“Over There” was perhaps the signal song from WWI. The lyrics told of the “Great War” over there (Europe,) and how the Yanks would come over and set things to right. The operative phrase for our purposes is the title.
There was an Armistice, but nothing was really fixed. In fact, twenty years later, Part II of the “Great War” began unleashing an evil unparalleled in its scope.
Sitting in our safe homes with a fireplace burning and a golden retriever napping at our heel, we like to think that the war is perpetually “over there.” It is not. It’s here.
By this, I do not reference America’s “endless foreign wars” or the violence pervading our streets, rather, I refer to the war that rages in our culture, the “us vs. them” war to which we have become accustomed, and with which we may even have become comfortable in a perverse way.
More so, I refer to the personal war that rages in the very hearts of many of us. “Peace, peace,” we cry, but there is no peace.
Francis Schaeffer said that above all, we have come to value comfort and security. Maintaining these two goals, we think, gives us peace – assures us of peace. But, it does not. For there is a nagging within us that says, “All is NOT well.” It is NOT “well with my soul.”
When we hate or worse, dehumanize the “other,” whoever he or she may be, all is not well.
When we tolerate this hatred in our fellows, all is not well.
When we lump that which we fear into a homogenous glob of “just alike-ness,” all is not well.
When we subdivide our “tribe” over issues that do not possess the greatest eternal significance, all is not well.
When we say with the Apostle Paul that our stomachs churn in our gut knowing what we should do, but our hands won’t do it choosing to do differently, all is not well.
Thus, the “Great War” is, in fact, not “over there,” but over here – here as close as the cartoonist little devil sitting on our shoulder urging us not necessarily to do wrong but to do nothing. No, all is not well. It never really has been.
But it can be, and life does not have to be this way. Jesus said, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” May I suggest that while He meant that he would, in fact, bring a sword, that sword, that instrument of death and destruction, would bring life and would bring peace by His wielding of that sword.
For He would be welding the sword not against the strange people “over there,” not against the toughs who haunt our streets, not against our former friends who revile us and speak all manner of evil against us, but against our own hearts and minds.
I view Jesus’ “sword” not as a Gladius Hispaniensis, a Roman long sword in the hands of a killing – machine – like Legionary, but as a tiny scalpel held in the hands of a Master Surgeon, a surgeon Who is able enough and skillful enough to perform a necessary surgery upon OUR hearts and OUR minds.
He alone can cut out the Evil that so quickly besets us. He alone can remove the “war gene” with which we are all born. He alone can cauterize the wound of the virus of hatred with which we live. He and He alone.
He comes not with fog horns blaring in the hold of the troop carrier, but He comes in the self-same “still small voice” heard by the prophet Elijah. He does not disembark unbidden upon our heart’s rocky shore with wave upon wave of fresh-faced idealism. Rather, quietly He knocks and gentle upon the believing heart’s door. And He waits… He waits until we are ready to receive Him.
Oh, but when He enters, He comes not for tea and a brief chat. He comes to stay and to dine, to dine as He did with the tax-gatherer Zacchaeus, with the prostitutes, with all the “sinners” of the age.
He sups with us, He persists with us, and He brings to us peace, His peace – not as the world gives, not the mere absence of conflict, not a passive peace, but the kind of peace that can sleep the sleep of an innocent in the stern of a wooden boat in a Galilean wind storm.
Are you possessed of that peace? I pray you are. Along with the various needs of which I am aware in your week, I am praying for this peace to come in and “sup with you.”
Now, may the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. “In Jesus’ Name we pray, AMEN. “
johnthebaptist15 