“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”

This past week, a man died in Hartford. His sons are filled with grief; his wife does not know how she can go on living without him. She gets some peace from remembering his long and rich life, from treasuring his love, from appreciating his contributions to this world. She gets consolation from her faith that, as the Burial Office says, “To your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.” But she also knows anguish over this death, and God’s peace seems elusive.

A month ago, 33 people died at Virginia Tech. Some of their parents returned there this weekend to receive the degrees their children would have been awarded had they lived. Some families did not go because their hearts were too heavy to endure it. Those whose hearts are broken find it hard to believe that “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” You have heard such platitudes, haven’t you? I have said them myself. “Everything will be all right. He’s better off now that his suffering is over. You always have your memories.” But in the midst of life’s tragedies, such pious pronouncements fall flat. When the disease is terminal, when the divorce is final, when the last pay check has been cashed, we need to believe in something bigger and better. We need to believe Jesus’ words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid. MY peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you.”

The peace that the world gives always falls short. The world’s idea of peace is the avoidance of struggle, escape from pain. Peace, we are assured, can be obtained if we pop a pill, take a drink, buy a car, watch TV, or go on vacation.

But those who pursue the world’s peace are doomed, I think, to become either frustrated or escapist. If peace is the absence of conflict or pain, then, in an absolute sense, peace is an impossible dream. Even in the face of the wonderful news that Ian Paisley and Bertie Ahern are sharing the leadership of Northern Ireland, the first time Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders have not been fighting since the Battle of the Boyne – even in the face of this news, we know that peace will not always reign in Ireland, that long nursed angers will surface sometime again. And so we become frustrated when we realize that in this life there will always be discord and pain, or if not frustrated, we try to escape to a world of our own making.

Those who know the peace of Christ, however, live in the real world with all its conflict and pain, and they face that conflict with the confidence that God is present and powerful in spite of it all, that God is always working to bring about reconciliation.

Christians believe that Christ’s peace comes in the middle of defeat, through sacrifice, blood and death. Only a week after his crucifixion, Jesus came to his disciples bearing his wounds and proclaimed the same words we heard this morning. “Peace be with you.” It is as if he were saying, “See, here are my hands and my feet, marked by the signs of betrayal and mockery, by spiritual desolation and by death itself. Here I am standing among you as living proof that God’s power is greater than any evil, therefore, be not afraid.”

In the valley of the shadow of death, nothing can save us but the peace of God. Alcohol, busyness of work, acquiring possessions, revenge – none of these can bring peace. We can get help from support groups, therapy, the passing of time, and financial support, but none of these can give the true peace of mind and heart and spirit that is at the core of our desire. It is only God’s peace that can break through the walls we have erected and shine light into our dark nights. A long time ago, St. Augustine said it another way, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

There would be little hope for us if Christ’s peace were not vastly different from the world’s peace. We have heard the vain promises of “a war to end all wars” and we still make bombs. We have waged a War against Poverty and still the homeless lie in our streets. Peace seems to elude us.

I was told the story of a family of three who lived in London in World War II. After a bombing raid that killed the woman, the father and son searched frantically in the rubble to find her body. After the son recognized the futility of the search, he stopped and looked up at the night sky. The father stopped digging too and took his son’s hand and stood crying. “It’s going to be all right, father,” the boy said, “God is hanging out the stars again.”

Nothing could ever compensate for the loss of that precious woman, but God’s stars say that peace can come despite the loss. God’s peace promises that there is a meaning and purpose to this world, that tragedy does not have the last word, that we are in God’s hands even when we are wrenched by grief. God’s peace passes all understanding so it is a peace that reigns even in a world where young people die in Iraq and where our church is debilitated by tensions about sexuality, and where we wonder whether the Mayor of our city is telling the truth when he says he doesn’t read his email.

So how can some people walk in peace while others insist on their right to be unforgiving and become prisoners of their own rancor and jealousy and vengeance? How can some people see stars in a dark sky while others allow a traffic jam to ruin their day?

The answer, I think, comes in the introduction that comes just before today’s Gospel reading, for the reading is the answer to a disciple’s question: “Lord, why do you reveal yourself to us and not to the rest of the world?” As we listen to Jesus’ response, the answer to our question becomes painfully obvious. The problem is not with God’s choosiness but with our own. Jesus tells us to forgive – and we insist on holding grudges. Jesus tells us not to be afraid – and we bind ourselves up in fear. I have seen it this week and maybe you have too – a mother who refuses to go to her son’s table for Mother’s Day because she’s angry at his behavior, a man in the middle of a divorce who won’t submit some information on time because she didn’t get hers in on time and so they both are mired in their anger and unable to move on to a new life ahead.

The answer is that God chooses to come and dwell where there is room for love. “Those who love me will keep my word,” Jesus says, “and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” God needs room in our hearts to dwell in them, and when our narrowness and fear and hatred and selfishness get in the way, we live without peace. As one of the petitions for healing in our Prayer Book prays, “So fill my heart with faith in your love that with calm expectancy, I may make room for your power to possess me.”

At the end of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe got the idea to institute a holiday called Mother’s Day as a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War. Mrs. Howe believed that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level. And so she wrote this Proclamation:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts….
Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be to tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Let [us] meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let [us] then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing … the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women … may be appointed … to promote the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Hmmm. It seems that Hallmark and the florist industry may have diluted Julia Ward Howe’s high goals a bit. But we mothers know that there is something more important to Mother’s Day than azalea bushes and going out to dinner with the kids. Jesus taught us what it is. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” May all of us who are mothers and that is all of us who give birth – birth to the things of the earth and the policies of this nation and the spirit in our neighborhoods, let all of us then, be children of God and people of peace.