The Peace that Passeth Understanding
Program 4815
First air date January 30, 2005
[Transcribed from tape and edited for clarity.]
There is going to be no peace in the world unless it begins within us. That’s what St. Francis made clear to
all of us: there has to be an inner transformation. For me, that inner transformation really begins and
develops in the context of prayer. Every morning when I get up, I center on Christ. I surrender to God and I
allow God to invade me, to possess me. Certain things happen. First of all, I imagine my Lord reaching out,
touching me, and absorbing out of me all of those negative things in my own heart and mind. I quietly
surrender and allow God to cleanse me. David prayed that prayer: “Cleanse me, oh God! See if there be
some wicked, ugly things in me and cleanse me of these things.”
In the morning I surrender to a cleansing. I ask my Lord to remove from my psyche, my heart, my soul all
of those dirty and ugly feelings and attitudes that are so much a part of our lives; to get rid of the
resentment. All of us have resentments because life is unfair and it’s easy to be consumed by resentments.
The Bible says that these resentments are the bitter weeds that grow up in our souls and destroy us. I need
to be cleansed of that. I need to be cleansed of my sorrows and my disappointments. All of these things
generate anger and anger within ultimately expresses itself in our attitudes towards people around us and
even, in the larger sense, to the world around us.
Not only does the Lord take away my resentments and my disappointments, but he takes away my fears. “A
perfect love casteth out fear.” He takes away my fears. There is a verse in the 14th chapter of John that
reads like this: “My peace I give unto you. I do not give as the world giveth. Let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid.” The removal of troubles and fear! And we do have fears, don’t we? We do have
fears: I’m afraid of failing, I’m afraid of not living up to expectations. And let’s be honest, we all are afraid
of dying. Helmut Teleke once said, “We all make noise on New Year’s Eve to drown out the macabre
sound of the grasses growing over our own grave.”
All of these things will be removed in the context of prayer. I know of no other way of getting rid of these
things except through prayer. Letting Christ reach in and touch me and absorb out of me my fears, my
anxieties, my worries. Cast your burdens upon him and that will result in what he promised: a peace that
passeth understanding. A peace that the world cannot give. That’s the beginning of peace in the world.
There has to be this transformation.
I have to tell you that is just the beginning. For not only does he absorb these things out of you, but in my
mystical, spiritual communion with God, I feel God invading me with his love. Have you ever in quietude
and silence surrendered to an invasion of the spirit, to be possessed by God? In stillness it will come to you.
The Hebrew prophets said that would happen. In silence he will come into you, he will invade you, he will
possess you. “Be still and know that I am God.” That’s what the Old Testament prophets said. And, indeed,
I believe that. I know that to be true. When God invades you, God brings into your being love. The fruits of
the Spirit: right at the top of that list is the word “love.”
Now some people are naturally loving. I have a friend who is a teacher in upstate New York. She had a
little boy in her class who was kind of intellectually challenged. He wasn’t very bright and he wanted to be
in the Christmas pageant. They gave him the role of being the inn keeper. On the night of the pageant,
Mary comes and knocks on the door. He opens the door and looks at her and says his line properly: “No
room!” A kid behind him punches him and says, “That’s right, that’s right!” Mary then says, “I’m tired.
I’m sick. I’m going to give birth to a child and if you don’t give me a room, the child will be born in the
cold, cold night.” The kid just stood there and the boy behind him pushed him, shoved him and whispered,
“Say ‘No room’! Say, ‘No room’!” Finally, the boy turned around and said, “I know what I’m supposed to
say, but she can have my room!”
Some people are just naturally loving. I’m not that way. I depend upon God to invade me, to possess me,
and to impart to me love. There is a kind of love that is a gift of God and that’s what spirituality is about.
It’s not just about going to heaven when you die. It’s about surrendering yourself and allowing the God of
Love to invade you. For God is love and whosoever loves is born of God. That love comes in, fills you,
transforms you and makes things different. You become an agent of reconciliation in the world.
I have a friend who was a pastor of a church on the Upper East Side. He would go every day to this
restaurant and have doughnuts and coffee. He did that every day for two months. He realized that the same
people were there every morning. So one morning he stood up and said, “Excuse me everybody, but I’ve
been coming in here every day for two months at 6:30 in the morning. It’s the same people here every day
and I don’t know anyone! Would you please stand up and introduce yourselves and tell us who you are and
what you do?” Well, they went around. It was a virtual who’s who. Bill Cosby’s wife was there and Tom
Wolfe, the author. It went on and on. Everybody introduced themselves, everybody said what they were
doing.
The atmosphere changed and there was a real comradery created in the place. People would come in and
say, “Hi Gordon! Hi Ralph! Hi Bill!” They knew about everybody except the man who ran the place. His
name was Harry. They ganged up on him one day and said, “Harry, we don’t know anything about you.
Where are you from? Do you have a family?” He didn’t want to answer. Finally they pressed him and said,
“You have to answer!” He said, “Alright. If you have to know, my name if not Harry. It’s Haseem.” A dead
silence fell over the crowd. He said, “I’m from Iraq. My family is in Bagdad even now!” And he said it
with anger because the war was just about to break out. Everybody hunkered down and finished their
coffee and doughnuts and got out of there.
The next morning at 5:30, the telephone rang. My friend picked up the phone and answered it. The voice at
the other end said, “Ralph, have you been listening to the radio?” He said, “No.” The man said, “The
bombing of Bagdad has begun!” Without hesitation, he hung up the phone, he rushed to the cable car that
would take him over to Manhattan, he came down the steps, and he ran over to the coffee shop. To his
absolute amazement, at quarter to six in the morning everyone who had coffee in that shop in the morning
had already arrived. They wanted to be there when Harry arrived—when Haseem arrived—at six o’clock.
When Haseem turned the corner and saw them, he was amazed. They ran up, encircled him, and they wept
and cried with him. Finally, Tom Wolfe said, “Alright, alright. Ralph, you’re the preacher. Pray!”
Ralph said, “I stood there on the corner. Here I am a Baptist preacher praying for a Muslim with some
Jewish people and some agnostics standing around praying with me. When we finished the prayer, I looked
up and tears were streaming down Haseem’s face who then said, ‘Alright. Alright. But you still have to pay
for the doughnuts!” And then he added, “But from now on, my friends, and you are my friends, the coffee
in this place will always be free!” My friend Ralph said, “As I held a doughnut in one hand and a cup of
coffee in the other, I wondered if I had ever been at the communion table in church with such an awesome
awareness of the presence of God.”
When God is in us, God makes us agents of reconciliation that bring people together and teach them how to
accept and love one another. We need God in our lives. There’s got to be peace within if there is going to
be peace in the world. That St. Francis made clear and we need to hear that message today.
There is one last story I want to tell you. It’s about a young monk who went to Rome and ended up at the
Coliseum. When they came out to battle to the death, realizing what was going to happen, he yelled at the
gladiators, “In the name of Jesus, stop! In the name of Jesus, stop!” They didn’t listen, of course, because
they couldn’t hear him over the crowd. So he ran down to the edge of the stands and he yelled out over the
field, “In the name of Jesus, stop! In the name of Jesus, stop!” Nobody paid any attention to him. He leapt
over the wall, went on to the fighting field, stood between two of the gladiators and he said, “In the name of
Jesus, stop! In the name of Jesus, stop!” The gladiators ran their swords through him, and as the monk fell
dead to the ground a silence fell over the audience. One man got up and left his seat. Then another. And
then another and then another and then another until the Coliseum was empty. From that day on, there
would never be another fight to the death in the Coliseum in Rome because one man stood up and said, “In
the name of Jesus, stop!”
In this day and age, what we need are people who are filled with the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
will go forth into the world and say to the warring people of this world, “In the name of Jesus, stop!” Only
the Holy Spirit can give us that kind of courage, that kind of fortitude, that kind of strength. We need peace
in our hearts in order to bring peace to the world.
Conversaiton with Tony Campolo
Lydia Talbot: Tony, your powerful message on peace. To use your words: In the name of Jesus, stop this
war! You’ve said to me that the people you are most afraid of these days are brothers and sisters in Christ.
Tony Campolo: Yes, that’s right. The thing is that when Jesus came into the world, he found that those
who most opposed his message and his effort to bring love and peace into the world were religious people.
In the end, it was religious people who put him on the cross. I’m not sure that things have changed so
much. Mark Twain once said, “People never do as much evil as when they do it in the name of God.” All
around the world we are seeing this kind of religiosity emerging in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam which
contradicts the essence of these religions. These terrorists are not really representing Islam. These Jewish
fanatics in Israel that do terrible things don’t represent Judaism. The Christians who are war mongers do
not represent Christ. When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he probably meant we shouldn’t kill them.
Talbot: And so it’s about power and yet God is not on the side of power and might but on the side of peace
and reconciliation.
Campolo: May I point out that love and power are diametrically opposed to each other? In order to love
you have to give up power. When you stop to think about that, here’s a husband and here’s a wife. She
loves him and he doesn’t love her. Who is in a position of control? Who can call the shots? He is in a
position of power because he doesn’t love. Love makes you vulnerable. Love makes you weak. That’s why
the great biblical message is about a Christ who thought not to be equal to God, but emptied himself of
power, majesty and glory and took the form of a little baby in a manger.
Talbot: About a Christ as a baby in a manger and yet isn’t there a Herod, not only in the world, but in each
one of us? Isn’t that tyrant, who wants us to do our own thing and dominate, alive in each one of us?
Campolo: Of course. I think it is human nature to want to dominate. I think that Friedrich Nietzsche said it
well: “The will to power is the essence of human personality.” That’s why we need spirituality. Only God
can change us and make us into new creations who are not on power trips. I see it in churches, I see it in
politics. People are on power trips and wherever there is a hunger for power, there is going to be war.
Talbot: And God protects and hides that child inside each one of us, ready to come forth.
Campolo: Unless you become as little children, you will in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. Give up
our power plays and let’s become loving people.
Talbot: Thanks for your transforming message, Tony Campolo.