As I’m typing this, my wife is at Refreshing Recreation. The program is an effort her organization started to provide a place for local families living in hotels to have a delicious meal and a gym for their kids to play sports and other games. Our school district has so many families living in local hotels that school buses stop their to pick up the kids during the school year.
Imagine being a young family with only the amenities of a hotel to raise your kids. While there are wonderful community parks about a mile or so from some of the hotels, what do you do when the weather isn’t conducive to the park? So Refreshing Recreation provides a once per month reprieve. I bring it up because someone had to think of it. Someone had to have awareness of the difficulty of living long-term with kids in a hotel.
But so often we are busy with our own lives, and we don’t see the need. This week, I’ve been trying to answer the question: “How can we allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America?” In the previous post, I suggested that Philippians 2:1-11 describes two movements that can help us answer the question.
In addition to movement that is heading outward (see previous post), in Philippians 2, verses 4-8, Paul describes peace as movement that is downward. Our attitude should be that same as that of Jesus, and Paul says Jesus moved down.
Jesus started at the top. In heaven. The pre-existent Christ, the second person of the trinity, God the Christ, living a life of perfect glory in heaven. It gets no better than that.
But Jesus, Paul reminds us, was willing to give up all of that. Not for him, but for us. The movement of verses four through eight is downward movement. Jesus just keeps lowering himself, emptying himself. From heaven to earth, he took on a body.
God took on a body.
For God to leave heaven is one thing. For God to dwell on earth is another. Gods visiting earth is a fairly common story across various world religions. What is not common is the idea of gods continuing that downward movement by taking on a body. God who leaves heaven, comes to earth, and then takes on a human body, is significant.
But notice the downward movement doesn’t stop there. Jesus is willing to go to the cross and die. God dies.
That downward self-sacrificial love of Jesus is the second movement of peace. Downward action is how we ourselves as individuals and together as local churches express ourselves to the community around us to bring peace.
Jesus calls us to follow his downward example of sacrificial love. During the three years he spent with his disciples, he taught that kind of love. He called them to look outward, beyond themselves to others. And he taught them to look downward, to those who were considered to be below them in society. See Matthew 25 and his parable of the sheep and the goats.
Downward sacrifice is precisely how Jesus lived. Follow his example, he taught his disciples and us, “Die to yourself.” Take on his heart, his attitudes, his sacrificial ways, and serve others.
That’s how we allow the love of Jesus to work in us and through us, both as individuals and together. To bring peace to our local communities, we sacrificially give of ourselves to love the people and communities around us.
I’m not saying downward sacrifice is a guarantee to bring peace. If we love enough and love rightly we are not guaranteed to bring peace. But that kind of sacrificial love is the pattern of Jesus. It is how he brings peace. Jesus pursued people with love. He welcomed people with love. He sacrificially gave his life. He spoke truth and matched his words with kindness and sacrifice for others.
Peace comes through looking outwardly, beyond ourselves, and being willing to go down, to share ourselves sacrificially, especially with those on the margins, the oppressed, those mistreated, the poor, the hurting.
Jesus came to bring the peace of his Kingdom. It is a much richer, deeper, holistic peace than a Pax Romana. Jesus’ way is not peace through strength, it is peace through sacrifice. Sacrificial, relational, costly love.
Who do you need to love with that kind of selflessness? Where is there a lack of peace in your life? How can you lovingly reach out to the person who has a bumper sticker on their car or banner in their yard promoting an ideology you disagree with?
If we want to bring peace in our land, Jesus teaches us that it starts with us where we live. It starts when we pursue outward, downward peace through sacrificial love like he did.
Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 