Some time ago, I handled a legal matter in which a property owner hired my client—a sand company—to dredge sand from his riverside property. The owner would then get a percentage of the profits from the sand that the sand company sold. The contract envisioned the sand company selling “all saleable materials” dredged. However, during the term of the contract a dispute arose about what this meant, and a lawsuit ensued.
It was a complicated case with lots of claims going back and forth, but in essence, here’s what happened. As a part of the dredging process, in addition to the typical sand materials a dredge might pull from a body of water, it also pulls out materials that are too fine to process into sand—superfine materials suspended in water, a kind of slurry waste product. To process the superfine suspended materials that make up the slurry into anything usable for any purpose would be cost prohibitive, and even if it could be sold, which my client maintained was implausible, it certainly couldn’t be sold at anything approaching the breakeven point, much less a profit. As such, my client deemed the material not saleable. The property owner, on the other hand, believed this slurry-like material might, after being specially processed, be sold as a very cheap grade of sand on which he should get his percentage. After about three years, the case settled out of court, with the parties still maintaining differing definitions of the term in question.
At this time of year, the word Peace comes up a lot, but it too can mean very different things to different people. When we sing about and hope for Peace on Earth at Christmas, we’re thinking of one thing, but when peace is used in the Gospel, not always but often it seems to be talking about something else.
Consider this—in our Scripture, Jesus is depicted as a Man born some two thousand years ago whose primary purpose while He walked the Earth was not to magically change all the structures and aims of earthly governments and nations and usher into the world an unprecedented age of geopolitical serenity. Rather, primarily, Jesus came to allay the innate turmoil of the human heart, such that human beings might see their Creator, the purpose of their lives, and their ultimate destinies in a far different light than before. Despite these being two very different things, we tend to use the same word—Peace—for both.
Maybe we too need to define our terms a little better, as this Peace on Earth kind of peace and the other kind of peace are not only very different from each other but sometimes have a kind of see-saw relationship with one another.
Take the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus, for instance. We’re told in the first chapter of Luke that Mary accepted the message the angel Gabriel laid out for her. “May it happen to me according to your word,” she replies, signifying that she was at peace on the inside while knowing this course would turn her life upside down on the outside. Put a different way, Mary forfeited one kind for the other. We’re called to do this sometimes too.
About a year ago, I baptized Glenn Simmons, a good man who’d joined the church not long before. Glenn can’t swim, didn’t like water, and hated being at the center of attention. As such, he was, to say the least, quite anxious about the whole baptism process. Even more harrowingly, Glenn’s knees and back are shot. Wearing a bulky white robe as he climbed down into the baptistry—basically a giant bathtub—in front of the whole church was not his idea of a peaceful Sunday morning. Nevertheless, he did it, and in doing so, his witness to me and to the rest of his church that morning bravely echoed not only a measure of Mary’s story but illustrated the difference between these two kinds of peace.
In this season—one in which external peace is sometimes hard to come by and often beyond our grasp, remember that this is not, in the end, what God, through Jesus, is placing on offer to us. Rather it’s the kind of peace that leads human beings mired in trouble to say such unlikely things as, “Yet, it is well with my soul” and “Nevertheless, I am at peace.” It’s that tranquility, that equanimity, that calm repose of the soul that comes over us when, like Mary, like Glenn, we offer ourselves, in the midst of the turmoil, for God’s purposes.
God—While seeking to be an advocate for one kind of peace, may I be a vessel of the other, as well. Amen.
