A few ideas for applying the principle of sabbath, without legalism – Rest & Sabbath, Part 5

This week, I’ve been blogging about sabbath. While the New Testament does not teach that Sunday is the new sabbath day, Jesus teaches the sabbath principle for us in Matthew 11, verses 28-30, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Think about confidence that Jesus wants to give us.  We can lack that confidence.  We can turn off our phone, but then worry that we are missing out.  We can be off work, whether one day per week or on a vacation, but worry that we should be making money.  To that, Jesus says, “Trust in me, take my yoke upon you. Find your rest in me.”

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that Jesus could be talking about the weariness of the Roman taxation system that meant people had to work nonstop to make ends meet. Or Jesus could be talking about the Jewish religious system that was filled with endless rules to follow, making it seem impossible for most people to think that God was smiling over them.

Do you feel those pressures? Endless work, paying off debt, paying bills, saving for retirement, paying for health insurance, and on and on it goes.  Life is expensive.  We can also feel tired about being a so-called good Christian.  We can question if we’re praying enough, praying the right way, serving enough, giving enough. To these frustrations and doubts, Jesus says, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Jesus is our source of true rest.  We spend time with him, rest in him.  One way is through contemplative prayer, where we physically sit with Jesus, listening for him, through his Spirit.  We are so accustomed to noise.  To having sound fill the air around us. We do well to follow Jesus’ example, as he often got away and was alone with his father.  We’ll never get away from all noise, and actually total silence is not the idea.  But we do well to take action to reduce the noise in our lives, and spend time with Jesus. Contemplating who he is, what he is like, how he acts and thinks, asking the Spirit to help us have rest in him, so that we can live more like him. 

What we find in this time with Jesus is that it comes back to our hearts.  He knows what is best is for our hearts to rest in him. 

That kind of time with Jesus is one way we can apply the principle of sabbath in our lives on a regular basis.  Not making a new law, as if we have to do spend thirty minutes each day in silent prayer. Nothing like that.  Instead, with a graciousness to yourself, and with a heart for God, try contemplatively spending time with Jesus on a regular basis.  Could be turning off all noise in the car when you’re driving.  Could be at night before bed.  Could be both.  Could be other times of quiet.  One small way I do this is when I am running.  I choose not to listen to music or podcasts.  Instead I run, listening to the world around me, thinking, sometimes praying.  I don’t always do it well, but when I do, it is running with Jesus.

You can practice this kind of contemplative sabbath individually and together with others.

How will you apply sabbath to your life?

Photo by Viktor Bystrov on Unsplash

The joy of giving your business and phone a regular break – Rest & Sabbath, Part 4

This past week I met friends for dinner.  They live two hours away, were in town, so we met up for dinner on Tuesday night.  We picked out a restaurant that we all liked.

A couple hours before we were to meet, I got a text from them saying that they just looked up the restaurant, and it was closed that day.  My first thought was, “Why would a restaurant be closed on a Tuesday evening?”  But as I thought about it further while working on this week’s emphasis on sabbath, I thought, “I bet the owners and employees appreciate the day off.”  Some establishments close on Mondays or Tuesdays because the weekend is so busy.

I have a friend who works at Chick-fil-A, and he is very grateful for Sundays off.  I don’t know if those business are closed because they are trying to implement sabbath in their lives, but clearly whoever makes those decisions knows that by closing their doors, they are forgoing the opportunity to make money.  That’s one of the reasons why sabbath is so counter-cultural, why sabbath is resistance.

In addition to a business closing for a day, there are many ways we can apply the principle of Sabbath.

In fact, Jesus continues this emphasis.  Not the rule, but the heart of sabbath.  In his sermon on the mount in Matthew 6 verse 24, he teaches, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Sabbath is a radical concept in our world because it resists against our human cultural tendency to depend on money.  Or on what our work will get us. Or to depend on how valuable we feel when we work.  Our identity can be found in our work rather than on Christ.

The prevailing cultural impulse is to make more and more money. Or to feel like you are valuable because you work hard.  So we work like crazy.  Work on your day off, work on vacation. Because of our pastoral role, Michelle and I have wrestled with this for years.  Especially since the onset of the smart phone, texting, and being online all the time.

When I started at Faith Church, I did not have a cell phone.  Our internet here at the church was dial-up.  I was the youth pastor at the time.  The previous pastor and I shared the dial-up line.  If one of us was online, and the other person didn’t realize it, and we dialed-up to check our email or go on the internet, we would bump the other person offline. 

But we could go back further than that, way further.  Imagine being a pastor in the days when they literally rode horseback from house church to house church.  If you needed them for pastoral care, you had to physically go get them, and only if they happened to be in your town.  You could also write letters to them, but that could take weeks to get a response.

Now, the texts, emails, phone calls, etc, are nonstop, right there in my living room, in my office, all day long.  That is the reality of pastoral ministry in 2025. That is the reality of life in 2025.  All that to say, not just pastors, but basically all of us are always on-call.  In my years as pastor, rarely do I go to the hospital in the middle of the night.  Super rare.  What is far more prevalent is answering texts, calls, emails, messages, all the time. For some of you, your work is like that too.  For nearly all of us, life is like that.

How, then, do we truly apply sabbath to our ultra-connected world?  For one, we can turn our devices off.  I want you to do try it out.  Not just silence them.  Turn them off.  Seriously, get out your device and turn it off.  See what it feels like to be uncontactable, unnotifiable, for next hour. When I preached this at my church, I asked everyone to turn their devices off right then and there. Maybe that’s a habit you could try. For a meal, for a Bible study, for a worship service. Just turn your devices off and be present.

Do you turn your devices off on a regular basis?  Or do you keep them on all the time?  I turn my off every night before bed.  Yes, that means my church, family, and friends cannot contact me in the middle of the night.  If they need me, they are welcome to come to my house and get me.  And we do not have a land line phone anymore.  99.9% of situations can wait. Does that sound harsh? I don’t mean it to be. I don’t think it actually is harsh, though I understand how it might sound that way, given our connected culture. But remember that before the advent of the telephone, what I do was the norm, and people were okay.

The act of turning off my phone has done two things.  1. I can sleep better, knowing that I don’t need to worry about the phone.  2. It helps me break my connection to my phone.  I have it with me all day long, which is not healthy.  I need to break the connection to the phone. ((Bonus #3 benefit: turning off my phone daily is also good for my phone, especially in its battery life. My phone is five years old and still functioning fairly well.))

Practicing sabbath is more than turning off your phone regularly. Jesus has more to say. To learn what he has to say, check back to the next post!

Photo by Asif Ali on Unsplash

The gift of sabbath is sometimes very difficult to receive – Rest & Sabbath, Part 3

If you are used to working hard and putting food on your table by working hard, then it can be very difficult to learn to rest.  I am not just talking about ancient Israel.  I’m talking about American life now.  Especially in cultures like the one I live in, Lancaster County.  We are work-oriented.  Generally-speaking, we can have a hard time resting, relaxing, and feeling okay about it.  When our work day is done, in the evening, we’re often thinking what else we need to do around the house, or to try to make more money in a side hustle.  We can feel guilty if we’re not using the time by some societal expectation of production and consumption. 

That’s exactly what some of the Israelites do when God offers them the gift of rest. In the previous post, we looked at how God introduced the concept of sabbath to the newly free nation of Israel. In Exodus 17, verses 27–30, however, we learn that the idea of sabbath took some getting used to, especially for a formerly enslaved people:

“Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where they are on the seventh day; no one is to go out.’ So the people rested on the seventh day.”

In this sabbath rest, God says, “Stop. Trust in me.”  He is desperate for the people of Israel to receive the good gift of rest that he wants to give them.  He knows what they need and what will be good for them.  It is for their best.  Rest is a gift.

But the people don’t trust him enough to provide them.  Their fear that they won’t have enough wins out.  They don’t want to receive the gift of rest. 

There in the wilderness desert, there is no Israelite alive who could remember rest like that.  A whole day off.  They had been enslaved in Egypt for so long that hard work, every day, is all they knew.  What a wonderful gift that God gives them.

The gift of Sabbath is so important, God enshrines the gift as teaching in the Ten Commandments.  In Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments chapter, we read about the Sabbath command in verses 8–11, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

For the nation of Israel, the Sabbath was a day.  A period of 24 hours.  It was part of their covenant relationship with God.  The Old Covenant. 

You and I, as Christians, are not bound to the terms of that covenant, as we are under the New Covenant.  That means we are not bound to abide by a 24 hour period of rest each week.  A Christian can certainly choose to have that 24 hours of rest per week.  It can even be on Sunday.  But no Christian should attempt to make a new law suggesting that Sunday is the sabbath day for Christians.  That is simply not a part of our new covenant that identifies us as Christians, as followers of Jesus. 

The only reason most Christian churches meet for worship on Sundays is because that is the day of the week that Jesus rose from the dead.  Eventually, this practice of Christians having worship services on Sundays became so prevalent, especially in countries that were majority Christian, that it became a day off work.  Some people, interpreting the Bible incorrectly, declared that Sunday is the new sabbath, and tried to make new laws, like the Blue Laws (which we learned about in this post), to make it easier for people to go to church on Sunday and rest. 

But there have always been people who needed to work on Sundays.  Pastors.  Worship leaders.  Law enforcement, medical personnel, etc. 

Instead of making blue laws, what Christians should have done, and what we still strive for today, is to implement the principle of sabbath in our lives regularly.  Not a 24 hour period of rest each week, though that can be a very good thing if you are able to do that. 

Instead, the principle of sabbath is radical trust in God.  Walter Brueggemann calls it resistance.  By practicing God’s principle of sabbath, we are resisting the pressures the world places on us to go, go, go, always doing something, multi-tasking, earning. 

One of the things I love about my extended Kime family vacations to PA state parks is that they are often in cell phone dead zones.  No cell service means we are not getting phone calls, alerts, text messages, emails, and we cannot be on social media.  On those weeks, I turn my phone off, put it on shelf, and let it be.  I give my phone a rest, and in turn I rest from my phone. 

That is sabbath. A week of phone sabbath.  A week of no longer being enslaved to the taskmaster that is the constant noise from our phones that says, “Pay attention to me!”

There are many other ways we can apply the principle of Sabbath. In the next post, we’ll talk about one of those ways Jesus introduced.

Photo by Fab Lentz on Unsplash

What do we do when we come to the end ourselves? – Rest & Sabbath, Part 2

I was outside this past weekend splitting firewood, and a very uncomfortable feeling came over me. The feeling was one part sick in the stomach and another part unsteadiness. I was afraid I was going to faint. I walked inside my house to get a drink of water, closed my eyes, and I saw a bright light behind my eyelids.

I was having a migraine, but not the kind that hurts. That migraine was from heat exhaustion.

We’ve been in a weeks-long heat wave here in the northeast USA, with near nonstop heat and humidity. That morning I had run/walked with my dog for four miles, totally soaked with sweat. I got cooled down in the a/c, got breakfast, and relaxed.

After a few hours, with dry clothes on, went outside again and mowed our grass. That took about 90 minutes, and again I was dripping with sweat. Back inside, I enjoyed the a/c, got lunch, and watched some TV.

A couple more hours later, with new dry clothes on, I went back outside to split wood. I have a lot of splitting to do to get ready for winter. If you’ve ever split firewood by hand with an axe, you know it is great exercise. I filled up a wheelbarrow with logs needing split, split them, and stacked them. I filled up a second wheelbarrow, but after whacking a couple logs, my body started having the symptoms of heat exhaustion. My body was telling me, “You’re done.”

We humans have our limits. As we age, we feel those limits more quickly. We need rest.

Given what Christians historically believe about God, he does not need to rest.  God has unlimited energy.  God could work unceasingly, and it would never affect him.  Ever.  24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, every year.  He is omnipotent, all-powerful. 

But he rested anyway.  Why? 

In Genesis chapter 2, we read the famous story of the God who rests after his six-day work week creating the universe: “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”

Why did God “bless the seventh day and make it holy.”  After working on the previous six days, his act of rest on the seventh declares that rest is a very good thing. 

God rests as an example to us.  He knows that we humans do not have unlimited energy.  We humans are not omnipotent.  Though we sometimes think we can go and go and go, we can’t.  Caffeine sure helps.  But we need rest.  God knows that.  He wants us to have an abundant flourishing life.  One of the ways we experience that flourishing life is by rest, pausing to see God’s character, his goodness.  So God sets an example for us to follow.  We do well to follow the example of God, resting.

Sabbath, then, is quite loving and gracious of God.  He knows that we need rest, a break, and he does not require us to live in a way that is impossible for us. He cares for us.

God’s care shows up in the Exodus account when he rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt.  After they journeyed into the wilderness, however, things got intense.  In Exodus chapter 16 and 17, we read that people of Israel grumble against their leaders Moses and Aaron, accusing them (and God) of leading them out into the desert to die. Though they were enslaved in Egypt, they say, at least they had food.

Can you imagine being a working people who are now unable to work?  For all your life, you’ve worked in order to put food on your table.  You’ve worked hard.  Slavery actually.  It was brutally hard.  The Egyptian Pharaoh squeezed every ounce of energy out of the Israelites.  If you are a Hebrew enslaved in Egypt, of course you hated it, and cried out to God for it to stop.  And God did stop it.  But now you’re in the wilderness desert now.  There is no work and no food. 

Just then God steps in.  In Exodus 17, verses 4-5, God says to Moses,

“I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

God provides!  And did you notice how God provides not only new work and new food, but God also lays a foundation for rest.  Each day they are only to collect enough of the bread from heaven, the manna, for that day.  So each day has a bit of sabbath rest built in.  You’re not supposed to work 24/7. 

And then each week has a longer rest.  On the sixth day, the people were to gather double bread, manna.  Why?  In Exodus 17, verses 21-23 we learn that,

“Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much—two omers for each person—and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He said to them, “This is what the Lord commanded: ‘Tomorrow is to be a day of sabbath rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.’”

What a beautiful system of work and rest, a system that depends on God.  The people can’t solely depend on themselves and their abilities.  The people work, but they don’t overwork, and instead, God provides just what they need. 

Except that some people didn’t seem to place their trust in God’s system. We meet them in the next post.

Photo by Jennifer Lim-Tamkican on Unsplash

Playing sports on Sundays, and hunting, is now legal in PA – Rest & Sabbath, Part 1

The headline reads, “Bill that would end Sunday ban on football and baseball passes Pa. House.”

Take a guess at what year that headline was published.  Believe it or not, 2022.

The article goes on to report, “The state House passed a bill Monday [September 19, 2022] that would repeal a…law that makes it illegal to play football or baseball on a Sunday, except between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.”  In other words, no Sunday morning or evening games.  What was happening on Sunday mornings and evenings?  Worship services. 

When do you think the law they were trying to repeal originally went into effect?

The PA Legislature Act 49 was approved in 1933, titled the “Sunday Baseball and Football Law”.

There are fines involved, if a sports team would disobey the law.  And as you know, the Phillies and Eagles have been playing Sunday evening games for years.  Guess how much the fine is?

$10.

The Sunday Baseball and Football Law is part of a series of laws in Pennsylvania called The Blue Laws.

Blue?  Why blue?  I found a source that suggests two options: 1. Related to the use of the word “blue” for sadness.  The didn’t say if the laws made people sad, or if the laws were intended to cure sadness.  Either makes sense to me.  2. The laws were originally printed on blue paper. 

The intent of the Blue Laws goes way back into PA history, to legislation in 1676 called the Duke of York Laws.  That’s pre-William Penn.  Barely.  Does anyone know when William Penn got the territory?  1681.  Do you remember what kind of Christian Penn was?  A Quaker.  Quakers were quite strict in their view of what a good Christian should or should not do.  Work hard, yes.  Engage is diversion and enjoyment, no.  Apparently, Anglicans were not so holy as Quakers.  At the time, because of our English heritage, there were a lot of Anglicans in PA, and they liked a good party.  But Penn and the Quakers were in charge, so the Quaker leadership of the state enacted laws banning a whole slew of activities

In 1682, the Quaker-led law code prohibited, “Cards, Dice, Lotteries, or such like enticing vain and evil Sports and Games.” Eleven years later, in 1693, the law was expanded, banning on Sundays, “stage plays, masques, revels, bull baits, cockfights, and bonfires.”  In other words, living in PA in colonial days…not very fun. 

Why, though?  What was the purpose of the laws?  One scholar writes, “Pennsylvania’s blue laws” were instituted to give people time to honor the Lord on the Sabbath. Individuals were expected to worship the Creator by attending church meetings and reading the Scriptures. Both work and play were unacceptable forms of behavior on the Lord’s Day.”

Three hundred years later, in 1978 the PA Supreme Court found these laws unconstitutional.  But some of them remain on the books to this day.  No car sales on Sundays at dealerships, for example.  Still can’t do that.  But now, at least, the Phillies and Eagles are in the clear to play sports on Sundays.  And for all you hunters, did you hear that Gov. Shapiro repealed the Sunday hunting ban? That was just last week!

The question I’m getting at is this, how did the people who enacted Blue Laws believe that those laws helped people observe the Sabbath? We’ll talk about that in the next post.

Photo by Ryan Carpenter on Unsplash

My Amish neighbors and their nonstop leaf blowing – Sabbath, Preview

My Amish neighbors are out there with their loud leaf blower at all hours of the day, blowing every speck of rubbish.  Nearly every day. And their blower is loud.  Why?  They absolutely do not need to do that.  Yet they do. I love Lancaster County where I’ve lived all my life. But I have to admit that sometimes it’s a bit much when it comes to work.  

Just ask most Lancastrians the question, “How are you doing?”  

“Busy.”  “Tired.”  “Ready for the weekend.”  “Ready for vacation.”

We Lancastrians aren’t good at rest. In fact, getting rest is an difficulty for most Americans it seems.

An article from the National Institutes of Health reports that, “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep every day. Nearly 40% of adults report falling asleep during the day without meaning to at least once a month. Also, an estimated 50 to 70 million Americans have chronic, or ongoing, sleep disorders. Sleep deficiency can lead to physical and mental health problems, injuries, loss of productivity, and even a greater likelihood of death.” 

Does that relate to you or anyone close to you?  We Americans tend not to be good at rest.  I find myself sitting on the sofa falling asleep, pretty much any time of day.  The older I get the more I find this happening.  But in the middle of the night, when I’m actually supposed to be sleeping, I can toss and turn, get up to use the restroom, and struggle to find that long deep sleep.  So I wake up in the morning still tired.  

Here’s another way to look at it: I call it seminary guilt.  When I was in seminary for both my masters degree and my doctorate, there was always reading to plow through, research, assignments, and papers.  I would feel guilty if I took any free time off and wasn’t doing seminary work.  The deadlines were looming large over my head, and I hated the feeling of knowing that I tons of reading yet to do, assignments to complete, papers to write.  But I would eventually work through all of it, get it done, and the semester would be over.  A weight was lifted, and I was free.  I had no more seminary work to do.  But a funny thing happened.  I still felt like I should be reading, producing, creating.  I couldn’t just rest and enjoy the time off.  I felt guilty for doing nothing.  

Maybe you’ve felt something like that.  Production guilt is embedded in our American cultural psyche.  Some call it the Protestant work ethic.  In the Lancastrian culture where I live, that guilt is rooted in our PA Dutch farming heritage.  Even if a family has no farming in their ancestry, even if they are not from Lancaster, that work ethic, that guilt, is in the air.  It gets in your mindset without you even knowing it.  Leaves you feeling like it is normal to be working nonstop.  Like leaf-blowing every speck of dust from your property, every day.

The result is that rest is not only hard to come by, but it can seem wrong.  With only a few weeks till my sabbatical starts, I am starting a blog mini-series about rest, sabbath, sabbatical, jubilee, and what God has to say about it in his word.  Check back here on Monday and we’ll get started.

Photo by Callum Hill on Unsplash

The second movement to bring peace – Jesus’ love and peace, Part 5

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

The first movement to bring peace – Jesus’ love and peace, Part 4

I recently heard a person in my church family claim that it is wrong for the rainbow to be used by those who promote gay pride. I suggested to this person that the Scriptures do not delineate how the rainbow can be used as a symbol. They agreed, but still felt it was wrong. I disagree with their viewpoint.

Are there people in your church family who think differently from you? What do you do about that? Avoid them?

Read Philippians 2:1-11 again, and I want you to notice the selfless movement in the passage. I believe that selfless movement is precisely how we can achieve peace even when we strongly disagree with people. What direction is the movement? The movement flows two ways in this passage. In this post we look at the first direction, and in the next post, the second direction.

The first direction of movement is outward.

In verses 1 through 4 Paul is talking about relationships in the church.  In verses 1 and 2, the theme is unity.  In verses 3 and 4, the theme is humble otherness.  I would argue that to achieve unity and humble otherness, two incredibly important qualities needed for peace, we must have a viewpoint that looks outward. 

What I mean is that we cannot expect that others will look toward us.  That’s when we expect others to support us, think like us, give to us, serve us. If we expect others to bend to us, then the focus is really on us. Worse, we are less likely to think that we need to serve them, support them, give to them.

Peace and unity point the individuals in a church family to have primarily an outward focused view. Peace and unity encourage us to ask “How can I help, serve, love, give to the others in the church family?  Who is hurting?  Who is marginalized?  Who is oppressed?  Who is difficult?  Who is struggling?  I give of myself to serve them.”  We don’t wait for them to come to ask.  We actively keep our eyes open, and we observe, we seek to put ourselves in their shoes, and try to understand their perspective, what they are going through, so that we are the ones who take the initiative and serve them. 

Paul uses the word “like-minded”.  The word Paul uses there is about attitude.  He is not saying that we need to have all the same ideologies, but we do have the same attitude.  Having the same attitude is especially important because there will be so many times when we have different ideologies.  That same attitude is the foundation for unity.  It a willingness to have a Christ-like attitude while living in close community with people you might differ with when it comes to ideology. 

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You likely can’t change America, but you can change how you live in your own community – Jesus’ love and peace, Part 3

Purple Church is just about the church.  The question of the week, however, “How do we allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America?” is talking about the wider society.  Not just the church. And yet, the inclusion of “the love of Jesus” in the question narrows the answer primarily to Christians. Furthermore, my blog is written to Christians. Do any of my readers have a national impact? Maybe. But my guess is that most of you do not have a national impact. And that is okay. It’s normal not to have a national impact. That doesn’t make you any less important.

So let me reframe the question a bit: How can we allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to the people who live in our local communities?  You and I rub shoulders with a variety of people each day.  Our neighbors, coworkers, family and friends.  What will it take to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace in the communities, workplaces, school, homes, where you and I actually live?

It will take selfless, self-sacrifice, in which we give ourselves in gracious love just like Jesus gave his life.  Read Philippians 2:1–11.

That’s it. 

In my book I talk about how sin, from a togetherness perspective, is selfishness.  Selfishness is a very American way of thinking, because we are culturally conditioned to believe in the power of one, in individualism, in personal responsibility.  I can do it myself.  Like Mr. Incredible says in the Pixar film, “I work alone.”  I need to do this on my own.  There is something less about me if I have to ask for help.  There is something wrong with me if I can’t figure it out.  Have you ever thought any of those statements? I have many times.

Those individualistic ways of thinking are not all bad.  There is something to be said for personal responsibility, for learning new things, for trying new experiences, for stepping out of your comfort zone.  I have written about that often on the blog.  I do believe that we need to step out on our own, start a new business, travel to a new place, volunteer for a new ministry, sing a new song.  Discipleship to Jesus is hampered if we never try new things.

Adventuring and experimentation requires that an individual strike out on their own, at least in part, take a risk, and go for it.  And when we do so, we learn and grow as individuals.  Even when we fail.  Maybe we grow as individuals more quickly and more deeply when we fail, if we have the humble teachability to learn from our mistakes.  Suffice it to say, individualistic goals and achievement are not all bad.

But we can elevate the individualistic approach too high, as if individualistic focus is the most important goal in life.  And that individualistic way of thinking, therefore, can have a negative effect on the way we view the world, including on how we think about God.  If our view of our relationship with God is primarily about you and God, or too much about you and God, then you can miss out on how God views the mission of his Kingdom. 

As humans we are not capable of having a complete view of God.  His ways are ultimately higher than our ways. But we can have a much more complete view of God by pulling Jesus out of the pockets where we hide him, and allow him to show us how he views the world around us.  And in Philippians 2:1-11, Paul does just that.  Of course, as do the Gospels.  Philippians 2:1-11 happens to be a powerful summation of Jesus’ example that I think is precisely the answer we need to the question. More on that in the next post.

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Allowing people to disagree with you (even if you are convinced they are wrong) – Jesus’ love and peace, Part 2

Allowing ourselves to encounter and express the love of Jesus, I believe, starts with humility.  By saying, “I need more of you Jesus.”  By saying, “I don’t have your love all figured out.  I could learn more about it, maybe a lot more.  I could live your love more in the day to day, hour by hour moments of my life, maybe a lot more.  Teach me to love like you love.”  Allowing the love of Jesus to saturate our lives starts with humility.  We allow Jesus to be our teacher, our guide, our mentor.  Allowing the love of Jesus to bring peace in our land, therefore, starts with us.  It requires vulnerability.  Let yourself be loved by him, accept the astounding gift of his love in your life.

Back to the question of the week: what will it take to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America?  As we are examining each part of the question, are you starting to see an answer take shape?  The answer has something to do with Christians, followers of Jesus, freely choosing to make the love of Jesus the pattern and practice of their lives. 

What about those who are not Christians?  Can we force them to believe in and practice the love of Jesus?  We could try, but would we want to?  No. Free will says that we don’t want to force people to believe in or follow Jesus.  We want them to be free, not coerced.  That is the beauty of Freedom of Religion.  And since this is a question that specifically asked about America, I’ll mention America now. 

The United States is a place where all religious views are free to believe and practice their own unique point of view.  In other words, the Christian theology of free will supports and encourages the right of people to not be Christian.  I’m not saying that we agree with the theology of every other religion.  I’m saying that we support their right to be different. That is freedom. 

As a result, when the question mentions Jesus’ love, it means that we do not become belligerent and aggressive if there are people in our country or communities who do not agree with Jesus being God, or that Jesus’ particular kind of love is what they want to live their lives by.  If we want the love of Jesus to bring peace, we live with love, even toward those we disagree with. 

Look at the example of Jesus.  The only people he became aggressive to, were people claiming to be God-followers who were legalistic and unloving, primarily the Jewish religious leaders.  Jesus, in other words was only aggressive toward those in his own religious family.

That said, the kind of love that Jesus lived his life by, the kind of love he taught, is astounding in its purity, and even atheists have commended Jesus’ love as pure. So the question’s focus on Jesus’ love, I think, would hold true for nearly everyone.  And that brings us to the final part of the question, the goal, peace. 

In recent years, we have seen lots of unrest in the United States of America.  I would argue that the amount of unrest we have seen pales in comparison to other eras in our nation’s history.  The Civil War being the worst, by far.  We’re nowhere close that level of unrest. Our current national climate also pales in comparison to the unrest going on in many other places in the world today. With that perspective in mind, do we need more peace in America in our day?  Yes.

To talk about how to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America, I thought about simply re-posting my Purple Church posts from 2021.  Some of you who were here then might remember that.  Talk about unrest.  2020 was awful.  2021 wasn’t much better.  In the summer of 2020, we were dealing with the Covid lockdown and massive disagreements about it.  We were dealing with ethnic conflict.  George Floyd and many, many other African-Americans had been shot.  Third, it was an election year, so we had the intensity of the primaries, the conventions, the millions of political ads, and it was bitter. The upheaval was mountainous.  And it pretty much continued right through 2021.

To address the unrest, I preached a sermon about how in the church, we are neither red nor blue.  We are Christians, first and foremost.  Jesus is our king.  We pledge our allegiance to him.  The church is a family where red-minded people and blue-minded people put the peaceful love of Jesus far above political ideology, and they practicing loving unity.  Red and blue together make purple. One of our goals at Faith Church is to be a purple church, a church family where red and blue mix together in unity, focusing on the love of Jesus that brings them together in peace. 

How do we do that?  How do we mix when our culture has for years now become more and more divided?  When I mention “mix”, I’m talking about peace. How do red and blue have peace?  We’ll talk about that in the next post. 

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