Peace and Welcome

Sermon

Jeremiah is considered the “Debbie Downer” of the prophets that we read today and admittedly, he is. Considered also having authored the Book of Lamentations, Jeremiah laments. He grieves, mourns, and cries out—almost desperately and panickedly—worried about everyone ignoring what the Lord has told him is to come: the destruction of their kingdoms and end to the short-lived period as the ruling power.

And because they have survived each attack and the next, each king has had reason to ignore the warnings of not only Jeremiah, but the widows and orphans without homes, the laborers forced to work in untenable conditions and given just barely enough to survive, their priests and community leaders. Why worry when their kingdoms have held on strong?

About five years later, those kingdoms fell.

The kings heard the warnings of the Debbie Downer, the lamenter, the weeper, the complainer, the overly emotional, or “the one who just won’t be grateful,” but never bothered to wonder, “why”?

The “why” is heartbreakingly almost too familiar across time and place: unfair wages; exploitation of women and children; physical, structural, and social marginalization of “out” groups. And as it becomes so familiar, so does it become easier for those with power to become apathetic about those without power. Why worry when their kingdoms have held on strong regardless of their worries and cries?

These empires that worshipped false idols and had recreated the very conditions of oppression from which they had been liberated came crashing to their inevitable demise because the kings ignored these “whys” and, as Jeremiah laments about over and over again, they ignored the consequences of allowing this way of being to persist: an inevitable demise.

Because while one prophet lamented in the name of the Lord, other prophets, in the name of the Lord, cheered victory over enemies.

“I have broken the yoke of their king. The Lord says I will bring back the kings and exiled, for I will break the yoke of the king.”

Jeremiah’s declaration is a stark contrast to Hananiah’s prophetic claim in the name of the same Lord.

The prophets before you similarly spoke of war, famine, and revenge against countries and kingdoms. What has that left us with? Ongoing war, continued famine, insatiable motivations for revenge. Instead, trust the prophets who look to treat countries as neighboring instead of warring. Trust the prophets who speak of famine as the unnecessary consequence of human injustice. Trust the prophets who speak of repair and relationship rather than conquer and conquest. Trust the ones whose calls for peace, result in peace.

The prophets before Hananiah have similarly made claims to build a better world, for a world of peace, and each time, their claims of peace have resulted in war, famine, and the further widening of deep fractures, and all in the name of the Lord.

Those who call for peace and do so truly in the name of the Lord will be known as such because it will have resulted in peace.

In the history of the world, in the history of the U.S., and even for individuals, war leads to greater wars, periods of peace to collective and sustained peace.

Peace is never achieved through war. War never achieves peace.

Peace is achieved by the pursuit and presence of justice and equity across humanity, regardless of one’s circumstance of birth. It is a part of how we recognize the presence of God in our midst, the kin-dom of heaven breaking through barriers hardened over generations—dandelions finding a way to light through cracks in the pavement.

And peace, in the name of God, we find, has little to do with whether someone claims it is in the name of the Lord, and more with whether the actions towards peace are of the Lord.

And this is why so many people today have a hard time distinguishing between Christians who are Christian nationalists and Christians who aren’t. Throughout the history of the United States, Christianity as a whole has faced an internal conflict. The Goodness of Christianity has found ways to resist against the persistent Evils of Ideologies guised as Christianity, like birthing the true Church as the primary resistance against the oppressive religion of the enslavers, like becoming beacons of hope for individuals and communities that did not have them, or by ensuring that at least some institution would find ways to feed the hungry, shelter the unhoused.

But the Goodness of Christianity has not been given the opportunities to thrive and flourish, instead always forced to break through a way of being long-established by the Evils of Ideologies guised as Christianity.

The Goodness of Christianity has never really gotten a chance to shine; peace has never had a chance to show off its stuff because oppression, greed, fear, selfishness, protectiveness, and guardedness have remained the dominant and identifying features of “Christianity.”

Still, baseball teams will protest Pride Month in the name of the Lord; applaud Bibles in religiously diverse classrooms because it is in the name of the Lord; strip women away of choice; treat people of different race, nationality, or ethnicity as if their perspective is any less or more than another’s just because it feels less or more familiar, in the name of the Lord (whose image we believe humanity is created in); human beings, many children, are killed, in the name of the Lord.

All in the name of the Lord of love and peace.

It’s very easy to say. It’s very easy to claim belief. It’s very easy to act for a few hours each Sunday, or take ten minutes to film a TikTok ad for some AI prayer app.

Peace and Love, Love and Peace. Welcome and Belonging. Belonging and Welcome. Thank you, God. Amen.

It makes sense, then, why the dominant narrative told about Christianity is such a negative one.

For all the atrocities that have been committed in the name of Christianity, or in response to such atrocities, the truth of peace prophesied about and realized in the life of Jesus Christ has yet to overcome the truth of oppression in the name of Christianity.

So, when someone tells me they despise Christianity, hate Christians, think we’re all hypocrites, judgmental, and hateful, it’s hard for me to blame them. Oftentimes, they are people who have been hurt by the Church, told they don’t belong, told they need to behave in one way or another, told that they need to speak a certain way, pushed out of a community defined by the idea of belonging. They are people who have lost faith in the community-based institution because those institutions have failed their communities. They are the workers and laborers unwilling to go to Church because their working hours rob them of their weekends and time with family, because they must also then dress and smell some type of way.

How can I blame them when I know I’ve experienced this myself, with only a few people standing up for me, and some pleading with me that I must remember to be gracious and patient—while I have to stay resilient to the onslaught of dehumanizing treatment because “that’s what Jesus calls us to.” It was Christians who made me squint my eyes and stand next to another Asian person so they could laugh at how similar we looked, even though we looked completely different. It was Christians who told my friends their sexuality wasn’t how God designed them, even though they were created in the image of God. It was Christians who told me that I should extend grace to racists.

While Evil Ideologies guised as Christianity are allowed to persist, allowed to dominate the social and political landscape, Goodness is forced to navigate underneath, absent of any real platform, not supported by any validating pillars or given any influence to establish the peace desperately seeking to break its way out through the rubble.

“Evil flourishes when the good do nothing.”

For it to be known that the Lord has truly sent us, for us to recognize who we do not know who have been sent by the Lord, in order for us to recognize in ourselves that we are of the Lord, with our prophesying of peace must come peace.

As a community, do we proclaim peace and then speak out against the violence committed by the police? We have to.

As a community, do we proclaim peace and then teach obedience and duty to women? No.

As a society, do we claim to be a country of immigrants, and then violently separate, detain, and deport immigrants? How do we reconcile this?

As a church, do we claim to be Christians, and then ensure people are no longer hurt by “Christians”? Is our speaking of peace known by the peace it brings?

As an individual, do your claims of peace and calm result in a peaceful and calming home?

The Church, or the name of Jesus, or the label of “Christian” is not the reason I still believe in Jesus.

I’ve managed to remain faithful to Jesus because I have had to have faith that the kind of tension and unwelcome I experienced in the Church or spaces dominated by white supremacy was not of the Lord, not of Christ, not a prophesying of peace.

I would love to tell you that I know for certain that people who don’t care about status or excess wealth are the happiest and healthiest—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. But really, I can never know everything going on in someone’s life and world, and I can never know for certain just how happy or healthy someone is.

What I can say for certain is that I’ve learned how silly it was for my younger self to ever envy the illusion of status and wealth because those who prioritize, idolize, or are strictly motivated by status, excess wealth, or selfish ambition, will, by nature, never be able to satisfy their goals or meet their needs; their “joys” are often kept afloat by fleeting moments of ecstasy rather than joy being rooted and sustained in community.

Eventually, the sense of assurance that comes strictly from the self, from social status, arbitrary wealth, or material goods reveals itself to be an illusion, and many are left yearning for the kinds of assurances and sense of peace possible through community and spirituality.

On the other hand, what faith guides me to believe, and how God has been revealed to me throughout my entire life, is that I can place my trust wholly in the reality and truth of an already established, in-breaking kin-dom of heaven and take every step in my day and life as if each step has the potential to uncover a little bit more of the kin-dom of heaven. And by reorienting my entire being has allowed me to meet inspiring people from all walks of life, allowed me to understand individual worlds and community cultures, allowed me to learn new things about humanity in every encounter, allowed me to recognize the presence of God in nature and its relationship to humanity, and opened me to recognize just how small of a peek we have of the image of God.

And through every non-negligible, and still miniscule, encounter that reveals more about God to me, I learn that I find myself that much more able to and trusting that I am wading in the peaceful waters of hope.

The call Jesus gives to the disciples is the same as the one Christ gives to us, every time—an invitation to welcome, an invitation to peace, an invitation to righteousness, an invitation to blessedness, and an invitation to see and hear those whose lives and experiences yearn for peace and justice amidst conflict and injustice—the invitation to step into and encounter the kin-dom.