2019 Sermon Series: God’s Peace

I’m Dan. I guide canoe trips at Wilderness Canoe Base this summer. Today, I’d like to talk about peace.

I spent the last four years studying history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I began to imagine myself as an academic historian, envisioning a life of thinking and talking and writing about the past. This might sound boring to many of you, but it was one of the most exciting moments in my life, primarily because the work helped me to begin to find my politics. History provided a framework (change over time) that has proved useful for understanding contemporary political and social issues, and it helped me begin to grapple with some of the things that matter to me in the world.

I studied nineteenth-century North America, which, as far as historical moments and places go, is a tough one, and my understanding of urgent advocacy compelled me to remember and carry with me as much of the pain and trauma of this hundred years of imperialism and colonialism, economic exploitation, systematized racism, and organized patriarchy as I could. In this work, I felt an ever-present urgency. This feeling that things need to change, right now, is understandable, and it can be productive. But rather than driving my sense of purpose, it most often made me feel hopeless, confused, and drained.

If my work in the discipline called history felt inescapably urgent, my work as a guide at Wilderness has felt inescapably peaceful. I don’t think this is because I’m not thinking about the same sorts of problems that I did when I studied history; I am. I understand guiding to be political and social work. I value the opportunity to help individuals experience a designated wilderness area for the first time, under surprisingly equitable circumstances. I savor the chance to live in community; to build confidence and work towards common goals with people who have different life experiences. Yet for some reason, I don’t carry the same sorts of mental burdens that I’ve previously associated with a political life.

The questions that have been on my mind most this summer, therefore, have to do with this feeling that I’m identifying as peace. First, why do I feel this peace? And, second, is it ok for me to feel this peace? If I feel at peace, am I doing enough in this very un-peaceful world?

The first question is easier to answer. I feel peace in my work as a canoe guide because the job is tangible. My life is grounded and bounded in physical ways. At the end of the day, my back hurts exactly in proportion to how many paddle strokes I’ve taken, how many pack straps and portage yokes I’ve hauled up onto my shoulders, and how many knobby roots have accumulated under my corner of our pitched tent. At night, I crawl quickly into my old Eureka 6p and lay on top of a damp sleeping bag, in physical and emotional alignment with half-a-dozen other tent mates, and surrounded by the hum of mosquitos and the first rustles of nocturnal critters. We’re tired and and we smell and our bellies are full and our world just makes sense to me.

I feel peace because my work occurs on a humbling scale. If, as a historian, I worked at a macro level, analyzing people and processes across across space and time, as a canoe guide, my experience is dramatically micro. I trip with, at most, 8 other people, usually for less than a week. I don’t really get to think about causality or to evaluate outcomes—in most cases, I never have the opportunity to continue the conversations that we’ve begun. Sometimes the work feels too small: how can I contemplate and address even one of the things that matters to me when all I have is a fleeting moment with a few people? But I’m reminded that I can only give my attention to one thing at a time, and that all that most of us really get is a little slice of the world in which to make a difference. I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Mother Teresa, which goes: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

However, if I think I understand why I experience my feelings of peace, I still can’t answer whether or not they’re ok. Even in voicing this question, I recognize how silly it sounds. How could it possibly not be ok for me to feel peace? I can see Jake rolling his eyes over there, and practically hear him saying “c’mon Dano, just chill out. Why do you have to over-analyze everything? Why can’t you just let it be peaceful?” But I can’t, Jake—the question keeps coming up, over and over again. Just the other evening, during a swim, as I peered across the rippling lake, surrounded and sustained by an expanse of clean water, my thoughts turned to the droughts that strike with greater intensity and frequency around the world, and that have most recently crippled parts of India and southeast Asia. I wondered with more than a bit of hopelessness, “how is it that I get to swim when so many don’t have enough to drink? How can that possibly make sense?”

It doesn’t. It can’t. I have no way to explain it. And so I turn, in my frustration, to our gospel reading for today. It’s excerpted from the Book of John, Chapter 14, during Jesus’s last meeting with the disciples before he is crucified. It seems, by all accounts, to be an exceptionally urgent, uncertain, un-peaceful moment. Jesus twice implores, “do not let your hearts be troubled,” but if you ask me, the disciples had a whole lot about which to be troubled. These people who had committed their lives to follow Jesus had just been informed that he would soon be betrayed, that he would be leaving them, and that they would probably find themselves alienated from their communities and places of worship, and maybe even killed.

And if this looming future isn’t urgent enough, Jesus begins to push a whole bunch of information at them, most of which seems unclear. I certainly don’t understand what “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may also be” means. Thomas, asking the question on everyone’s mind, says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus responds, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Oh, right. Of course. No duh. Glad we’ve cleared up. Others have questions too, but Jesus dodges all of them, answering with redirection and more riddles. It’s as if Jesus himself is feeling anxious and rushed by the urgency of the situation. At this point, he’s on the clock, aware that his death is looming. He has one last opportunity to reiterate his most crucial lessons with his most important delegates, and they don’t seem to be getting it. Eventually, he punts, saying “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” and promises that a mysterious Advocate— a “Holy Spirit” of “truth”—will come to tell them what they need to know.

One of the few direct statements that Jesus does make in this final meeting is, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” He repeats the message again before leaving the meeting place and going out to be crucified. Peace bookends death in this passage: later, when the risen Jesus presents himself again to the disciples, he greets them by saying “peace be with you,” and, after showing them his hands and side as proof of his identity, repeats himself: “peace be with you.”

This phrase, though used simply for greetings and goodbyes, would have had a rich, multilayered meaning for the disciples. Biblical scholar Cornelius Plantinga describes the Old Testament concept of “shalom” like this: “The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom they delight. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

He could have offered power or anger or information, but in a moment filled with urgency and gravitas, both for himself and for the disciples, Jesus proffered peace. It’s an audacious move, almost an irresponsible one. Was peace really the most logically sound thing to extend to the disciples as they prepared to carry on their political and moral work in the face of intensifying, life-threatening opposition? Maybe not. But maybe that’s the point. Peace alongside confusion—and perhaps in place of explanation. Peace that surpasses all understanding. Peace that, like the urgency that accompanies it, is divine.

A month ago, a sixth grader from Minneapolis took a canoe trip with me. He had never been camping before and he took in all of the newness quietly, standing in the back of the group with his head cocked slightly to the side. He was in my boat when we approached the first portage, and by the time I’d loaded everyone else up and sent them off, it was just me and him left, responsible for carrying a canoe and two heavy packs. When I lifted the equipment pack onto his slender shoulders and yanked the straps tight, he looked up at me, not in anger or fear, but in puzzlement, as if to ask me how I possibly thought this would work. I took the lead, and after a dozen steps, I turned around in time to see him put his left foot on the first log stair, gather himself, and attempt to take the step, the bottom of the pack bumping against his calves. Without so much as a teeter, he fell over sideways into the bushes. I put my canoe down and walked back, hauling him out of the woods by the ears of the pack. “Good stuff! Let’s give the next one a shot.” He stumbled up to the next step, lifted his other foot onto the edge, and proceeded to topple over into the woods again, this time towards the right. I helped him up the first set of stairs and then, in a rush to get off the portage, pushed on, telling him that I’d be back once I got to the other side.

I passed the rest of my trip-mates, all of them struggling, put my boat down, and went back for him. I found him about 20 yards past where we’d parted ways, on his side, mostly in the bushes, still strapped firmly into the pack. I’m not sure if he physically couldn’t get up, or if he just trusted that I was coming back. I couldn’t see his face. However, I could see the index finger of his right hand. It was poking and prodding ever-so-carefully at the base of a small ox-eye daisy. That little finger stopped me in my tracks. In the midst of a very urgent experience, on an unknown path in an unknown place, strapped into a monstrous bag that clearly weighed more than him, he’d found some peace: a thing to notice, a plant to explore. It was a hard week for him, but I kept noticing that finger. When he fell and banged his knee and curled up in the grass to cry, or when he felt so horribly homesick that he couldn’t even begin to articulate himself, the first thing that I’d see as he began to uncurl his body and rejoin the world was his finger, scratching around in the nearby grass and gravel, searching for and with a peace that is both of and beyond this Earth. In those moments, I knew that things were going to be ok.

I can’t explain whether or not I should be feeling peace. But if I can strive to ensure that my peace is not one of complacency, but of humility. If I can remember that I need to take care of myself in order to serve others, and acknowledge that all I will probably ever have is a little slice in which to make my difference. If I can recognize that this is a persistent calm that I am feeling, one that I don’t understand, but that encompasses me nonetheless. And if I can be even a fraction as graceful when I find myself pulled down in the midst of scary strangeness; if I can live into the peace that I find around and in me, extending my finger bravely to explore the unknown of the present moment, then maybe that is enough for now.