Have We Thought Through The Peace We Are Praying For?

  It is a good thing to pray for the peace of Christ. But do we know what it is? Beyond vague generalities like “the love of Christ made manifest” or “the grace of the Lord for humanity”. Those are not wrong answers, but how would our church seek to make the love of Christ manifest in the world to achieve this peace? What does the grace of the Lord for humanity entail? And if we wait for the pastor to tell us what this is, what if it doesn’t sound right? What if it doesn’t ring true? What if it doesn’t resonate in our hearts and minds and spur us to thank the Lord? 

Is the pastor wrong? Being a pastor, the odds are in your favor in that consideration. What is peace? At 11:11am and 11 seconds on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918, the guns fell silent at the end of the Great War. “Peace” was achieved. It lasted twenty years, setting the path to the Second World War. Retrospectively, implicitly recognizing the failure of “peace”, the Great War was renamed ‘The First World War’. Thus far, there has been no World War 3, but that is not about the achievement of peace. That is about the desperate fear of nuclear annihilation, “Mutual Assured Destruction”-not much peace there. 

So we got to think about peace. We need our minds and hearts in alignment in understanding what this peace is. In understanding the God who, in Jesus Christ, is offering us this peace. If nothing else, it will provide clarity as to exactly what it is we are praying for. The vibrant church is not simply the church that prays together, but the church that thinks together, that reflects together, that offers a place of safety for its members to come boldly in their understanding (or lack of understanding) of the things of God. 

There is a ten dollar word for thinking about God, for thinking about the things of God. We call it ‘theology’. It is thinking about God that is guiding Paul’s hand as he writes to the Ephesians. What he puts into a few verses has prompted thick books of people thinking about it. What is the peace of Christ? What are we praying for? What are we offering up to the world? How are we reflecting the light of the Child of Peace into a world that needs it so desperately?