Tuesday, the Fifth Week of Lent

I Corinthians 14:20-40

For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

Now, what St. Paul is writing about here is worship.  He's chastising the Corinthians for having wildly disorganized worship services.  Without structure their gatherings have become mere disorder in which they all seem to be jockeying for position and prominence, each wanting their own hymn, their own tongue, their own bit of prophesy to be heard.  For an Anglican the implications of this passage should thrill the heart.  "All things should be done decently and in order" should cause us all to give a rousing "Amen!" as we reach for our prayer books.

It is in that context that Paul writes, "for God is not a God of confusion but of peace."  Yet, even though I risk taking his words out of that context, I can't escape mining them for deeper meaning.

We live in an age of confusion; everything is confusing.  Things that were once foundational to life, to existence itself, things which seemed unshakable, are now open to question and critique or even dismissed out-of-hand as antiquated and offensive.  Family, marriage, the sanctity of life, the value of sacrifice, truth, God.

It is a world that is, in a certain way, much like the raucous Corinthian church.  Everyone has a voice to be heard, an idea, an agenda, a truth, a prophesy, a vision and each demands that they be given equal validity to all others.  And to refuse to value each equally is to be backward, close-minded, bigoted.    How can all this be sorted out?  Where does one find a place to stand when everything overwhelms?  The answer, of course, is God, who is not a God of confusion but of peace.  The confusion of our world is not from God, in fact, it is opposed to Him.  Chaos has been His enemy since the beginning.  In Him, we can stand against the confusion and chaos of our culture.  God is a God of peace.  We find Him in peace, and we find peace in Him.  Peace is what He offers us in the midst of our confused world, and as his people, peace is precisely what we have to offer to our confused world.

So, among all the confused voices vying for our attention, what we must be about daily, and especially in Lent, is seeking God's peace, His calm.  His peace overcomes even the most seemingly insurmountable confusion in our world, and indeed in our own lives.  My hope is that this little effort will be blessed by God and through it He will speak to us some small measure of his peace.

The peace of the Lord, be always with you.