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, and do not let them be afraid.  John 14:27 

Some of you know that I just retired.  It’s still a shock to awaken most mornings to the prospect of a day whose content can be determined, for the most part, by what my wife and I would like to do.  A delightful shock, but a shock nonetheless.  We have time for another cup of coffee now.  We listen to the radio without glancing at the clock every other minute.  Lately the radio news has been full of the student unrest in Indonesia.  The other day, we heard that there were some fatalities: some said six, some said there were really more.  We thought, as we listened, of all the decades of struggle for human rights we have witnessed.  We talked about coming here, to a college town, and we thought of how central a role young people always play in these struggles—everywhere:  Palestine, Indonesia, the fall of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, the civil rights movement here in America.  Students have always been in the front lines of struggles that frightened their elders.  Of course they are:  young people are pure.  I don’t mean well-behaved when I say they are pure—Patti and I raised adolescents, too, you know!  I mean that they possess an innocence about themselves of which they are unaware.  They have not yet compromised, and they cannot imagine that they ever will.  They are not afraid.  Death seems to them like a thing that happens to other people.  But we are afraid for them.  We know just how punishing the world can be.  It can punish a vision of liberty with terrible harshness.  Power never gives up without a fight. 

Almost everybody gives up in the face of that harshness.  Almost everybody surrenders the dreams of peace and fairness and equality we send our young people off to college to acquire.  Almost everybody comes to treat them as just that:  dreams, unattainable pipe dreams, Utopian dreams.  We refer to this surrender as growing up.  But we feel uncomfortable when we say this, for we know that it is not the whole truth.  We know that growing up does mean surrendering the illusion of immortality and omnipotence, but that it need not mean abandoning our principles.  We know that, while we do not have the unlimited choices we used to think we had, we do still have choices.  Ethical choices.  We know that growing up has not excused us from making ethical choices.  And we know that these choices can never be based solely on our immediate self-interest.  We know, however far away our own student days are now, that the world’s cynicism must never be allowed to be the only voice humanity hears.  We know that our efforts will always fall short of our dreams.  But we must continue to dream, and continue to try. 

Yesterday on the radio, they were also talking about the nuclear bomb exploded this week in India.  The president is going about applying economic sanctions aimed at making the testing stop.  Suddenly, this week, it was as if the year were 1978 or 1980 instead of 1998—a nuclear bomb?  We haven’t thought much about nuclear bombs for a while.  Our communal fears have pretty much relocated to the movie houses—volcanoes raining molten rock on us, tidal waves engulfing us, asteroids hitting us.  Even Godzilla—my fellow retiree—is back!  And this week, suddenly, a nuclear bomb; not a movie, but a real one.  We remember the arms race at the height of the Cold War.  We have no wish to go there again. 

One thing we know is that the world is not very good at giving humanity peace.  The history of humankind is fundamentally a history of conflict, a chronology of humanity’s wars.  We long for peace, but we do not wage peace.  We wage war.  Peace is often a weak hope with us.  War is a campaign.  I used to live very near the headquarters of the United Nations.  It arose out of the ashes of war: the ashes of despair, out of shock and at the human capacity for cruelty, the capacity to destroy the very possibility of life on earth itself, which stunned us all after the Second World War.  It dreamed of a world in which the human family was a reality more real than the jangling competitive claims of national sovereignty.  From the beginning it focused, often, on children and their needs.  It attempted to be a place where peace might be waged, as war is waged in the world.  Its success, we know, has been small in comparison to the human sorrow that has come and gone since the United Nations was founded.  We know that its halls have not been innocent of the national intrigues and corrupt power realities which cause war and suffering.  And yet its idea draws us: a forum for peace arising out of the ashes of world conflagration, a temple to the love which ought to bind the human family together.  We know our sad limitations.  But we also know just what it is for which we long.  We are still young enough to know that. 

Jesus talks of peace to his disciples.  It is not the flaccid peace the world gives us—which is just about no peace at all.  The peace of Christ is something else.  We listen to him speak of peace, this man who knows that soon he will die and is willing to do so.  We think of others who have changed the world by speaking, in the same breath, of justice and peace—we think of Mohandas Ghandi, of Martin Luther King, who have died speaking peace this way.  This is not the “don’t-bother-me-and-I-won’t-bother-you” arrangement for which the world settles when it talks of peace.  There is no love in such peace.  This is anything but that.  The peace of Christ lays down its life for humanity.  It is full of energy and power.  It takes the good of the other as equal in importance to the good of the self, and actively pursues it. 

I used to stand, sometimes, at the window of our apartment in New York City.  We were way up high, on the top floor of a tall building.  All around me were the lights of the city, apartment buildings and office buildings.  I would look at the windows of the buildings, squares of yellow light in the black night, and I would think of the people in the buildings, eating their dinners, reading their papers, laughing and crying, listening to music, paying their bills, falling in love.  For a moment, I would see them as God must see them, and I would be shocked with love for them, for these thousands and thousands of people whom I would never know.  I loved them for their humanness.  The moment would soon pass, of course.  I would go and read my paper, pay my bills.  But I have not forgotten those moments of relatedness.  I have not forgotten how real it was.  Those moments are rare for us.  We don’t have them very often. 

But they are continuous in the reality of God.  That’s the way it is in the household of God all the time: keen awareness of what is, keen love of everything that is, keen and piercing and infinite.  All the time.  Human beings can’t maintain that feeling, not in this life.  That keenness, that heightened awareness would wear us out.  But it is the reality of God, and it is how we will experience our own reality one day, when Christ is all in all.  Our sisterhood and brotherhood will be piercingly and eternally real.  Our despair will be forgotten, a thing of the past.  Redeemed at last, and free, the love of God which we can only sense dimly now, and only for a moment here and there, will be our lives. 

That’s what the peace of Christ is like.  It is that keen, aching peace he leaves with us.  It is a love total enough to give its life for the beloved.  This loving peace belongs to us, to the young and the old alike.  Every longing humankind has, every struggle among us for a place at the table is born of this mighty love.  It lifts our eyes from the myopia of our self-interest and transforms us, if we allow it to do so. 

Another academic year comes to an end.  Another class of the hopeful young is launched into the world.  We have gotten another year older.  But the new class has gotten its acceptance letters and sent back the forms, and the textbook orders for next semester are already in.  The fountain of energy and innocence keeps springing forth, to be molded and tempered by experience—its own and the experience we try to share with it.  Molded and tempered, but not cut off: the human race would not last long without it, and it is stronger than our acquired cynicism.  For the exuberance of the young, as uninformed as it is about the ways of the world, as vulnerable as we know it is to the disappointments that lie ahead, is close to the exuberant, piercing love of Christ.  It is cut from the same cloth. 

Let us pray:  God our Father, you see your children growing up in an unsteady and confusing world:  Show them that your ways give more life than the ways of the world, and that following you is better than chasing after selfish goals.  Help them to take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a chance for a new start.  Give them strength to hold their faith in you, and to keep alive their joy in your creation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, AMEN.