Many readers know that for a long time I was a member of an intentional Christian community. This community was a group of Christians informally coming together from a range of backgrounds - Protestant and Catholic - seeking to live a life devoted to Jesus. I can't think of one person from the whole time I lived there who wasn't a sincere follower of Christ, who wanted to live in the kind of peace that Jesus offers.

 

One year, I remember that the community was on the verge of utter breakdown, with people threatening to leave - and it took not just one, but three different mediators working over a period of months to help the community rally. This was despite the fact that everyone in that community really did love Jesus and really did want to love others. The fact that people were sincere and truly, genuinely desired a loving life directed toward others didn't mean that everything was great in the community. Indeed, maybe that even made our fights all the worse because we had to figure out how to deal with conflict in ways that maintained our love for each other. But in our culture, fights do not equate with love.

 

That's important to think about in relation to today's scriptures. In the first reading (Ephesians 4:1-6), Paul, too, is speaking to a community of Christians on the verge of breaking down. So Paul emphasizes unity, especially the unity we have in Christ because we are baptized. It SOUNDS easy. But if you read on in chapter 4 of Ephesians, you'll quickly see that the actions Paul advocates are not at all easy: for example, speaking truth to our neighbors.

 

In my own experience, attempting to speak truth to our neighbors (or people attempting to speak truth to me), no matter how dearly we love each other, that truth is in fact a source of conflict between people, sometimes one we can't get over so well. Perhaps that is especially true in marriages, where couples often know each other so well that they also know exactly and precisely how to hurt each other. 

 

Sometimes it just seems easier not to speak truth and not to do the hard work of figuring out how make truth work together with seeking peace and unity. But as Jesus emphasizes in today's gospel reading (Luke 12:54-59), people who are supposed to be speaking truth shouldn't be simply handing off the hard work to someone else, as in the case of the hypocrites who decide to go to a magistrate about a court case rather than really, truly do the hard work of building up their relationships. Jesus tells the crowds that it is much better to try to repair relationships on the way to court - do the hard work yourself! Don't be a hypocrite! The implication is that no matter how hard won the peace is, no matter how difficult working on that relationship is, THAT'S where we're going to find our true peace and unity in Jesus.

 

Today, let us pray for strength and courage to work on our relationships with each other, and to seek true peace and unity in Jesus.

 

- Jana M. Bennett