Texts: Isaiah 40: 1-31, Mark 1: 1-8

Although I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive about this weekend, the four of them: Felipe from Brazil, Aki and Yu from Japan, Jigsoon from Korea are not only utterly delightful, but they are committed to building peace one project at a time through the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, known as IICD. They are college students who are giving a year of their lives to eradicating poverty in the Third World through sharing their skills in manual labor, teaching, health services, and caring for the world's poorest people. This weekend they are camped out at my house and spend their days raising money for IICD programs. Building peace is more than just the absence of war. The seventeenth century Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza once wrote that peace is not an absence of war, calling it a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice.

The question for us is how we develop the state of mind that enables us to practice benevolence and justice, for true peace entails practicing both charity and justice. In the words of the old song, "You can't have one without the other." That is what every single international development agency knows and what we should know as well The connection goes back even before the Isaiah of the restoration, whose words we heard earlier: There can be no peace without justice. So, if you want peace, in the words of Paul VI, work for justice.

It's a truism, of course, but the problem with truisms is that they are often ignored because we often do not consider their deeper meaning. What does it mean to “work for justice?” Most of us cannot just go off to Africa or some other remote place to give up six months or so of our lives. Most of us are too old and have too many commitments back home, here in New Jersey. We have families, jobs, we have commitments that, for better or worse, cannot be broken. So for us, the work of peace must begin here at home: in our communities, our state, our nation, and in our hearts.

Finding peace in our hearts is not easy, especially as we are buffeted about by the world and ts demands on us. Moving beyond those demands and moving into a peace that we find through our connection to the One who has given us the ability to think and act, to love and, yes, even hate, to be present with others in the midst of their distress – that is the task of peace. Building such peace in our hearts is not easy. Quite frankly, it's really difficult, but ever so necessary if we are to have peace in the world. For the two are connected. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Thanh said, the miracle is not to walk on water but on the earth.

Peace is not something abstract, a concept just to be considered, but results from our encounter with each other, which is at the very heart of it, an encounter with God. Peace in our hearts doesn't come from "believing" in peace but in experiencing a deep and real moment when we feel that peace within. It's true that all of us need moments of solitude, those times when we confront what is within us. Even Jesus needed to withdraw from the press of people on a regular basis. But he did so to recharge himself so he could be with others.

When we cry for peace we should not cry for someone else to bring it to us. We should cry for strength to bring it to others, for in that way will we bring it to ourselves. We can find a model in the way that Jesus connected with others. He built peace by sharing his peace with others, not just through large crowds, but by directly looking at and addressing each individual person as if that person really mattered. As Dorothy Day once said, peace must be built as one would build a house, brick by brick.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that we ignore the world around us. There are times when, for the cause of peace, we must organize to act as a force against evil. But we must always remember that without the peace in our hearts, it is nigh impossible to build peace in the world. One of this year's Nobel laureates, Leymah Gbowee, began with a simple thought: let the women in her church come together for peace; she extended what came to be called her White Shirt Movement to other churches and then across the artificial lines of religious organization, inviting her Muslim sisters to join the movement for peace in Liberia. Each of these women began with the peace in her heart by reaching across a divide that up to that point was one imposed by the outside world. In reaching across the artificial divisions that separate us, one human being from another, we encounter peace because we encounter God.

And in encountering the other and recognizing our common humanity, we recognize that this encounter cannot be separated from the work of justice. Justice begins with our relationships with one another. The large work of justice is a reflection of the small work of justice in our dealings with each other. And unless our relationships are just, there will be no peace. The cry for peace is, in the final analysis, a cry for justice. It makes little difference whether the cry for justice is for economic justice, as is made by the 99 percent in the Occupy movement or the feeling of being left out and ignored as was found in the politics of fear. It is a cry that our society must heed or there will be no peace.

Peace in our society and peace in our hearts is deeply interconnected. Personal frustration and anger robs us of peace in our hearts even as we struggle to have it. And we see the eruption of that frustration and anger by the lack of peace in our society directly related to the feelings of injustice. It is indeed a viscous cycle, one that is hard to break. Every once in a while we get a glimpse of the possible. The kids – and they really are kids – that are giving up a year of their lives to work for peace through creating a more just and equitable society in Africa are glimpses into the possible. What's amazing is that they don't see themselves as "giving up" a year of their lives, but of investing in the future, one that builds peace, like a house, brick by brick, through working to establish justice. They are on to something. So, then, of course, was Jesus.

Let us pray: Creator of peace, establisher of justice, bring peace into our hearts, into our souls as we continue the vision of the One we follow who came to bring peace to our hearts and justice in our relationships with others.