God’s Spirit says, ‘Peace, be still.’
I grew up in a family of 5 children. We had a tradition in our family of always sitting down to a proper meal in the evening. My mother was a fantastic cook, and my father was a very slow eater, so our meals were quite lengthy – something I have thanked God for many times since. BUT 5 children!! Evening meals were also the time to catch up with each other, and believe me, each of us wanted to be the first to tell our story! If we had been allowed to, it could all have turned into a shouting match, where the person who shouted loudest got heard first. In that kind of context, the hardest thing of all to do was to keep quiet and say nothing. Everything in a child screams for the attention of its parents, particularly if they are loving parents. The discipline of ‘Peace, be still…’ is difficult to sustain. It requires an enormous amount of POWER. It is always much easier to start shouting. And when you add to that the fear that you might not be heard, the shouting gets louder and louder. Fear promotes the very opposite of peace. Peace requires enormous power.
The Gospel passage today begins immediately after Jesus’ famous statement, ‘I am the way the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me.’ So in verse 17, when Jesus promises the Holy Spirit and He calls the Spirit ‘the Spirit of truth,’ He is in fact speaking of the Spirit of Jesus, because He IS the truth. Jesus is still with us by his Spirit. That is the message of Pentecost! Jesus is HERE! And not only that – Jesus says His Spirit ‘lives with you and will be in you.’ THAT is the power! – His Spirit with us and in us. And that is what the disciples were told to wait for. Jesus said, ‘you will receive POWER when the Holy Spirit comes on you.’ It is a promise! In Ephesians Paul describes that power. It is ‘the God of our Lord Jesus Christ’s…. incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.’ It is unimaginable power…mind-boggling power.
So when Jesus said, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.’ He was promising us that enormous power given at Pentecost. The power that alone can give true peace. The opposite of peace is not war - the opposite of peace is fear. Without the underlying fear of each other, there would be no war.
When our children were small, we lived in Papua New Guinea for over four years, and worked among tertiary students there. It was a wonderful time and a real eye opener. Papua New Guinea has over 1000 languages – I speak only one of them, the basic trade language called Tok Pisin. One of the reasons there are so many totally distinct languages – they resemble each other not at all – is because of the divisions between people there. There was virtually no contact between the people who lived in one valley and those who lived in the next. When there was contact, it was to kill and destroy, because of their overwhelming fear of each other. And in their fear, they did everything to make themselves look ugly and fearful [use masks again] – that was a demonstration of their power. Power was defined as instilling more fear in the other person than you felt yourself. This is not anything new. Not long ago, someone I know said to me, ‘I aim to defend myself by attacking first!’ And this was a British person, not a Papua New Guinean! In Papua New Guinea, tribal war and the occasional stealing of women from other tribes for use in the longhouses was the only contact between peoples of adjoining valleys. Cannibalism was another expression of power. If you could eat your enemy, you made yourself more powerful. The father of one of the students we worked with had taken part in the last cannibal feast in his village.
But Jesus changes the whole definition of power. Power becomes the love that overcomes fear. Papua New Guineans, when they are converted to Christ, become incredibly bold. Another of the Christian students we knew went home once to find that there was a tribal war going on. When asked to fight with his people, he refused, and tried to talk them out of it. Finally, he stood between the two tribes and preached to them about Jesus. He said that they could find peace by putting down their weapons and getting to know and love one another, thus overcoming their fear of each other. They would then discover that they really weren’t that different from each other after all. Both sides were so stunned that they actually did stop fighting! Fearlessness in the name of Christ is not just power – it’s transforming power! By the Spirit of God, that one lone Christian student was able to lead two tribes away from fear and death.
Who or what is leading you? What is your focus on? That is who or what you will be following. Paul, in Romans, says that ‘those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.’ By implication, no one else is, in fact, a child of God. This is a hard saying. Are you being led by the Spirit of God? Are you like ‘the wind that blows wherever it pleases? You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going? So it is with everyone born of the Spirit,’ Jesus says. If we are, in fact, led by the Spirit of God, there are enormous benefits. Paul goes on to say, ‘For you did not receive a spirit that makes you slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption.’ The contrast is between a spirit that enslaves and the Spirit that frees by connecting us in a loving, intimate relationship with God the Father, so that we can call Him ‘Daddy’. It is like being a child again in the arms of the only person that we trust to protect and care for us. In that place, we can relax.
When the Holy Spirit finally came on those first disciples, obediently and patiently waiting for Jesus’ promise to be fulfilled, it was with the sound of a violent wind – a picture of great power. To the sound was added what looked like tongues of fire. The combination of wind and fire is normally about as destructive as you can get. But the effects of the Spirit were not destructive. Instead, the Spirit united people by making the communication of ‘the wonders of God’ comprehensible to everyone who was there. Instead of the fear of each other that separates people, such as in Papua New Guinea, causing myriads of languages to develop, the spirit enabled people to overcome differences. The Bible names peoples of fifteen different areas present on that day.
Like most biblical prophecies, the prophecy from Joel is a combination of the now and not yet. The first part was fulfilled at Pentecost and is being lived out in the lives of Christians to this day. Now we, like the first disciples, wait for the second part to be fulfilled: ‘wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ In that last sentence is our peace. No matter what happens, Jesus will save us. We need not fear! That costly salvation is what we remember as we give God thanks and share communion with Him and with each other here today.
Let me finish with one of my favourite sections of Eucharistic prayer B [and by the way, Eucharistic just means ‘thanksgiving’, so it’s thanksgiving prayer B!]: ‘Send the Holy Spirit on your people and gather into one in your kingdom all who share this one bread and one cup, so that we, in the company of all the saints, may praise and glorify you for ever, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ AMEN.