“The children were having breakfast. This was not a pleasant sight.” So begins Jill Murphy’s children’s book, Five Minutes’ Peace, a children’s book that parents will often offer to read to their children. Because although the characters in the book are elephants, a mother and three children aged about seven and below, the story describes the experience of many a parent of young children.
The book begins with Mrs. Large looking at a messy kitchen after another chaotic breakfast with her three children. She decides to prepare a tray “with teapot, a milk jug, her favorite cup and saucer, a plate of marmalade toast and a leftover cake from yesterday. “Where are you going with that tray, Mom?” asks Laura. “To the bathroom,” said Mrs. Large. “Why?” ask the other two children. “Because I want five minutes peace from all of you…”
Mrs. Large funs a deep, hot bath, pours herself a cup of tea and lies back with her eyes closed n the tub…
Only to be interrupted by Lester, instrument in hand. “Can I play you my tune?” asked Lester. “Must you?” “I’ve been practicing. You told me to. Can I? Please, just for one minute.” “Go on then.” “So Lester played…’Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ three and a half times.”
There is something about adorable when children proudly seek their parents’ attention for something new they have learned. But it can also be exhausting.
Next comes Laura. “Can I read you a page from my reading book?” she asks her mom. “No Laura. Go on, all of you, off downstairs.”
“You let Lester play his tune. I heard. You like him better than me. It’s not fair!”
“Oh, don’t be silly, Laura,” said Mrs. Large. “Go on then. Just one page.” Laura then read four and a half pages from “Little Red Riding Hood.”
In came the little one with a trunkful of toys. “For you!” he beamed, flinging them into the bath water. “‘Thank you, dear, said Mrs. Large weakly. She got out, dried herself, and headed back downstairs, leaving her children playing and arguing in the bathroom. “Where are you going now, Mom?” asks Laura. “To the kitchen,” said Mrs. Large. “Why?” asks Lester. “Because I want five minutes’ peace from all of you, said Mrs. Large. “That’s why.”
“And ff she went downstairs, where she had three minutes and forty-five seconds of peace before they all came to join her.” The end.[1]
Five minutes’ peace. What we would not give for such an elusive gift sometimes in our lives:
- …when the children are whining and crying at home,
- …when the emails at work keep pinging in our inbox like the sound of rain in a tropical rain storm,
- …when our commitments and schedules are running our lives and we never feel like we can accomplish anything,
At such times, five minutes of peace is like a large glass of cool water for a person desperately thirsty.
But there is also a deeper and longer-lasting pace that we seek: the peace that will mark a lasting end to a pointless but painful conflict between two loved ones; the peace of a good answer from the doctor as we await the results of the test; the peace of knowing that the way we spend our time – at work, at home, or in our community, is the right way to be spending our time; the peace that will overcome our fears of aging or dying; the peace of quieted guns and rockets – in Gaza; northern Israel, southern Lebanon; Ukraine; or in streets and communities across this country.
The Bible tells us that the fruits of the Spirit include peace. This we know, this we yearn and pray for. We want to have a quiet haven to get away from the stress of the rat race. We want to carry inside us such a sense of peace that we can travel through life with a quiet serenity amid the noise and haste.
The question is: how do we find such a pace? Where do we look?
Before you can find something, you need to know what you are looking for. Perhaps there is no word that loses more in the translation to English from Greek in the New Testament and Hebrew in the Old Testament than the word, “peace.” When you say the word, “peace,” what do you mean? What images come to mind?
For many of us, the word, “peace,” refers to what is missing: “peace” is the absence of war or hostilities or quarrels or disturbances or noise.” Indeed, when you go to the online Oxford English Dictionary, nearly all of the definitions for “peace” begin either “freedom from” or the “absence of.”
When you think of peace in that way, there are implications. If peace is the absence of war, and nothing else, then peacemaking is to do anything that would avoid fighting, even trying to appease Hitler with Czechoslovakia, as was done in Munich in 1939. If peace is the absence of quarreling, and nothing else, then, as a parent, you will always yield to nagging children and give them what they want – just so the nagging will stop. If peace is the absence of noise and disturbance, and nothing else, then the only way to find peace may be to retreat from the world and avoid any commitments to other individuals, communities, or countries.
While our English word, “peace,” may have that limited definition, “Peace” in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament is not just the absence of bad things; peace is the presence of good things too in the Bible. “Shalom” – the word translated as “peace” means “wholeness,” “a state of well-being.” Our lives have peace in the Biblical sense when everyone has the basic necessities, and we are living the life that God wants us to live.
This peace, Biblical peace, is not just the absence of fighting; peace is the presence of justice. This peace is not about giving into belligerence, bullying, or nagging – giving in gives us a respite but no lasting peace. Peace is not just escaping obligations and commitments, but finding purpose and joy in those obligations and commitments.
Do you want to know what peace looks like? Look at Jesus. He sought retreat, going off to pray on numerous occasions. He never picked up a weapon, other than scripture, and he knew how to put off a fight – saying that it was not yet his time. But Jesus did not run from the world or avoid necessary conflict. Neither did he try to suppress his care for the world or his anger at those who acted contrary to God’s will.
This is what peace is, what shalom looks like. The question remains, however: how do we find and experience such peace?
The passages we heard today offer three answers. “Do not worry about anything,” Paul writes the Philippians, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.” If we want to have peace in our lives, then we need to pray. How we pray, where we pray, and when we pray – those depend on the individual; but what is crucial for everyone is that we pray.
“Make your requests known to God.” It is not that God needs to hear our prayers before God will understand what we are facing and what we are carrying. Paul’s instructions here are about what we need; not what God needs. The first step towards peace is naming that which we are worrying about; bringing out into the open what we are angry about; putting into words the burdens that are weighing us down. And when we cannot put those requests into words, even then, we need not worry because the Holy Spirit is capable of praying for us, Paul tells the church in another epistle, the letter to the Romans.
“Make your requests known to God.” That doesn’t mean that we will always get what we want. Friends, many of you can attest with me that God has not given me everything I wanted but God has given me everything I needed. Like a great African American preacher once declared: “God may not come when you want God. But God is always on time!”
We find peace when we pray, however, not just because we find some answers. We also find peace in prayer when we quit trying to carry our burdens alone. When we are honest and open with God, when we pray with outstretched hands, rather than with clenched fists; when we let God shoulder the burdens that we are carrying, we find that those burdens no longer so heavy. The next time you are facing a difficult problem, just ask in prayer, “how are we going to handle this?” It is amazing what a difference that “we” makes!
True peace does not come from denying our fears, or turning our back on the world, or numbing ourselves so that we will not worry or care about others. Shalom comes from trusting in God, from knowing that as big as our problems and anxieties seem, God is much bigger still; from knowing that as much as we love the people for whom we are anxious, God loves them even more than we. Paul may tell the Philippians not to have any worries, but earlier in this letter, he confessed that he is genuinely concerned for the Philippians’ welfare (2:20).
For Paul and for us, it is not a matter of not caring. It is a matter of not feeling that we have to care by ourselves. And it is a matter of recognizing that God wants to give us this gift of peace. Later in this passage from Philippians, after telling the church in Philippi to make known their requests to God, Paul promises: “And the peace of God…will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Paul is actually using a military term here: the peace of God “will stand sentry watch” over your hearts and minds. In other words, because God’s peace is on duty, “we do not have to be anxiously scanning the horizon for new threats.”[2]
How do we find the shalom of which the Bible speaks? By naming what we are worried about and trusting that God is standing watch over our lives like a sentry. But there is one more thing to add about finding peace. That which Jesus tells the disciples and the crowds gathered on the hillside in Matthew 6: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear…But strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.”
Thomas Kelly, the great teacher and Quaker writer from Haverford College, wrote this description of the human condition seventy-five years ago, but his diagnosis for our modern condition is uncannily accurate: “We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all…Strained by the very made pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness.” He then offers this Biblical cure for our modern disease: “Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center…But too many of us have heeded [God’s] Voice only at times. Only at times have we submitted to his holy guidance…Religion isn’t something to be added to our other duties and thus make our lives yet more complex. The life with God is the center of life, and all else is remodeled and integrated by it. It gives the singleness of eye.”[3]
This is the peace that we hunger and yearn for. It is not just quiet, or a slower paced life, or a life with no commitments and no loved ones to worry about. No, the peace we want, the peace that God gives us, is a peace that comes from a “singleness of eye.” Such peace comes from listening to one voice, God’s voice, rather than a cacophony of competing voices. In God’s will is our peace,” Augustine once wrote. Peace, true peace, shalom, comes from living out of the divine Center of our life, by praying and doing the will of God.
In this silence, let us pray and let us begin to share with God those burdens which disturb our peace…
Amen.
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Due to technical issues, we have chosen to exclude the 8:45am service from this page,but it can be found on YouTube and Facebook. Please note: The first 30 minutes are silent
[1] Jill Murphy, Five Minutes’ Peace (Puffin Books, 1999).
[2] Fred B. Craddock, Philippians (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 72.
[3] From “The Simplification of Life.”
