October 15, 2003
Service for Peace and Healing
October 15, 2003
Dear Christian Friends; Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen
We stand as a world in need of peace, and as people in need of healing. The news media, our experience of life, and our own hearts remind us that we are broken people living in a broken world. We come tonight, confessing our need to God, who alone can bind us up and make us whole. We come to pray for peace and healing.
We stand as a world in need of peace. Two years ago, our country’s illusion of security was shattered on September 11 when terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, DC. Our 200 year old record of no war on our shore was broken. As a nation and a super-power, we suddenly knew what it was to be afraid.
Six months ago, our country invaded Iraq. Fear allowed us to believe that Iraq’s unstable dictator had weapons of mass destruction that would be unleashed on us unless we did something first. We even convinced ourselves that he somehow had something to do with the September 11 attacks. Time has proven both of those assumptions to be incorrect. We did overthrow an unjust political regime. We hoped to liberate Iraq and bring peace to its people, but things haven’t quite worked out as we hoped. There’s still a war going on over there, even though we don’t call it that now. People are still fighting and dying, for a variety of causes that are a mystery to us—and perhaps even to those who are doing the fighting.
We stand as a world in need of peace.
In Israel and Palestine—God’s Holy Land—war also rages on. Four thousand years ago, God promised Abraham a land. God promised him generations of descendants, and promised that through this nation called Israel, all nations would be blessed. Centuries later, when the descendants of Abraham were liberated from slavery in Egypt, God sent them back to the land, and warned them that they were never to oppress the foreigner or the stranger, for they themselves had once been foreigners and strangers in a strange land.
And yet war rages on over that sliver of land at the east end of the Mediterranean, land that both Israelis and Palestinians call home. Neither is a blessing to the other, and both see each other as foreigners and strangers.
We stand as a world in need of peace.
In Iraq, in Israel and Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Liberia, in the Ivory Coast, the Sudan, in Indonesia, Central America, and in places too numerous to name, war rages on. The reason? Human selfishness. Somebody wanting more than somebody else has. More land, more control, more power.
Because of our sinful human desires, we stand as a world in need of peace.
And so we come tonight to pray for peace, and for the courage to act for peace.
And we stand as a people in need of healing. We need to be healed of our waring madness, of our selfish ambitions that cause us to want to wield power over those who are weak. We need to be healed of the arrogance that separates us from God, and from one another. We need healing for our souls, our spirits, and our bodies. We are broken people living in a broken world.
We stand as people in need of healing.
Tonight, we confess that only God can heal what ails us. And lest you think that is an impossible request, let me remind you that God has already healed the biggest rift of all—the rift between death and life.
God began by sending his Son into the world. God bridged the distance between heaven and earth, between God and humanity, by becoming human, so that we might know him here. He sent his Son so that we might see first-hand what his gentle rule of peace and justice looked like. And then he allowed the Son to die for us, so that we might never die in the same old way again. Then glory of glories, God raised the Son from the dead, so that we too, might live a new life. God could not bear to separated from us in life, and so he came to us in Jesus, to heal us and make us whole. God could not bear to be separated from us in death, and so he raised the Son, so that we might live with him in eternity.
If God can heal the rift between heaven and earth, between God and humanity, between life and death, then God can certainly heal those things we bring to him now. AMEN
I ask you now to join me in prayer to God, who alone has the power to bring peace and healing.