Peace, I Leave with You

God moves in mysterious ways.

God is moving me, a skeptical participant of most things presbytery, to become a presbyter (God: Rob, put up, or be quiet!)…in Sacramento, California! God is moving this congregation onto a new path, one that will reveal a new leader, a new leadership style, and new way of being this particular church in this particular place. 

In other words, God is changing everything. 

That simply adds to the chaos that unfolds before us, seemingly each day. What a violent run-up to Christmas this has been. Globally and nationally, we reel from one day to the next, wondering where, when, and who will be next. 

Yet maybe that is the very reason God is mixing things up. We cannot remain as we are if there is to be a transformation and transcendence of the world as it is. We need a new vision. We need a new way of being. We need to transform and transcend who we are to become implements of God’s transformation of the world. 

And that really is what Christmas is all about—God chose to radically readjust creation by living immediately and bodily within it in Jesus. God took everything that we are, everything we feel, everything we think, and everything else that makes us who and what we are in order to radically readjust our lives, being, and presence before him. 

It is hard to look at the daily news without realizing that never before has there been such a hungering need for readjustment. The statistics emerging after this last week of violence are staggering—more people are shot in our country each year than a year of actual declared warfare produces; there have been more mass shootings than there have been days in 2015 (355-340); and on goes the drumbeat. Add to those the continuing tragic episodes around the world, and the need for change becomes inescapable.

But why here with us in this place? Why is God shuffling our deck?

That will become more clear as the journey unfolds. Right now, we simply accept that God is doing something. We will see what it is as it develops. Our faith, though, tells us to trust God to be God. God is still good; grace still abounds. God definitely has something in mind for all of us. That is the beauty of our Presbyterian doctrine of predestination—it does nothing if it does not remind us that God always has something in mind for us. God is shifting us around right now because God has something afoot. 

That sort of trust led Mary and Joseph to accept angelic messages about a child coming. Neither of them had any real idea of what God was doing. Joseph had no idea that accepting the angel’s message meant a sudden flight to Egypt as head of a refugee family fleeing political violence. Mary had no idea that the little boy she would bear was going to be who he was. Luke makes that pretty clear as he recalls Mary pondering an awful lot in the opening chapters of his gospel. Her confusion was tangible. Yet, both of them gave themselves over to God’s direction and leading. They knew God would see them through, and that God was working something for all of creation.

Keep that in mind.

This thought becomes the peace that Christ promised his disciples on another night when the mind of God was utterly baffling to a group of God’s human servants. In just a few hours after he spoke this promise, he was gone. I am sure the disciples has plenty of questions about that, too—what sort of promise of peace was this? Yet, as it went, Jesus’ promise was perfectly sincere and fully realized. God was with them; God did indeed have something in mind; and, yes, God even used the very and completely ordinary lives of those disciples to work the transformation and transcendence of the world.

As we shift and adjust to God’s shifting and adjustment of our lives here, God is surely using this to continue the creation of the world—its formation into what God intends it to be. How will that work out? I have no idea. But I do know God is here and God is at work and the God sends his peace upon us. I trust that. I hope we all can.