The peace of God

“And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)

Jesus spends a lot of time speaking with his disciples about peace. Before he dies, in a long conversation with his friends that in John chapter 14 (check it out if you’ve got a moment), Jesus reassures them that he will not leave them alone as orphans. He is going away, yes; he is about to walk the road towards the cross, yes; but he is not about to abandon his followers. His promise is that he will give them the precious gift of his Holy Spirit who will come and make his home in their hearts, who will come and bring them peace: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)

The peace that Jesus offers is not the same as the peace of the world. At the moment, the entire internet is full of strategies for coping with this strange and frightening moment, but many of them provide only momentary distraction rather than lasting peace. A really good watch on Netflix (presumably the only business in the world that is actually going to make a profit from Coronavirus!) is a source of distraction from facing what is happening, but escapism doesn’t last. It is just a temporary measure.

And Jesus says that what he offers is not like that. It isn’t a quick fix patch up, but an altogether different kind of peace – he does not give as the world gives.

Yesterday, our family tried to use “zoom” to have a three-way family church service with some friends in the morning. We read the story of Jesus sleeping in the boat in the middle of the storm. (Luke 8:22-25) Jesus immediately curls up in the stern of the boat and falls asleep. A storm soon starts over the lake and the little boat carrying him and his friends is in danger of being swamped by the waves. Jesus’ friends run to him, shake him, shout at him and wake him up. Jesus gets up rebukes the wind and the waves and restores the lake to calm. Jesus is entirely peaceful right in the middle of the storm.

 This is, I think, what Paul means when he talks about the “peace of God which transcends all understanding.” It is unthinkable that anyone could be calm when their life is in danger. It is unthinkable that Jesus should fall asleep – and stay asleep – while the boat is being tossed by stormy waves. But he does. Jesus carries the peace of God with him. He is a non-anxious presence in a moment of extreme anxiety.

And this same peace is available to us. Paul’s strategy, again, is simple. Peace follows prayer. Peace follows the handing of our anxiety over to God, and the entrusting of him with it.

I love the image of the final part of this verse: the peace of God is not some passive, ethereal thing, a transitory feeling, but something strong and protective. The peace of God guards our hearts and minds. Like a watchman standing at the door of a fortress, the peace of God will not permit unhelpful thoughts and feelings to enter. The peace of God guards us against ourselves and our own tendency to think the worst and dwell on it.

I pray that you would know the peace of God today. I pray that God’s transcendent peace would settle on hospitals and doctors surgeries, on the homes of those who are lonely and isolated, in the hearts and minds of parents about to start home-schooling and feeling apprehensive, that our lives would confess the beauty of God’s peace. Amen.

Your voice has stilled the raging storms

The wind and waves bow down before

Your still small voice brings hope to all

Who wait on You, we'll wait for You

To lead us to the place where You'll restore our souls

And all our earthly strivings come to cease

Take from our souls the strain and stress

And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of Your peace

The beauty of Your peace

Bright skies will soon be overhead

We'll enter in to Heaven's rest

There'll be no death, there'll be no pain

The things of old will pass away

You'll lead us to the place where You'll restore our souls

And all our earthly strivings come to cease

(Tim Hughes, The Beauty of Your Peace)

Do not be anxious about anything

"Do not be anxious about anything" sounds like one of the most useless pieces of advice ever written. It also sounds like a throw away lyric from a Bob Marley song: "Don't worry; be happy..." In times like these, anxiety is unavoidable and telling ourselves to not be anxious is like telling ourselves to not think about an elephant. Almost as soon as you try to stop worrying, you start thinking about all the things you're worried about and then you worry about the fact you're worrying and you're in a worse position than when you started. 

But Paul is not Bob Marley. He is not telling the church to stop being anxious; he is telling them what they should do with their anxiety: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." (Philippians 4:6) Prayer is an act of surrender. It is a confession that we are not in control. And, in light of the global coronavirus pandemic, it seems fairly obvious that we are not. But, as with rejoicing (which again Paul mentions here), we do have control over some things. We cannot control the feeling of anxiety, but we can control what we do with it. 

The invitation in this verse is the invitation to come to our loving, heavenly Father - the one who loves us and wants what's best for us, who hurts when we hurt, and cries when we cries - and say, Dad, I'm feeling pretty stressed out right now. 

My lovely 4 year old, Sarah, has just learned to lie, and we're been having lots of conversations about what lying is and why we don't do it. Part of it, I've tried to explain to her, is about trust. I want her to trust me. I want her to know that no matter what has happened, what she has done or not done, she can come and talk to me. I want Sarah to know that she can come to me with whatever worry she's got, whatever mistake she's made, and hand it over to me so that we can work our way through it together. 

God is like that: "present your requests" to him. Hand them over. Give them to him as gifts. Lay them down at his feet and leave them there so that you can work through them together instead of trying to carry them on your own.

I am a stress-head. Most people probably know this about me. Not being anxious is pretty much at the top of my list of things I am really really bad at. But this verse in an invitation from God to trust him - to place into his hands everything that makes me feel anxious: my Nan's health, whether or not the shops have any pasta (and what on earth my fussy children will live off if we can't eat pasta), whether the NHS can cope with the current level of need, the families in our community who will be forced further down into poverty, how to create some kind of structure and routine to get me through the next few weeks with my kids, those that I know who are sick, those who are know that are struggling financially because they have been laid off and their income has disappeared over night...

The list is endless. But God is bigger than our fears. He has an endless capacity for carrying our anxieties. So let us hand them over this morning as an act of trust and an act of surrender. 

The Lord is near

The Lord is near.

Another beautiful simple reminder from Paul this morning: “The Lord is near.” (Philippians 4:5)

At this present moment in time, we may feel – and actually be - quite far away from people. Covid19 has forced many of us into self-isolation. Our usual patterns of seeing people have been severely disrupted. Daily contact with friends, family, neighbour – previously so often taken for granted – is now limited. Church cannot meet at it usually does on a Sunday. Birthday parties and celebrations are being postponed. Plans are put on hold.

Thankfully, God isn’t in the habit of social distancing.

In fact, he does exactly the opposite: the story of the Christian faith is the story of the God who comes close. So close, in fact, that he enters into the world of broken and hurting humanity as a tiny little baby. He becomes one of us. God does not wait for us to come close to Him; in Jesus he comes close to us. In Jesus he brings us back to himself. We who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. (Ephesians 2:13)

As I ran through the park this morning (trying to avoid old ladies walking their dogs!), I was reminded of two things. The lyrics to an old Rend Collective song and a section of the Anglican liturgy usually said during communion:

“No one really knows

What it is to be alone

Since You've never left our side

Omnipresence means

That You're never far away

You're always within reach

Always within reach

Hallelujah God is near

Hallelujah Christ is close

Hallelujah God is near

Hallelujah .” (Rend Collective, God is Near)

“When we turned away

you did not reject us,

but came to meet us in your Son.

All   You embraced us as your children

and welcomed us to sit and eat with you.” (Eucharistic Prayer)

I pray that we would each know the truth of God’s near-ness today. That no one – no matter how self-isolated or socially distanced they are – would feel alone. That we would each know the God who came to meet us in his Son.

Amen.

Gentleness

The next piece Paul's "survival in a crisis" strategy is simple: "Let your gentleness be evident to all." (Philippians 4:3)

I honesty cannot think of anything that is more needed right now than gentleness, and a gentleness that extends to every single social interaction and area of society.

At the shops earlier in the week, I looked in the tired eyes of a shop assistant brimming with tears (after having been shouted at for most of the day it seems) and asked her if she was alright. We are in desperate need of gentleness. We simply cannot afford to be horrible to each other right now. We cannot afford to be selfish and angry and resentful and out only for ourselves. We need to be gentle.

And the challenge of Paul's words is that this gentleness should be evident to all and, I would suggest, in the way we talk about all. This is difficult. On my shopping trip earlier in the week, I encountered two very different reactions to our situation: the first a couple of terrified shoppers wearing face masks in an attempt to protect themselves; the second, a group of shoppers mocking them relentlessly even as they stock-piled their own items of food.

There was very little gentleness on display.

It is so easy to start taking chunks out of each other - to see someone'e else's behaviour and start judging and criticising. To blame Boris Johnson, to blame those stock-piling, to blame schools. I have done much of that this week - out of my own fear, I have tried to find explanations for what is going on, and identify who is most to blame for the situation. But in another letter, Paul says this, "The entire law is fulfilled by the command: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other." (Galatians 5:15)

We need to be gentle.

Perhaps we struggle with gentleness because we think of it as a kind of weakness. We're happy to be gentle with children (and puppies) but we prefer sarcasm to kindness. Showing compassion and sympathy might end up putting us in a worse position. We don't want to be labelled as a mug.

But Jesus is gentle. In fact, it is one of the very few words that he uses to describe himself: "Take my yoke upon you," he says, "for I am gentle and humble in heart." (Matthew 11:29) Jesus stops for the one. He locks eyes with the frightened. He takes time over those that the rest of society has written off. And - if we claim to be following him - then we need to behave like him. And that means guarding our words and our actions, monitoring what we put on Facebook and thinking about the impact it will have on others, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

But, and this is the truly beautiful part, we do it knowing that Jesus' gentleness is for us too. In amongst all of the emotions that we are experiencing right now, Jesus promises that he is gentle. That he is tender. We are to come to him in our weariness and anxiety and exchange what we are carrying for his easy yoke. (Matthew 11:30)

In our fragility and fear, he will be gentle. That is who he is:

"Here is my servant whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my spirit on him,
and he will bring justice to the nations.
He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out." (Isaiah 42:1-3)

Let us be like Jesus today. Let us remember one another's bruises and brokenness, and be gentle.

I will say it again: rejoice!

I will say it again: rejoice! (Philippians 4:4)

I love this verse. It is one of the very few verses in the bible that gets its own exclamation mark at the end. And although God often repeats the same instruction to his people in his word it is pretty unusual for the same thing to be said twice right next to each other. It must be important.

It must also be quite difficult. Many many years ago, I heard someone older and wiser than me preach on Psalm 42. This song / poem is written by someone in quite extreme pain and distress. In today’s language, we would probably say that they were suffering from depression and anxiety. But, amazingly, 5 verses in, the writer says this, “Why my soul are you so downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God.” The older wiser person preaching on the psalm pointed out at this point that the most helpful thing we can do sometimes is talk to ourselves instead of listen to ourselves. When everything inside our heads and hearts, and thoughts and feelings, is signalling panic stations, doom, gloom and disaster, perhaps the most helpful we can do is to shut ourselves up and, instead, deliberately practice an act of gratitude.

Imagine if Facebook was full of people’s individual lists of things they wanted to say thank you for? Imagine if our newsfeeds were overflowing with small expressions of thanks? If we started talking to ourselves, instead of listening to the echo chamber of social media and the news?

Let’s give it a go today. Pick up a pen. Make some swipes on your screen. Tap something different on your phone.

I will say it again: rejoice!

Here’s my starter for 10 after fifteen minutes with a cup of coffee before my children woke up today…

Thank you for… hot coffee. The sound of birdsong. The radiators in my house. My dressing gown. My children sleeping well enough so that I could have a few minutes of peace. The way that so many people are trying so hard to be kind and generous and selfless right now. Being able to dig over my vegetable patch yesterday. Doing puzzles in the living room with my youngest daughter. Eating cake with my Mum on Monday to celebrate her birthday. A kind conversation with a neighbour yesterday morning. Having neighbours that look out for me. The response of the church in wanting to bless and serve the local community. More phone calls than normal this week because it’s hard to see people face to face.

Rejoice

Facebook is quite an unhappy place to be at the moment. So is the BBC news website. And so is the local Aldi at 9:30pm on a Monday evening.  So, in an attempt, as much for my own sanity as anyone else’s, I’m going to try and post a little thought / encouragement on my (not much used) blog each day from the bible…

I’m going to start in the book of Philippians because Paul, the writer, is pretty much a master of encouragement – especially in times that are dark and uncertain like ours. I’ve seen several people on Facebook post a meme with the conversation between Gandalf and Frodo from Lord of the Rings. Frodo says that he wishes that all the terrible things that were happening had not happened during in his time. And Gandalf responds, “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

It is hard to remember, in times like these, that we can decide. That we can choose to respond to things instead of react to them. That we do have a choice in what to do with the time that is given to us. The letter to the Philippians (a small group of people in a church in a place called Philippi) is written by Paul whilst he is chained up in prison. Things are really not going well for him. And yet, somehow, he claims that he has learned the secret of being content – even whilst he’s chained up to a prison wall. I’d like to get me some of that!

The last bit of Paul’s letter to his friends is where he unpacks some of this ‘contentment in a crisis’ strategy so I’m just going to head straight there. You can check it out yourself in his letter to the Philippians in the New Testament (second half of the bible), Chapter 4 starting at verse 4. If you have a bible with subheadings this but is often called “Final Exhortations.” In other words, the bit that Paul really wants his readers to remember.

And here is it. First thing to remember:

“Rejoice in the Lord always.”

Rejoice. Not because some nice, warm fuzzy feeling is swelling up inside of you (that’s hard to muster when you’re stuck in an endless queue for nappies and the person in front of you is shouting abuse at the helpless cashier) but because you can make a choice to find something to be thankful for: the fact that it’s actually stopped raining long enough this week for the daffodils to come out, the phone conversation you had with your Nan, a hot cup of coffee, a house in which to self-isolate into, watching your daughter complete a jigsaw puzzle by herself for the first time (after having done it with her several thousand times first!) some extra time to read the novel that’s been sat on your bedside table for several months.

And, remember, Paul isn’t saying this as some kind of nice, friendly way to end his letter; he’s saying it because it’s part of his strategy. Because it’s good for your soul. Because sometimes when everything is really hard and you’re feeling scared and anxious and overwhelmed by life, saying thank you is the only thing that’s going to stop you from going under.

But, it’s hard isn’t it? This is a moment in time when it’s really quite difficult to think of things to say thank you for and to rejoice in. Especially in that Aldi queue. But that’s why Paul kind of qualifies it a bit. Not just “rejoice” but “rejoice in the Lord.” Don’t just try and make up something to make you happy: remember the God who loves you and who is with you in the middle of the crisis. Remember the God who is the same all the time – pandemic or not. The God who is always good. Always kind. Always loving. Always present.

We do not rejoice because of the difficult things that are happening, we can rejoice because God is with us in the midst of them.

Now. Here. This

For the second time, I owe the title of a blogpost to Father Gregory Boyle. Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship is the latest collection of stories from his work with Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation programme in the world. It is a beautiful and challenging read. In one particular chapter, Boyle speaks about the necessity of embracing the current moment, rather than always rushing on to the next one.

This is something that I am astonishingly bad at.

I live in the next moment almost all of the time. I am always waiting for a time that isn’t now for something to happen that hasn’t happened yet: for my daughter to sleep through the night, for the day when I’m not tired, for a job I really love that gives me meaning and purpose. I am constantly on the lookout for the thing that will complete me, or at least bring a greater sense of satisfaction than I currently have.

That isn’t to say that I’m not happy – there is so much in my life that I have to rejoice in –but I am restless. Part of this restlessness is, I’m sure, due to life stage. The transition from working full time to full time mumming it has not been an easy one for me, and I find it hard to dwell happily in the present moment when the present moment often consists of mundanity, tantrums and various bodily functions. But, I do not think restlessness is only due to life with two small children. It is a way of thinking, and a way of life, that I seem unable to shake off.

And yet these past few weeks I have been trying. I have been choosing to dwell in the present moment and to celebrate it rather than holding out for a future moment that might never happen. This does not come easily to me, but children are great teachers (or at least Jesus seemed to think so) and I have been letting my two year old school me in the art of being fully here. 

On Monday we walked to the library. This should take 15 minutes, 10 if you walk at my usual hurried pace, but I had let Sarah walk and so we were not going to get there any time soon. Sarah, like most two year olds, stops for every, single thing that interests her: tree, leaf, flower, crack in pavement, lamp post. Everything. Each thing is to be seen and held and marvelled at. And most of the time, this does my head in because, most of the time, I have somewhere else I think I need to be, some other moment I am trying to rush off to. But Sarah does not live life like this. She lives life in the present. And to her, most of the time, the present is a thing of glory and of wonder.

During our overly long walk to the library I was about to lose my rag when I spotted a sign in a window that said, “Live the life you love.” And in that moment, God spoke to me gently and reversed the words, “No. Love the life you live.” For many of us, we do not choose the life that we have. We do not choose the family or postcode we are born into. We do not choose our circumstances or opportunities. It is an impossibility – as much as the world might tell us otherwise – to simply start living a life that we love, to have the dream job, and salary, and family. Thus, to have the life we always wanted to live - that we would love to live – is beyond us. And yet, what is not beyond us is to choose to be present in the life that we have, the life that we are already living, and celebrate the joy of it, savouring every pink tinged leaf, and white striped feather.

Boyle puts it this way, “If your anchor is not centred in today, then you’ll blink and miss the delight of this very moment.” This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t some moments which are not delightful, that there aren’t seasons of pain and sorrow, but it is to say that the present is a moment in which to seek joy, rather than assuming that it is only available in the future. The present is also a moment in which we can choose whether or not to acknowledge God. Whether or not to embrace his presence and his goodness. Whether or not to tilt our faces upwards to the sun and say thank you.

On that afternoon wander in the vague direction of the library with the autumn sun golden above the rooftops, I was able – as I so often am not – to do this: to stop and look back towards Sarah, with her hands and pockets crammed full of coloured leaves, and love the life I was living and the gifts I had been given. To love that moment, and to live fully inside it, without waiting for something better to eclipse it. 

Here.

Now.

This.