Creating Christmas: Peace

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Philippians 3:4-7 and Mark 1:1-8:

At one of the churches I served in Boston, the clergy association held an interfaith Thanksgiving service that brought together nearly all of the church and synagogues. While there was not a mosque in the town, the next town to the south did have the Islamic center for western Boston, and so as it came up to be our turn to host the event, I said that we would do it, on the condition that we also invite the Islamic community to participate. But, of course it wasn’t just that easy. After September 11, as the community, which had lost several citizens in the planes, sought to put together an interfaith service, someone else had recommended that the Islamic community be invited, and it was said that that would never happen in this town. Much of the opposition, although not all of it, came from one of the two rabbis, who was an Israeli and had lost several family members in terrorist attacks, and I understood his position and was completely sympathetic to his position. Additionally, we had to answer the question of whether it was justified to destroy and break the community we had established in order to widen the circle. Did the ends justify those means?

Eventually, we had one of the other protestant pastors, who had a closer and longer relationship with the rabbis, talk with them and both of them, to their inordinate credit, agreed that not only would they agree to the invitation, but they would still participate as well. When the day of the service finally arrived, we weren’t really sure what was going to happen, but the rabbi walked up to the representatives from the Islamic center and he put out his hand, remember when we could do that, and he said to them “shalom Aleichem” which is Hebrew for peace be with you, and those greeted replied “Aleichem shalom”, which is unto you peace. In his letter to the Romans, Paul says, “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” And I think in that moment, we broadened peace and community just a little bit. Shalom Aleichem.

As I said in our worship preview which goes out on Fridays, leading into Advent, we often act or treat Christmas as something that happens to us. I mean there are things we have to do for Christmas, shopping and wrapping and decorating and preparing for the meal and visitors, and hopefully some church somewhere along the line, but Christmas itself comes and goes every single year, and there’s not much we can do about that. Except, I think, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of Christmas. Christmas is a celebration of the gift of God’s son, the greatest gift the world has ever received, but it’s not something that happens to us. It is something in which we are called to participate. It’s something that we can assemble together, and part of the way we do that is not just by hearing about the themes of Advent, which are hope, peace, joy and love, but to live into those themes. To make them part of who we are, so that we can live into them every day. In the movie Elf, there are three codes of the Elves, and the first of them is “Treat every day like its Christmas.” And so that is part of our charge.

Last week we addressed hope, and the hope that we have in the coming redemption of the world, with the second coming of Christ who will bring about the completion and perfection of creation. But, hope is not optimism, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, “Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better;” which means we can lose our optimism, but “hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better.” We are called to participate in the hope that God brings to the world though the person of Christ, and we are called to wait on that hope with patience. Which, of course, is not easy, but it turns out that too is a gift from God, because patience is one of the fruit of the Spirit. And, as it turns out, so is peace a fruit of the Spirit, along with joy and love. And so when we think that it’s impossible for us to possibly live up to these standards, the answer is, of course it’s impossible. But it’s not impossible for God, who gives us the Spirit.

That’s what we hear from John the Baptist in the passage from Mark from this morning. In preparing the way for the coming of the Lord, John says that while he baptizes with water, Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit. And, we believe that when we are baptized that we receive the Holy Spirit as a gift from God, and so the fruit of the Spirit is already there for us to claim, and to work for. And so is that true for peace, although not the peace we normally think of. Because normally when we talk about peace, or being a peacemaker as we did a few weeks ago, we talk about peace as being the absence of war, or the absence of violence. And there is certainly an aspect to that, especially as we proclaim Jesus as the Prince of Peace, and yet there is also something personal about our call to participate in peace.

In Hebrew, the word primarily used for peace is shalom, as we already heard.  While it too has an understanding of an absence of war, more importantly, especially in relation to God and us, it has a meaning of safety or well-being and contentment. When that is then translated into Greek, the word is Eirene, which again has the connotation of absence of war. But, more importantly for our purposes and for the gospel message, it also has the connotation of wholeness and well-being, the restoration of relationship between people and God but also between people. And so think of the resurrection story in John, when Jesus appears before the disciples what is the first thing he says to them? “Peace be with you.” There are lots of ways he could have greeted them, but his greeting is about peace. What we could see him saying here is may you be whole, or may you be well. And of course in a time of deep brokenness in their lives following Jesus’ death, healing and wholeness is probably exactly what they needed.

And the same is true now for us and for the world. We need peace in a multitude of ways. We need to learn to turn our swords into plowshares and learn to study war no more, as we heard is the passage from Isaiah last week, and we also need to learn to be at peace with ourselves, as we heard in the vision from Isaiah today of the “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together.” As I said a few weeks ago when we talked about being peacemakers, there is an ancient story that all of us have inside of us two sides, one that is angry and devorous, and one that is peaceful and serene, and the one that we feed will be the one that wins. And so if we feed our anger and our animosity and our hate, those things will win, and surrounding ourselves in the things we read or listen to or watch that are angry and hateful then that is what we are feeding. But, if we instead learn to feed on peace and love, by praying for our enemies and practicing forgiveness, as a start, then we will begin to live in peace. Because I think Isaiah’s vision is not just for the world, but his vision is for us. that when we live in peace then the wolf and the lamb, and the leopard and the kid and the calf and the lion lay down inside of us. when we are at peace with ourselves then we will be at peace in the world.

When I began in ministry, if you had asked me about the reason for Jesus and something about the Kingdom of God, I would have danced around a lot of different things. But, the longer I do this, the more I believe it is about peace as an understanding of healing and wholeness. That Christ, in his actions, in all of his offices, as it were, is giving us the opportunity, the resources, to be complete in ourselves, which means being in wholeness in our relationship with God, and in wholeness in our relationship with each other. And so I don’t want to say that peace is more important than the other themes of Advent, because they too are really important, but peace does have some priority. Because when we are at peace with ourselves, then we will be at peace with the world. When we are at peace with God, then we will be at peace with others. When we live in peace the we will be witnesses to God’s love and joy and hope in the world, and that, my brothers and sisters, is who we are called to be. I pray that it will be so. Amen.