Shalom
Dear Hope Church Family,
Perhaps you have heard or you have spoken the Hebrew word shalom. A flat equivalent translation into English is “peace”. Dig a little deeper and you engage a vision for what it means to be human, to bear God’s image in this world. Shalom represents an intricate and rich tapestry of wholeness, flourishing, and delight. Shalom is God’s ideal for life that is teeming with security, purpose, joyful contentment, and hope. We all were made for and all ache for this peace, this flourishing.
Sin is the mocking caricature of the biblical ideal of shalom. Sin is the unwelcome intruder that compromises shalom and leaves us with that ache. It stresses the weaving of righteousness to the breaking point and past the breaking point as it violates the way-it-is-supposed-to-be and inflicts rupture. The most unrelenting, infuriating, deflating, and fear-inducing breaking of shalom is violence – one human to another.
These past weeks our country has had the ugliness and terror of violence yet again thrust into our faces and experienced in our real lives. The violence has come in sadly familiar ways with more school shootings in Minnesota and Colorado, and in what feels like shocking and sickening heightened forms – the brutal murder of a Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, on public transportation in Charlotte and the vile assassination of fellow believer in Christ, Charlie Kirk.
Shalom always feels vulnerable and liable to tearing apart; however, these recent tragedies intensify the feeling that the tapestry of shalom is being shredded by reprehensible violence.
What do we do with these realities as believers in the Risen Lord Jesus Christ?
- In the face of evil that tears apart the fabric of God’s ideal for humanity, it is always best to start with honest lament to our God. We entrust our sadness, our anger, our fear, our confusion, our longings to the God who not only allows us that access but also gives us language to express the depths of our brokenness with His Word. Take advantage of Psalm 13 and so many others that empower us to pour out our hearts like water before our Lord.
- We renew our hope in the Resurrected Jesus. Rather than set our hopes on governments and political parties, heroes and leaders, or our own relative security and control of circumstances, we trust in the One who has conquered death and will end violence and repair the shalom we are meant to thrive in. Indeed, earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot and will not heal. When we see shalom vandalized, we long for the assured hope that it will be made new and good and right again by Jesus himself.
- We live as Christian believers in this compromised and harrowing world. The one resource we have at our disposal that no other faith or community possesses is the Spirit of the Living God. The Spirit enables us to lament, to hope, and to cultivate the lifestyle of redeemed image bearers. In the vortex of violence and fear, we ask the Spirit to produce and stir up in us the distinctive fruit only Christians can express: love in the face of hate, joy in the face of despair, peace in the face of threat, patience in the face of annoying entitlement, kindness in the face of cruelty, goodness in the face of evil, faithfulness in the face of broken promises, gentleness in the face of severity, and self-control in the face of selfish indulgence.
We have an unprecedented opportunity to show, by profession and quality of life, that shalom has not been obliterated and that Jesus’ Kingdom values will triumph!
If you would like to join me and some others for a time to pray about these very things – to lament, to hope, and to ask for the Spirit’s help – I am going to be at the church on Sunday afternoon at 3pm to pray. I invite you to pray with me as we seek God’s face together.
Peace (shalom) of the Risen Savior,
David – along with Ethan and Ben