Last week Father Emmanuel preached about Christ being our peace and our role in making Him our peace personally. Today this theme continues but in a slightly different direction. The Epistle reading appointed from St Paul’s letter to the Church at Ephesus at chapter 4, deals with both making and maintaining our peace in Christ together, as members of the Church, the Body of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. In verse 3 he writes to the Ephesians urging them to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace “.

We know first of all that the unity of Christians arises from our common sharing in the baptismal gift of the Holy Spirit. Those who are filled with the Holy Spirit can only ever say of their fellow members in the church: “you are my brother, sister, mother or father “.  This is a new relationship, not based on flesh and blood but upon the gift of the Holy Spirit who makes of us all children of God. St John the Theologian in the first chapter of his Gospel and verses 12 to 13 states: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God”. To break this new relationship that we have with one another in Christ is to grieve the Holy Spirit who is manifest in the peaceful accord we should have with one another. This is why every church, every Orthodox Church, should be a community of reconciliation. God has restored our broken fellowship with him through the death and resurrection of Christ bringing forgiveness for our sins and victory over death. We must, therefore, live out that faith in our relationships with each other, thereby drawing more and more people into the circle of God’s forgiving love.

Make no mistake about this, maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is hard work. Why? Because some people are themselves ‘hard work’ and if we have the grace to see it, we must also recognise that we sometimes can be ‘hard work’ in the experience of others. Maintaining the unity of the Spirit therefore is a labour, and work in progress, even a struggle. In the Old Testament, peace is not merely the absence of war but rather a state of deepening righteousness in God which needs continual work, a work of sanctification. It does not stop at the personal level though but instead informs and transforms a whole network of social relations.  This concerns how we order our society and the principles of justice and compassion upon which it must be built and strengthened. In his Sermon on the Mount our Lord Jesus Christ taught in the Beatitudes that the peacemakers are blessed - “for they shall be called sons of God.”  (Matthew 5:9).

Being a peacemaker, therefore, is a comprehensive vocation that touches on every aspect of our lives. In recent weeks we have witnessed some horrendous acts of brutality across the world, not only in Paris but also in Egypt, Mali and Lebanon. Few of us perhaps can contribute to peace-making at the source of these conflicts and sometimes military intervention is necessary to protect innocent lives against the thuggery of mindless violence.  However, there are things we can do both to make and maintain peace in these situations.

For example, maybe you are on Facebook and you notice that some of your friends are getting hot under the collar about ISIS and are advocating the unleashing of retaliatory terror on the perpetrators. Wars conducted in the heat of passion rarely go well. Cooler heads make wiser decisions. Peace-making in this situation is to take care to be informed enough about all the factors in order to promote and facilitate those wiser responses. Soon our junior doctors will be going on strike for the first time in the history of the NHS. Clearly, many are angry about the perceived injustices of their pay and conditions. Making and maintaining peace in that situation calls for the application of fairness and justice, and that means being impartial, patient and creative in looking for solutions, both defusing conflict and building trust.  All this is peace-making and peace maintaining.

Now all of this seems very far perhaps from maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace which most of us can see quite clearly in a church context but which we don’t often understand too well how this relates to the bigger picture. Allow me to hint at a few connections that will make this relationship clearer.

Here in the church, where we have all the resources of Christ at our disposal, we can learn the art of peace-making. The Church is a school for peace. Here we learn humility in seeking forgiveness from one another, even for the slightest wrongs. We learn peace in sustaining our relationship with God through confession. We do not hide from God or from his priest the things that disturb our peace and indeed disturb Christ’s given peace between us.  So having learnt this gentle art of peace in the Holy Spirit we take this God-given wisdom and strength of practice out into the world as leaven within the lump of dough, as salt to savour the blandest of foods and as light to scatter the darkness from the affairs of men.

Each of us then, in our own little way, can be both a peacemaker and a piece maintainer.  When we fail, as we shall from time to time, we can come back again to Christ the Prince of Peace and learn some new skills and refresh some old ones. As both reconciled and reconcilers we can be agents for truly positive change in the affairs of men. Then when people give thanks we can point not to ourselves but to Him, that is Christ, who shed his blood that all could be reconciled to God. In these very practical ways, therefore, we can “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”