On Becoming Instruments of Peace

A sermon offered on the Feast Day of St. Francis at St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, Winter Park, Florida, October 8, 2017

Both here and in all your churches throughout the whole world. We adore you, O Christ and we bless you. Because by your holy cross [+] you have redeemed the world. Amen

I must confess that I have struggled mightily this week trying to find inspiration – indeed, even clarity of mind – to create this morning’s sermon. It wasn’t that the lessons themselves did not hold plenty of fine material or that the lives of Francis and Clare of Assisi had nothing to offer us. They do. The truth was that I, like perhaps many of you, simply found myself overwhelmed by a tidal wave of ugly, heartbreaking news from a world around me that seems to have gone completely crazy.

As I walked into the sanctuary Tuesday morning to lead Morning Prayer I found the litany that had been used the night before at the vigil following the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Suddenly my inspiration appeared.

The vigil prayers used a response that comes directly from the Prayer Attributed to St. Francis which is found in our Book of Common Prayer. That prayer was not actually written by St. Francis and first appeared `during the period of the first world war in France. But it reflects the spirit of St. Francis and it also speaks so readily to the tumultuous times in which we live.

And so I offer a meditation using this prayer as my beginning point this morning and referencing the Morning Prayer service of our Book of Common Payer. I invite you to enter into that meditation with me. At the end of each meditation I will pose the invocation: O Lord. I ask that you would be kind enough to respond each time: Make us instruments of your peace. 

Instruments of Peace

The prayer begins. Lord, make us instruments of your peace.

Because, in all truthfulness, Lord, there has been very little peace this week. Our country has been ripped apart by yet another mass shooting. We have watched in horror as the bodies of young women and men were carried from a public square designated for peaceable assembly turned into a slaughter house, their life energies draining from their bodies before our very eyes. It was another senseless massacre in a country completely paralyzed in dealing with its addiction to firearms, the graphic symbols of our fear and mistrust of one another.

Lord, you called us to be peacemakers, but we cannot create peace without your help, your guidance, your wisdom. Our response to the promises we make in our Baptismal Covenant - “I will with God’s help” - reflects our need for your help to live into any of those promises. Lord, we need your help now.

Oh Lord, Make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let us sow love;

Lord, there is no small amount of fear and loathing in our country and our world today. Our social media has largely devolved into a cesspool of name calling, fake news and foreign espionage. Our news media has become obsessed with a flood of disrespectful and dehumanizing remarks from the Twittersphere. The image of G-d that every living being bears has long since been lost in this assault.

In Myanmar, whole villages of your children are being slaughtered because they are Muslim in a Buddhist country. In our own country, your Muslim children are the targets of enormous fear and loathing often with deleterious results. Lord, we cannot love our brothers and sisters if we never come to know them. Give us courage to question our self-serving caricatures of the Other and to meet them on their own terms. This day, we need your saving health among all nations.

Oh Lord, Make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is injury, pardon;

Lord, there is enormous suffering in our world today. In Puerto Rico, our fellow

Americans struggle to survive. In Florida and Texas we dig out from the assault of killer hurricanes while in Mexico the people dig out of the devastating effects of a killer earthquake. We feel overwhelmed, Lord. We know that in your own lifetime that where there was suffering, you were there, Lord. Richard Rohr reminds us that if we want to find Jesus in the Gospels, look for where the suffering is. As followers of Jesus, we are called to do likewise. Guide and empower us in our quest to be agents of healing in a suffering world, Lord, for only in you can we life in safety. 

Oh Lord, Make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is discord, union;

Public hanging of gay men, Iran

Lord, this week our nation’s ambassador to the United Nations voted against a resolution to prohibit the death penalty imposed on people simply because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. In our own Anglican Communion, the opportunity to offer a prayer for Las Vegas afforded our Presiding Bishop Curry to begin the evensong for the gathered Anglican bishops was objected to by bishops from the schismatic Anglican Communion of North America. Even in the tragedy of mass murder, we find it difficult to lay down our partisan differences to even pray together. In the meantime, the vulnerable among us wonder where we stand in your church, in our nation, our world and who will stand with us.

Lord you called us to be agents of unity in the Way of Jesus, not gatekeepers of conformity to socially constructed belief systems.  This day we need your guidance, O Lord: Guide us in the way of justice and truth.

Oh Lord, Make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is doubt, faith;

Lord, it is easy to doubt your existence in tumultuous times when so much tragedy and terror can be found at every turn. But what we lack is not faith, it is trust. And it is not hard to understand why that would be.

Yet we know that in the midst of every tragedy you are there, Lord. In the sorrow of death and the joy of birth and at every point in between, you are there. As the Franciscans have taught us, we come from G-d, we exist in G-d and we return to G_d.

Lord, you come to us in unexpected ways; in the random acts of kindness of strangers, in the willingness of those we have offended to forgive us, in the second chances that changed our lives that we may not have deserved. Our lives might be the only Gospel others ever hear. Help us to remember that you are with us always in the living of your Gospel, Lord: Show us your love and mercy; For we put our trust in you.

Oh Lord, Make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is despair, hope;

Lord, there are so many who are in despair around us. And if I am being honest, I must admit that there are days I am among them. Our world seems perched on the edge of major evolutionary change. And yet, the backlash against that change has predictably come to the fore. We hear threats of nuclear war, assaults on immigrants and people of color, and many of the most vulnerable in our nation face the threat of the loss of health care they need to remain alive. Some days the world seems grim, Lord.

Help us to be instruments of peace, Lord, to assist you in assuring that “the hope of the poor [will not] be taken away.”  But not us alone, Lord, for we absolutely need your help in these endeavors. In you, Lord is our hope. And we believe that our hope shall never be taken away.

Oh Lord, Make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is darkness, light; and Where there is sadness, joy.

Francis was born into a time of darkness and sadness. There was much suffering all around him. On the edge of town there were lepers who were required to wear bells to warn others to avoid them. The working poor were exploited in Assisi just as they are in our own time and derided by the privileged like Francis’ own family. War between the egocentric merchant princes was a constant threat. And periodically the plague, the great equalizer, would sweep through the region taking an enormous toll.

Francis knew deep in his heart that things were not as they should be in the world around him. But when a Byzantine cross began to speak to Francis in a deserted San Damiano Church, it did not speak of hopeless despair. Rather it called Francis to “rebuild my church.” And he immediately began gathering stones to do just that.

We, too, are called to be agents of light in a dark world, to be embodiments of joy in a world filled with sadness. We, too, are called to rebuild God’s church and our beloved country because they both, indeed, are falling into ruin.

Lord, we need your help to live into those undertakings in our own lives to which you have called each of us. Be with us this day and in the days to come. Create in us clean hearts, O God, and sustain us with your Holy Spirit.

For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Oh Lord, make us instruments of your peace. AMEN.

 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

 © Harry Coverston 2017

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++