In the name of God: Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The peace of God it is
no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing, the
marvelous peace of God.
Sometimes
the hymn writers just get it, and that is certainly true for William Alexander
Percy, the author of today’s sequence hymn. Today we get a view of Jesus that
is unsettling. This isn’t Jesus as the shepherd of our souls, or Jesus the
friend of sinners, this is a far more aggressive and angry Jesus than we’re
accustomed to. This is a challenging Jesus, perhaps a Jesus that we wish would
just keep his mouth shut. This Jesus makes us uncomfortable with words such as “Do
you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but
rather division!... father against son and son against father, mother against
daughter and daughter against mother.”
