to sit with the anger, the hurt, the betrayal that we feel. We try to avoid the discomfort of acknowledging that hurts from the past still linger in the dark recesses of our being. We fight against the need to sit still and listen to the stories that our wounds tell.
Further, many of us have been conditioned to believe that the love and peace we are called to as Christians can only occur in the absence of conflict – that they can only occur when we erase or deny any difficult or harmful interactions with other people.
Cheap grace, a covering over of the sins of another (or of ourselves) without the hard work of repentance and reconciliation, is less messy. If we just cover it all over with the pretty words of peace and grace, we don’t have to open our hearts, get the full stink of what is rotting inside us, or touch that rot to get it out of our souls.
Nobody likes to deep clean like that. There’s a reason Febreze sells.
But agape love doesn’t let us offer pretty, empty words as a covering for the ugliness of human relationships. Agape love says we have to dig around in our hearts, see the wrongs we have committed toward another, and figure out how to confess, how to forgive ourselves, how to apologize, how to make restitution, how to reconcile. Agape love says that we have to open up the hurt inside us and look at it. It says we can’t just smooth over the damage done by others – we have to deal with it and we have to learn to forgive, to accept God’s grace in our lives, to draw good, sometimes uncomfortable boundaries and hold to them.
Agape love says that Febreze for the soul isn’t an option.
Agape love says that peace isn’t the absence – or denial – of conflict, but is love in the presence of painful situations and memories and the ugliness and messiness of humanity.
Agape love sets boundaries and learns from the past. It recognizes that some relationships can’t survive our humanity. But it also never stops recognizing the image of God in the other person, however hard that may be to see.
Peace is real. It can happen. But it doesn’t smell like spiritual Febreze.
Miss Jerri Writes 