The Scales of Peace (Sermon)
Christian Civics Executive Director Rick Barry delivers a sermon at Washington Community Fellowship covering the Bible’s vision for peace and how it plays out on the personal, inter-personal, corporate and political scales.
Christian Civics Executive Director Rick Barry was recently invited to deliver a sermon at Washington Community Fellowship in Washington, DC, addressing the theme of “People of Peace” and what being people of peace means and looks like in our relationship to politics. His sermon, “The Scales of Peace,” covers the Bible’s vision for peace, how that vision plays out at different scales of relationship, and which scale has to come first.
An extraordinarily abridged summary of the sermon follows, and the complete video can be watched above.
Abridged Summary
In English, “peace” means calmness and a lack of conflict. A lack of aggression. Maybe even a little bit of interaction, as long as it’s mutually beneficial. But in the Bible, the English word “peace” is standing in for the Hebrew word shalom. And that word means more than just lack of conflict. In the Hebrew imagination, shalom means something like wholeness, rightness, harmony, health and flourishing, all at the same time.
If we are going to heed God’s call to spread shalom, then we have to think about spreading that shalom on four scales, four levels: The personal, the inter-personal, the political and the corporate.
Personal shalom is what we would translate as, “the peace that passes understanding.” The inner calm, inner contentment, the deep satisfaction that comes from experiencing God’s love and trusting in the future he has promised.
Inter-personal shalom means healed relationships, and it means honoring and restoring the dignity of others.
The next scale we have to think about when we think about spreading shalom is the corporate scale. I mean “corporate” as in, “a body.” Individuals bound together in a coherent way. The corporate scale is larger than the inter-personal scale, but the people you’re tied to at the corporate scale are still knowable. The corporate scale can mean a family, a business, a team, a company, a club, or a church.
The last scale we might think about when we think about spreading shalom is the political scale. When I say, “political,” I mean, “life of the many.” “Civic life,” or “the public square.” The systems, the institutions, the traditions, and the norms that shape and give order to our relationship to more people than we could ever possibly know. These are things that the New Testament writers understood as “powers and principalities.” Political mechanisms and social forces. Paul says in Ephesians 6 that we're not just struggling against flesh and blood, but that we're also struggling against powers, and principalities, and cosmic powers, and spiritual forces. Powers and principalities of this world; cosmic powers and spiritual forces of the heavenly realms.
Pursuing shalom, experiencing shalom, and spreading shalom all starts at the corporate scale. Not the individual. Not the inter-personal. Not the political. It starts at the corporate scale because the corporate scale is where God makes himself present in this world.