Sermon: Trinity 10 - 2020

16 August 2020

Text: Luke 19:41-48

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Our popular culture is filled with the word “peace.”  Young people greet one another with the word “peace” complete with their own take on their hippy grandfathers’ and grandmother’s greeting of “peace” with the two-fingered peace sign that became popular during the very unpopular Vietnam War.

The greeting “peace” is found all throughout St. Paul’s epistles in the New Testament, reflecting the Hebrew greeting of “Shalom” of the Old Testament.  Our congregation’s name “Salem” is a variation of the word “Shalom.”  Arabs use a similar word, “Salaam” as a greeting, and of course, it also means “peace.”

 “Peace” is one of those things that everybody talks about, but is elusive in our world.  Jews say: “Shalom” and Arabs say: “Salaam” when all the while they are at war with one another.

 Pop stars routinely say “peace” while advocating violence in the name of so-called social justice.”  

 But this is nothing new.  The prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the seventh century BC, preached the Word of God that criticizes those who say, “‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”  The name “Jerusalem” means “City of Peace” (you can hear the “Salem” in the name), and yet her history is anything but peaceful.

And as important as people think saying “peace” is as a pop-culture phenomenon, our English translation of the Bible employs the word “peace” three hundred and forty-eight times.  “Peace” was the first word with which our risen Lord greeted the disciples that first Easter.  You will hear the word “peace” several times in the liturgy.

And in our Gospel on this day, our Lord Jesus Christ is distressed that the City of Peace does not know peace, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!  But now they are hidden from your eyes.”  Our Lord then reveals news that makes Him weep.  He prophesies the destruction of the city by means of a siege and the flattening of the beautiful temple.  This prophecy was fulfilled forty years after He said it would happen, as the City of Peace was routed by the Romans in a ruthless invasion that left the temple as a pile of rubble.

And why this judgment?  Our Lord comes out and says so: “Because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

God has visited His people, but His people refused to believe.  But the remnant who did became the Church, the New Israel, and they were joined by Gentile believers who know the “peace of God which surpasses all understanding,” the peace of the Prince of Peace Himself.

But what does this mean, dear friends?  What is this peace that pop stars and hippies talk about, Jeremiah yearned for, Jerusalem did not know, and our Lord delivered from the empty tomb?  What is this peace of the prophets and our Lord? 

In this fallen world, we think peace means a lack of combat.  We think North Korea and South Korea are at peace because there are enemy troops arrayed against each other in an ironically-named “Demilitarized zone.”  The Cold War was described as “peace through mutual assured destruction,” and the fact that the world wasn’t incinerated in a nuclear holocaust was considered “peace.”  That’s how low the bar is.  United Nations soldiers are called “peacekeepers,” in a reminder of George Orwell’s book “1984” in which the government told people that “war is peace.”

Jesus greets the disciples with the word “peace” that first Easter because they were getting a little glimpse of how things were before the fall into sin in the Garden of Eden.  They saw the New Adam: sinless, perfect, victorious, and immortal.  They saw sin and its effects defeated and removed.  They saw the beginning of the Last Days, as the world awaits the consummation of the re-creation of heaven and earth, as God and man are reconciled, as sin is forgiven, as death is delivered a mortal blow, and as Satan is defeated at the cross: his lies exposed, his damage undone, and his false peace shown for what it is: a perversion and inversion of actual peace.

So what does “peace” look like, dear friends?  Look to the Garden of Eden.  We see a husband and wife content with who they are: men and women as they were created, the man as the head of the wife without lording over her, the wife as the helpmeet of the husband without being a doormat.  We see God and man conversing in the cool of the day, mankind unashamed and unafraid of God, God without wrath or judgment to visit upon mankind.  We see harmony and concord between men, and between all creatures: no predation, no fear, and no need to kill in order to live.  And we see eternal life, we see a universe without rebellion and without Satan and his lies.  We see planets waiting to be explored, technology waiting to be discovered, we see human beings cooperating perfectly with no scarcity or poverty, and we see humanity content to serve and give praise to the Most Holy Trinity without a lust to dominate his brothers or to claim dominion over God.

All of this, dear friends, is packed into this beautiful word, “Shalom.”  Our forebears understood this when they chose the name “Salem” for our congregation.  And it was the Lord’s intent for Jerusalem: the city that was to be Mt. Zion for eternity.

And so we see why Jeremiah and our Lord weep.  For in our Godless world, there is no peace, even though Christ Himself hand-delivers this peace that everybody claims to want, offering it as a free gift, wrought from His own shed blood, and it belongs to any who will receive it by faith.  It is a tragedy when anyone rejects this peace in favor of a counterfeit peace of the kind decried by Jeremiah.

True peace, dear friends, is found only in Christ.  For only He could restore peace to our fallen world through the forgiveness of sins, dying on the cross, and rising victorious over sin, death, and the devil.  Jesus has won the war and has thus won the peace.  And we await His glorious return and the completion of the world’s restoration to follow even as His work on the cross was completed with His cry of: “It is finished.”

And so, dear brothers and sisters, the true peace sign is the sign of the cross.  Real peace isn’t a wishful and wistful greeting among the rich and beautiful, but is rather a reality among the rejected and hated of this world: the peace that Jesus gives to those who are baptized and who believe: the Church.

And dear friends, we have this peace not by works but by faith.  “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

May you know the time of your visitation, dear friends, and may the Lord’s peace be upon you by grace, through faith.  

Peace be with you.  Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.