S-S is for
Superior Shalom
or "Surpassing Peace" of which congregations sing.
AN ALL SURPASSING PEACE
IN THE NAME of the God we praise, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, welcome one and all to Hymn Fest 2004. Fifteen months ago Christians from throughout our region packed this magnificent hall to lift their voices in the Church's song. Tonight we sing again, this time attending to a long thread of prayer that Christians have woven into their songs and hymns, presumably from the day of Pentecost itself, that long ago day when faith in Jesus Christ erupted in Jerusalem and the Church was born.
Our theme tonight is peace. For this we sing. Not for peace as the world gives, partial and fleeting, but for that peace beyond all present understanding which God alone can make and keep.
We sing for peace because we awoke this morning as Christian people always have to a dissonant world, a world filled with sounds that, taken together, compose an outrage. On the one hand a baby's coo; on the other a mother's wail as her child is buried. Here a young man's happy shout as he stuffs a basketball; there his scream of horror as the enemy's bullet shatters his leg. We sing because the screeches of wrath and enmity, of greed and fear and wretchedness are everywhere heard, and much too loudly: not only in the distant alleys of Baghdad but also in the streets of our own city; not only in the deeds and lives of people we do not know, but also in the actions of those we call neighbor and friend and fellow citizen. We sing on account of the dissonance in our own noisy hearts where strains of saintly faith and sinner's arrogance fought bitterly in us this whole day long. "Lord, we believe. Help thou our unbelief!"
For peace we sing because the very form of hymn and song confesses our faith that peace is God's will for us, and not for us only, but for all the world. In the beginning God saw what he had made and he called it "Very good!" Creation itself still whispers that word, its order and beauty hinting that all things were indeed made to act in unison, to live in harmony. When we sing this way we too proclaim the word and will of God-and our song rises up as a protest of love against the present tumult, as a plea to God for the speedy onset of the peaceful glory that one day shall be when all creation raises its one, harmonious voice in everlasting adoration of the Lamb.
We sing for peace above all because God has promised this glory through Jesus Christ our Lord. We sing because the God of peace commands our song.
"PEACE I LEAVE with you. My peace I give to you" (John 14:27). So said Jesus on the night he was betrayed. His word bore fruit the next day when we, the children of Adam, rose up and murdered our brother, the Son of God (allusion to Gen. 4:8b).
A great riddle drives our song tonight. Instead of riddle, some say mystery; though St. Paul calls it wisdom. God's wisdom, secret and hidden, "decreed before the ages for our glorification" (I Cor. 2:7) [that is, to the end], that we this very night might lift it high before the world as our own chief glory.
This riddle is the unspeakably brutal mercy-the horror, gracious beyond all telling-that was and is the cross of Jesus Christ. We sing the riddle in Spirit-revealed words (I Cor. 2:10) that push reason to the edge of madness. Death means life. Despair causes hope. A bath of blood makes the filthy spotless. Our own sin, foisted on the one we wrongly crucified, results in our everlasting innocence.
And violence begets peace. An all surpassing peace, born in those hours of all-surpassing violence when our anger, meeting God's wrath, drove the final breaths from Jesus' broken body.
"Through Christ," writes Paul, "God reconciled us to himself" (2 Cor 5:18), that is, God made his peace with us. We can hear that peace in those final breaths of Jesus. With one of them he prays, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). With another he shrieks "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). He shrieks this because he bears the sins that the Father forgave. He bears those sins to save us from ever having to shriek ourselves on their account. Again St. Paul: "God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21), beloved daughters and sons with whom God is very well pleased (Luke 3:22b) and justifiably at peace-an all-surpassing peace, impervious to any and every assault whether by death or life or angels or rulers or things present or things to come or powers or height or depth or anything else in all creation (Romans 8:38-29a).
Therefore "be reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5:20c). The apostle, adding this thought, begs us to let God's peace with us encourage our peace with him. We sing our Christian song in the eventide of a rebellious age. Old Adam's children continue everywhere to deepen the darkness that besets them. Then, as their father did before them, they blame God for the night (Genesis 3:12). When we lift high the cross we do so, in the first place, for our own sake, that Christ might save us from this folly. "My peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you." He who perished for us in deepest darkness is risen from the dead and lives and reigns eternally; this is most certainly true. The peace he gives is the living word that nothing but nothing shall separate us from the wondrous, astounding love of God for us in him, our crucified Lord (Rom 8:39b). So whether in joy or in sorrow, in life or in death, we lift that cross and proclaim God's love. We sing the certain promise of an all-surpassing peace.