What Do We Christians Hope To Achieve With Our Faith-Based Activism?

 For Sunday, our passage is from 1 Timothy 2: 1-7:

 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, ² for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. ³ This is right and acceptable before God our Savior, ⁴ who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. ⁵ For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, ⁶ who gave himself a ransom for all —this was attested at the right time. ⁷ For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth; I am not lying), a teacher of the gentiles in faith and truth.

           We love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength.  At the crossroad of loving God and our souls is the dream articulated in verse 2, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”  When I imagine that, I think of the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings.  They live comfortable lives, farming the earth without the curses God laid upon Adam in Genesis 3, comfortable and uncaring of the worries of the world surrounding them.  It would be of help to me if we could ditch the pipes they all seem to smoke, maybe find some comfy shoes…I am not a barefoot person.  It is also fiction.

          In the books, their idyllic world is invaded and redeemed.  In the movies, it is limited to a vision of what ‘might be’ if evil is to triumph.

          Paul develops "the quiet and peaceable life" in our passage.  It begins with a call to prayer for the leadership, the ones in power, those who are most able to make or break a quiet and peaceable life.  Prayer lines them up with God, where the true power is.  But Paul knows the world isn’t so utopian.  Thus we were given Jesus, that all may be saved, that all may know the truth, that all may be ransomed by He who gave His life for all.

          This is why Paul does what he does, ^{7 "}For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle, a teacher of the gentiles in faith and truth."

          “A quiet and peaceable life in godliness and dignity” is the endpoint of Jesus' work.  It is the vision that is cast for us to know what Jesus has done for us.  We see it in snatches, in the beauty of creation.  Sunrise, sunset, a forest, a beach, a rainbow, snow capped mountains.  It can be encapsulated in worship space.  For me, that would be the old chapel at Camp Johnsonburg. 

          Are we not called to see the face of Jesus in everybody we meet?  As in, what in this person can lead me more deeply into my faith in Christ Jesus?  Are they a blessing?  Is there’s a need that I can serve to fill?  What grace lives in the face of every one of my neighbors (and they are all my neighbors)?  The goal of our life journey is to look into a face at peace, at rest, in comfort, blessed.  We catch glimpses of that, if we look, as into the faces of our loved ones when they are at ease and joyful. 

          Seeing through the sin of the world to the peace that lays beyond, in Jesus, to see what Jesus has done, what we, in turn, are called to do.  It is looking into the perfection of God and being lifted into joy.  Some call it mystical.  Some mystics enter deeply into this joy of being in Jesus.  I call it contemplative, a contemplation of what it means to live into godliness and dignity, to leave in quiet and peace (“peace and quiet” sounds too much like my wanting the kids to knock off the noise…this is BIGGER).

          When we get here, to heaven, to the renewed heaven and earth, we have arrived.  We’ve made it.  We have accomplished our journey in Christ Jesus.  It is what we have to look forward to, what we are working toward.  It is the peace beyond the war, the joy beyond the sorrow, the health beyond the pain.  It is a spiritual practice for each Christian, loving God in deepest being, to strive to that perfection.  It a goal of joy in a world of sin and death.  It is the love of God made most real.

          We work to achieve that reality.  This is why we share our witness of Christ.  This is why we work to address the needs of a world in pain.  This is why we worship in joy and celebration.  We know what is coming, what was done for us by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is the vision we cast and we share with the world in need.

 

Peace,

Pastor Pete