Scripture: Psalm 29Amos 5:18-242 Peter 3:8-14

Text: Be zealous to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. 2 Peter 3:14

If you were an astro-physicist from Kitt Peak Observatory, or a nuclear scientist from the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, how do you suppose you would interpret these words?

With a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burned up. (New Jerusalem Bible)

You might nod your head in recognition. You might say, "Well, those are the words of an uninformed layperson." But they do represent some reasonable assumptions we have made about a possible scenario for the planet earth.

With a cataclysmic astronomical event, with the predictable death of our local star, the sun, the sky will vanish as the oxygen and ozone are drawn off. The scientist might say that the fire and falling apart of the base elements is a primitive description of a nuclear explosion. But, most of all, scientists might express amazement with the realization that such a primitive, yet possible, prediction was made by a former fisherman who happened to live 2,000 years ago, and was a follower of Jesus - Simon Peter, by name.

Perhaps even more perplexing, in Peter's prediction, is the fact that the world was, by experience, a relatively stable platform on which to live. It shook occasionally with earthquakes, or erupted with volcanos and was inundated by floods, hut generation after generation endured it, and had every reason to believe, by their experience, that it would always be that way.

Yet Ezekiel, Jesus, Peter, and John of Patmos, author of the book of Revelation, were convinced otherwise. They believed there was something else in the mind of God.

In order to comprehend that idea, which is in the mind of God, it would be helpful to orient ourselves as to where we are in this series of Lenten worship services on the "Sevenfold Path to Peace."

Last week, with the question, "Is peace attainable?" we suggested that the answer depends on our own willingness to recognize that wars start within ourselves and ripple out across the sea of humanity. Because Jesus had something else in mind, peace, he was able to project a quiet calm into nature itself, quieting the raging storm. Since that principle is true, we too, with peace in mind, could quiet the temptests which overwhelm our world. God has given us far more power to bring about what is in the Creator's mind than we have been willing to apply.

Today, in our search along the biblical Sevenfold Path to Peace, we find ourselves in a different place. If the peace which Jesus had in mind was able to calm the stormy sea of Galilee, then the peace which Peter sees in the mind of God is not ultimately the submission of nature, but its replacement with a new form, a nature not subject to decay, destruction, and turmoil. The new creation is inevitable ... and it is peaceful. There is, in Peter, and you ... and me, something which yearns for that time, beyond this earth's death.

But STOP!

The prophet Amos cries to us from the pages of the Old Testament a perplexing warning:

Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness and not light. Amos 5:18

Amos waves the warning flag because he knows that what we live in the interim, between now and the day of the Lord, has an impact on us and on our world.

The little negativities we send out, like ripples from our minds, eventually strike some distant barrier and, with accumulating force, come back on us with terrible destructiveness.

Even that we which we imagine to be peace can have terrible consequences, because we want peace on our terms, not peace on God's terms.

What Amos lays bare in our minds is the fact that there is an inconsistency between what we profess, on the one hand, and do, on the other! Listen to his words,

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. (Amos 5:22)

Why would God not want our attempts at reconciliation and peace?

The answer is encapsulated in what God does want,

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:24)

God is telling us, through Amos, that peace is something more than the desire to have a secure placid existence. Something more than a world without nature's destructive storms and humanity's manipulative control over the social order ... a control which results in the denial of rights, which, in turn, leads to war.

Peace is the doing of justice.

In James Goldman's play, The Lion In Winter, from which I quoted last week, and in which Henry II is not only contending with the question of which of his three sons will succeed him on the throne, but also with the constant threat from France, he says;

Since Louis died, while Philip grew, I've had no France to fight. And in that lull, I've found how good it is to write a law or make a tax more fair, or sit in judgment to decide which peasant gets a cow. There is, I tell you, nothing more important in the world. And now the French boy's big enough and I'm sick of war.1

"To write a law or make a tax more fair, or to sit in judgment to decide which peasant gets a cow." "Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." That is the stuff peace is made of. That is what God has in mind ... what God desires.

A person who has served on the field of battle in a war summarizes his experience like this: "War is brute force. On the battlefield there is no justice. Right does not prevail. There is no mercy. Land and people are destroyed. There is not any law, only chaos. Survival is largely a matter of chance. War is not fair. It is inhumane."

Perhaps it is easy for a congregation of people, even a nation of people, to brush off the words of preachers, spoken from the philosophical contemplations of their studies, or in pulpit reflections on biblical witness of ancient prophets. It is more compelling and persuasive to hear the plea for "peace-which-is-the-result-of-justice," from an individual who has survived the war! War does not create justice. Justice creates peace.

The Apostle Peter said, following his description of the end of the world, "But according to (God's) promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." (2 Peter 3:13) "In which righteousness dwells." That's the fairness of which Henry II spoke and for which he yearned.

If we hear Amos rightly, if we take Peter's vision of the new heavens and new earth seriously, then the conditions which cause us to be separated, estranged from God, the conditions which made war possible, are those conditions in which injustice is perpetuated.

It was true in Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and a myriad of dictatorial regimes such as Batista's Cuba. It is logical to conclude that the injustices we foster will not only generate the storms of war; they will inevitably ripple out to the destruction of the earth itself, thus fulfilling Peter's pre-scientific description of the sky's disappearance and the breaking apart of the elements in fire.

No wonder Peter says to us,

Therefore, beloved, since you wait for these, be zealous to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. (2 Peter 3:14)

God engages us in the work of justice, because, when all else is said and done, then the new order is established. The only thing which will remain, when the dust is settled, will be righteousness.

God wants, very much, for you and me to be participants in that new order, that new peace. It is possible only if we start our participation now. Desire peace with deeds of justice and we all might take the next step on the "Sevenfold Path to Peace."

1. The Lion in Winter, James Goldman, (Random House, N.Y. 1965, used by permission. Act 1 Scene 5.)