speaker-0: Our first reading from Micah ⁓ four verses one. ⁓ In the to come,

speaker-1: reading today ⁓ five. ⁓ Four. The mountain of the Lord's temple shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be placed above the hills. People shall scream to and many nations say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of God of Jacob, ⁓ that he may teach us and that we may walk in his paths.

speaker-0: and be raised. And his ways. For Amazon.

speaker-1: Go forth instruction from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many people and shall among nations far away. They shall beat their sword.

speaker-0: and the word of the Lord he shall Arbitrate between strong into plowshares and their spears into...

speaker-1: Hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. But they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid. For the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. ⁓ So we continue again in our Fruit of the Spirit series, and we have learned so far that the fruit of the Spirit is love. Been there, joy, seen that, and peace. We are about to get that t-shirt this morning. We've heard from the prophet Micah already: a vision of a world transformed by God, weapons of war, turned into gardening tools, and relearning now how to live in. The world. And now we turn to the letter written to the church in Philippi, which was a city under Roman control, garrisoned by Roman soldiers, and in which Paul was imprisoned. So Paul is writing this letter from jail under occupation. And so he writes this letter to the Philippians and he says this: listen with me for the word of the Lord from Philippians 4 and verses 4 through 9. Again, imprisoned in an occupied land. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, Whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them. And the God of peace will be with you. The word of the Lord. Thanks. Let us pray. ⁓ God, as we come to you today, through your word, speak to us now by your spirit a word of peace, that we may live by it, that we may sow it and reap it. Guard our hearts and our minds, O Lord, in your love. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Wanna play a game? Let's play a game. It's called Finish the Maxim. Are you ready? The best predictor of future behavior is. Past behavior, past performance is also an acceptable answer. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Maya Angelou. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me is technically the right answer. However, one of my favorite GW gaffes is when he finished that. Fool me twice. Can't fool me again. It cracks me up every time I think about it. And here's our last one. It is from the Bible. Specifically, it comes from Galatians 7, right after, about a chapter and a half after the fruits of the Spirit, after Paul tells us about them. He says, and this sounds like one of those things that isn't in the Bible, but people think is in the Bible, but this one's actually in the Bible. It says, You reap. Whatever you reap, whatever you sow. There is just like an everyday folksy truth to that. Christy Williams very clearly put into the ground a bunch of pepper seeds ⁓ a couple of months ago because lo and behold, at this week's VBS, she was handing peppers out to every Bob Gary and Sherry that would take them. Christy Williams did not, in fact, sow peppers into the ground. And then reap a bumper crop of zucchini, though if there ever was a fruit voted most likely to abound where it was not invited, it would be zucchini, because the zucchinis do not do anything half-hearted, is the point. This week we sowed at VBS seeds about how God is our creator and how God knows everything, and how God is our safe place, and how God is love and God is forever. Wow, God. That's what you're supposed to say. Who was it? Somebody did it out there. Wow, God. Yes, Emma. Thank you. Wow, God was the response every time we said those things this week. But we we sowed those seeds into the heart of these kids, and we hope, we pray, we have every reason to believe that God will grow those seeds into good fruit because that is the spirit in which they were sown. So My dear ones. Why is it that we are consistently surprised and appalled that we live in such a violent world when the seeds of violence are so abundantly sown around us? We might deeply desire to reap the fruit of the Spirit of God that is peace, but I am not sure that we have been sowing the right seeds. To reap such a harvest. I mean, if we could rank the gifts of God from most desirable to take it or leave it, peace might actually top that list. I mean, imagine not having anything to keep you up at night, because not only is there no conflict, but everybody in your life, nay, everybody in everybody's life, is thriving. ⁓ imagine that the voices in your head that tell you that your spouse is mad about something, or the voice that comes out of your spouse telling you that they're mad about something. Imagine that those voices go away, they vanish because you've you've talked it out. You stopped avoiding it, you s started talking it out. Imagine that the anger inside of you that sort of simmers when you think about that person. Imagine that the anger that simmers inside about inside of you when you think of those people. Imagine that it melts away because you've resolved your differences, or as at least resolved what you can in your own heart. The gift of peace, of being settled, as Micah says, right? Of being able to sit under your own fig tree and to have no one make you afraid, of being settled and having no fear. That is I think what all of us so deeply desire. And often our lack of peace comes from outside of us, things we cannot control. War, legislation, homelessness, abuse, you name all the things that compound to create our sense of compassion, fatigue in the world, but much of the peace that we desire is between one another. It's an unsettledness at work with our colleagues or our boss, with our partners, our kids, our neighbors. And we can't have this peace. But it seems for whatever reason to always slip through our fingers. We either don't know what to do or what to say, or we don't have the courage to say it or to do it. We have this tendency when we're wronged to really want to be in the right, even if we've played a part in what is wrong. We make daggers with our eyes and spears with our swords and absolute nukes with our thoughts. We make one another disposable. And I would really love I'm not really that guy, but I'll let's pretend I am. I would really love to to wag my fingers at you and tell you just to knock it off. And you should knock it off. But I think we struggle so deeply to do that. Because we are all under the spell of the myths that animate our age. I think all of our minds have been captivated and colonized by the power of the sword. This week, if you ⁓ read our midweek minute, I ⁓ referenced a song by the Porter's Gate, which is called The Kingdom of Jesus. And in the second verse it begins. ⁓ to what shall we compare the spirit of the hour if not a sword? A fair comparison. And then it goes on, and it gets really honest with our really complicated relationship to violence when it says this: it frees us, unites us, enslaves and divides us in violence. Help us, Lord, right? Like whether we want to or not, we feel repulsed by violence and also addicted to its promised ability to keep us safe. Let's keep playing the finish the maxim game so I can t show you what I mean. Speak softly and Carry a big stick. Teddy Roosevelt. You know, that has always felt to me like a really Texas thing to say, which is ironic because Teddy Roosevelt was from New York City and you can almost hear those paced salsa guys say it in the background, New York City. Anyhow, it feels Texan to me because it was like Very shortly after we moved here nine years ago, about nine years ago, that I was informed that most folks in Texas you can count on being kind because everybody assumes that the other person is carrying a gun. It wasn't said to me as a joke. It's funny, but it was not said to me as a joke. In other words, the big stick, the threat of violence, is supposedly the thing that enables our soft speech. It's a worldview to trust in the power of violence to draw kindness and softness out of us rather than our good, God given, inherent goodness. It is a it's a worldview. It's not a Christian one, but it is a worldview. Here's another saying that you might not know the ending to, but has indeed motivated Western society for, I don't know, 2,000 years. Are you ready? If you want peace. That's what thought. It's good, actually. If you want peace, prepare for war. That's right. That came from the Romans. Specifically a man named Vegetius. See how Zucchini's trying to sneak its back w its way back in here? But that sentiment, if you want peace, prepare for war, would morph into Rome's motto, which Reagan would actually borrow for his foreign policy: peace through strength. And what Rome did was to absolutely crush their enemies and beating their chests over bodies and booty, call it peace. The United States is in a season of really leaning into the optics and the dollar spend of this same motto. Peace through strength. You might not like that I'm comparing the United States to Rome, but we're about to have a UFC fight on the White House lawn here in like seven hours. ⁓ like we literally built a baby Coliseum and we're calling it the claw. ⁓ meanwhile, while we're at it, Marco Rubio had the audacity to call this UFC fight a display of the United States' soft diplomatic power. As if the World Dad Gum Cup isn't happening on US soil right now. The World Cup actually makes me bleed red, white, and blue because it's an opportunity to play internationally without killing each other. Instead, we just get to flop around on the ground as though somebody's tried to murder us, if you've ever seen a soccer match, trying to draw a flag. At any rate, it isn't just the fight night optics for the US right now. It's dollar spend. As it said, show me your bank account and I'll tell you what your values are. Right? Show me your checking book, I'll show you, and I'll tell you your values. The president said a couple of months ago at the White House's Easter luncheon, it's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, and all these individual things. We gotta take care of one thing: military protection. Now, he was talking about states and fed spending, and that's not my point. My point is That as a country we are sowing what we will then reap, right? Do you know Chekhov's gun? The literary device that's like if you introduce a gun in chapter one, that gun is gonna show up in chapter three. What happens when you fund the military like that? You're gonna use it. That is my point. Last year we spent $895 billion on the Department of War, a recent renaming. Is meaningful and names our values, right? While we spent only fifty-one point seven billion dollars on the State Department. That's 17 times more money allocated to war than diplomacy. And for this year, President Trump is asking for $1.5 trillion for the War Department and has reduced the State Department's budget to $50 billion, meaning in dollar spend we are now 30 times if if the administration gets what it wants, we will be thirty times more likely to kill than to negotiate. We spend over half our country's discretionary money on more creative and quote unquote safer ways to kill each other, and then we wonder why we're such a violent Are you with me? Such an ethos literally and figuratively bleeds into all of our lives. So my friends, we will continue to reap what we sow and we shouldn't be any more surprised by this than Christie is when she gets a pepper after she's shown pepper seeds into the ground. We remember Micah for the image of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. And it's poetic. That's why we remember it. It's beautiful. It's refashioning a tool of destruction into an implement for growth. But that actually isn't the part of Micah's vision that grabs me by the collar. Honestly, that feels more like performative, more like the PR side of things than actual strategy, unless you're low on hose, I guess. But for me, in a season that is soaked in violent optics and dollar spend, the really important part is this. Micah says, Yeah, we're gonna turn all these weapons of war into gardening tools. And then he says, Neither shall they learn war anymore. That's the part that hits me. Micah's calling us out for the learning, the prep work. We are being discipled by violence. How to win a war, how to win an argument, and it's killing us. But no longer learning war is no small feat because the ways of violence are paved six-lane highways with good, well-lit signage and nice big wide on-ramps. It's why we so easily default to violence. We are wired for it. Have you ever considered that the very first thing that happens outside of do you remember this? The very first thing that happens outside of the Garden of Eden? Two brothers kill each other. First thing out of the garden. This scene, we shouldn't be surprised by this. This scene almost happens in my house about twice a week. We are geared for violence. And at the same time, though, we are offered another way, a different way, an alternative by the Lord Jesus to learn, to be discipled by, to actively engage the way of peace, which comes to us as a gift of the Spirit and an alternative to the damning ways of the world, which keep grinding us down. It is a glory and a real frustration to me that while violence gets a shiny new I-35. Every attempt toward peace feels like an exercise in the most difficult and creative trailblazing ever done. We've got to strategize around how to be peaceful. We gotta take a machete out to hack our way through the thicket. We gotta do all these things. It's why we keep dipping back into historical like how many times do we need to talk about Martin Luther King Jr., the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Gandhi, right? Like it's the reason we do that is because ways That are nonviolent and also peaceful are so precious few in our world. It makes it feel like it's an impossibility. But here's the truth if we can learn war, we can learn peace. And the first step of doing that is to offer up more than a negative view of peace, which is simply the absence of conflict, and instead offer up a robust positive, constructive view of peace, which is the presence of justice, so says Martin Luther King Jr. See, I had to do it again, point in case. This peace can be learned because it offers us more than something not to do. Don't be in conflict. Isn't much of a way to live. But thanks be to God, Paul picks up here with a positive vision. He says this rejoice. Let peace rejoice Flow from joy in the Lord, a different way to be. Let your gentleness, Paul says, not your strength, not your big stick, let your gentleness be known to everyone. If you are anxious, he goes on, and how much of our violence against one another, both internationally and individually, how much of our violence against one another is anticipatory. Based on our fears of what might happen to us. So Paul says, if you are anxious, take those cares to the Lord. Trust the Lord with your whole life. And what will happen then if you do that? If you rejoice, if you let your gentleness be known, if you take all of your anxieties to the Lord, then and only then the peace of God, which passes all understanding, thank you, Jesus. Will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. But can I tell you something important? This isn't about finger pointing. This is always what we want to do. We want to say, well, that is good of great advice for somebody else. Right? In the same way that Corinthians tells us that all of our acts of service are empty, like a ringing gong, if we do not have love, I don't think any of our right thinking about violence that someone else is doing matters one iota. if we let violence reign in our own hearts. So we've got to refuse to learn war anymore when it comes to our relationships with one another. We gotta stop prepping for battle with each other because we get what we prep for. If we wanna have a positive peace in our relationships, we gotta stop applying the lessons that we've absorbed from the spirit of this age and cease believing that we can bully one another, physically or emotionally or otherwise, and call it a win. Our might does not make right. It means that we have to stop preparing for those fights. We gotta learn ways not to win to fight, or not to win the fight, but to learn ways that build one another up. To take all of our tools for destruction, right? Emotionally, intellectually, and turn them into constructive tools. Instead of ruminating on your anger or the perceived failures of your partner, your boss, your fill in the blank, Paul offers this whatever is true, whatever is honorable, just pure, pleasing. commendable, if there's any excellence and anything worthy of praise, think about these things. If you're gonna ruminate, and you are, ruminate on what is good. We have to learn a new way through conflict. We gotta learn to be healers rather than conquerors, menders rather than warriors. We gotta reacquire a taste for the good fruit of peace that the Holy Spirit is offering us. Because I fear that we've been nipping it off at the bud for so long that we forgot what it tastes like. This world doesn't have to be read in tooth and claw and pen, not least if the Lord is to be believed. We can have peace in our homes and in our hearts, a peace that is guarded by God for heaven's literal sake. This peace might even grow up out of the sidewalks and the abandoned hopes for our world as a gift from God. So I gotta tell you. It might be mid June in Texas, but there is no better time to sow peace that we might make peace than right now. Thanks be to God. Amen.