The Peace of Christ - Sermon for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost (2024)

Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men. This was the hymn the hosts of Angels sang on the very first Christmas over 2,000 years ago and we sing this every Matins and the clergy say this quietly before every liturgy. Peace, goodwill toward men. This is what the world so desperately needs and this is what perhaps of all the fasting seasons we feel most deprived of. The pressure mounts at the end of the year to get everything done we needed to, to plan and prepare for various family gatherings or other festivities, along with all the other worries national and international strife add. St. Paul declares in the epistle this morning that Christ Himself is our peace. Christ came to give us Himself. When Adam and Eve fell, they could not be at peace with God and hid from Him in Paradise. This division between God and man only grew and within a generation man could not be at peace with his own brother—Cain slew Abel. And ultimately the fall creates divisions in our minds and in our hearts—we are shattered selves, hurt and hurting others. Christ Who is our peace came to give us Himself, to reconcile us with God whom we ran away from, to unite us in one Body the Church and to bind together the fractures of our souls.

This is a busy time of the year and it’s so easy for us to lose focus. It’s so easy to be swept away in our cares and anxieties that we will find ourselves falling prey to many of the devil’s snares he sets out to rob us of our peace and our sense of goodwill towards our brothers. St. John of Kronstadt remarks on one such illusion that we have all come across. He writes:

Everything except true love is an illusion. If a friend behaves coldly, rudely to you, say—this is an illusion of the enemy. If a feeling of enmity arising from your friend’s coldness disturbs you, say: This is an illusion of mine; but the truth is that I love my friend in spite of everything and I do not wish to see evil in him (My Life in Christ)

If a friend behaves coldly, rudely—this is an illusion of the enemy! St. John is not saying that no one ever mistreats us. He’s not saying that we have to pretend we never suffer wrong. He’s saying that whatever is not true love that we experience is an illusion of the enemy. That it is the enemy who is behind the negative, rude, cold experiences wehave, even if our friend happens to be an unwilling (or willing!) instrument at the time.

Let us look at this when the shoe is on the other foot. The demons can trip us up all day long and they love to bring in other people in the mix to receive collateral damage. How often are we stressed or exhausted or on our last rope and someone comes along and does something under normal circumstances we wouldn’t notice. But this time, it’s too much, it’s the last straw and we let them have it, we rebuke them, we mock them, we tell them off. In our better moments, we know that’s not what we wished we had done. But at least we can see when we’re in the wrong how we play into the devil’s plans. Despite our brokenness and our reactions stemming from the old man within us, we know we love our brothers.

The spiritual life is experiential, it’s not just abstract dogmas and beliefs. If we do what the saints tell us, we will be able to confirm in our hearts that what they say is true. St. John is telling us that any coldness, rudeness or enmity from our friends is an illusion. In spite of his behavior, I will choose to ignore whatever evil the devil is insisting I see in him and I will instead remind myself of how much I love my friend. Because love is not our emotional affection and attachments to others, but our service to them and our sacrifices we make for them that they might have the best. Our sacrifices include sacrificing our demands and expectations that they should be different. That love that I have for my friend is what is true, and not whatever the devil is trying to tell me about him.

The demons will want us to take everything personally when we are in conflict with each other so that we end up offended for long periods of time. The fathers tells us that the demon of despondency will always bring up these incidents in our minds and will constantly whisper to us that there is no real love here, that the love of the fathers in this monastery has grown cold and we should look elsewhere. If we choose to listen to the demons, we can live in constant emotional upheaval, always reacting to or anticipating someone else’s words or actions. Never at peace, but always in turmoil for the conflict that may or may not soon surface. If we instead listen to St. John, who tells us, “Let us not take to heart any evil occasioned to us, intentionally or unintentionally, by our neighbor”, then that experience will roll off our backs if we ask God to help us. We need prayer to overcome our bad ways of thinking because our bad ways of thinking are not the result of an intellectual or psychological defect but the result of our carnal-mindedness and especially our self-love. When our peace is disturbed by our brother’s behavior, let us ask the Mother of God to tear apart the illusion the devil is trying to weave in front of us and we will see the truth that is always there—our brother, made in the image of God, who is trying to love us but is not always successful.

There are still a few weeks before Western Christmas and about a month before ours, and there will be ample opportunities for conflict and turmoil, for temptations and mistakes. These are gifts sent us to teach us how to grow “unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ”. These are ways God uses to correct our vision, to show us how often we choose to believe the devil’s fantasies and to remind us of how tormented they make us if we believe them. These are opportunities to learn how to see the world, and especially our brother, the way the saints do and to experience the true peace Christ gives us if we make a space in our hearts for Him. If we do this, we, too, will be “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord”. Amen.