Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5.12-28
Isaiah 65.17-25
John 3.12-28
We have much the same experience in our personal lives. We think: “If I can just hold on until the weekend, until this project is finished, until vacation, until semester break, until the holidays are over, until my raise, or my promotion, or whatever, then I’ll be O.K. Then I’ll get some rest, catch up on my work, tie up my life’s loose ends, get organized, get things under control, and in general make peace with myself and the world and be healthy, happy and whole.” Experience teaches again and again it doesn’t work this way. We get at best momentary respite from the roller coaster, treadmill, rats’ maze of life (pick your metaphor). It’s just one thing after another. Whatever peace we can make or find for ourselves is not the real thing. We all know better, but finding out each time is a new disappointment.
All in all, life is a matter of peace looked for but not found. What the Church confesses is that this lack of peace is something we do not have the power to escape. Real, enduring peace lies beyond our capacities. For the causes of hatred, conflict, war lie within us.
We are not at peace with ourselves. To be a human being is to be internally conflicted. We are at odds with ourselves. We judge and cannot honestly satisfy ourselves. We internalize standards and ideals and judgments and find ourselves one way or another not measuring up, not good enough, not beautiful enough, or popular enough, or smart enough, successful enough, not having worked or studied or tried or loved hard enough, and so on and on. We suffer, as St. Paul would put it, under bondage to the law. No amount of self-approval suffices for the empty places within us; they were meant to be filled only by God’s love and acceptance.
We are not at peace with one another. This is the most obvious lack of peace from which we long to be delivered. Thus the universal appeal of the Christmas story: Mary and her baby in the manger among the animals, angelic choirs hovering over wintry fields, the gift-laden, star-following magi...Everyone responds to this part of the Christian story. Even those who have no use for the Cross and the Resurrection, even those who boggle at the literal God made literal flesh, experience the palpable blessedness of the coming of the Child Christ. “Peace on Earth, and good will to men!”
We all are ready to hear the promise of peace, for we know conflict at every level of human life. Hostility between nations, wars and rumors of war without end. Abductions, serial killers, drive-by shootings, random violence. Insane conflict between ethnic groups, hatred between the rich and poor, between the powerful and the marginalized, between women and men. Even when there seems nothing but good intentions there can be systematic domination and exploitation of some persons by others. There is something radically broken in human relations. We do not see ourselves as created for trusting God. We do not see one another as loved by a trustworthy God. The human thing is to long for security, power, control; to be right and in the right. We are dangerous to one another.
And we are dangerous to the rest of nature. The original human task and opportunity to take responsibility for the natural world, to respectfully and thoughtfully steward its resources has been squandered. We have not trusted God to supply all our needs; we have greedily, foolishly destroyed, spoiled and wasted much of nature.
These ways in which human life is full of conflict have one underlying cause. We are not at peace with God. We need to make peace with God and will only be at peace with ourselves, with one another, and with our world when there is reconciliation between God and his human creatures. The idea that the basic human problem is the need to make peace with God can be hard to swallow. We easily accept the notion that we need to be good, more like God, or more the sort of persons we can imagine God approving of. We admit that we ought to take a greater interest in God, or at least in the ethical and religious things God is reportedly interested in. The idea that there is enmity between God and us, and that something must be done to bring it to an end, sounds pretty strange. Yet it is this that we confess. We are created for trusting God. The temptation of Eve and of all her children is to trust not in God but in oneself. The Genesis tale puts it in the the serpent’s mouth: “To be like a god, knowing good and evil.” Our temptation is to be for ourselves what God intends to be for us. Being a god means not having to take things on faith, not having to rely on the goodness, and on the approval, of someone greater than us, someone we cannot control. To be godlike is to be more than a creature; it is to be always in the right, secure, powerful, independent, self-justifying.
If there was any doubt about what has gone wrong deep within the human heart it disappeared when God himself became one of us. The vulnerable child of Christmas grows up to be the man of sorrows, the man who as God puts himself into human hands, hands that kill him for blasphemy. Humankind is not at peace with itself because it is at war with its Creator.
The good news of Advent is that God has come to make peace. He does what we cannot do. God, in the Messiah John announced, brings peace to those in conflict within themselves, with one another, and with the natural world. The coming of the Christ child is the beginning of the end of the long waiting for peace. Good Friday and Easter lie ahead, but already there is the overwhelming fact of the great joy. God is with us. He has not left us to our own devices and desires.
Above all, God was then and is now in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. God is not only bringing peace to us, he is making peace with us. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and by way of the community that at all times and places faithfully witnesses to Jesus, God decisively acts to make peace with us. He acts to undo our attempts to do away with him and go it alone, taking his place. We are, by fallen nature, God’s enemies. Nonetheless he gives us faith in Jesus, a faith that joins us to Jesus and lets his goodness, his obedience, his perfect trust in God his father, count as ours. Our being enemies with God is over. We are now justified, our relation to God restored. By God’s grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, we have peace with God.
We tend to think of peace in negative terms, merely as the absence of conflict. Peace, we think, is whatever we’ve got when the conflict ends. But the peace the God of Advent brings cannot be adequately described in terms of what it isn’t. Nicholas Wolterstorff, in his book Until Justice and Peace Embrace, uses the Hebrew ‘shalom’ to draw attention to the positive content of the peace God makes:
The peace which is shalom is not merely the absence of hostility, not merely being in the right relationship. Shalom at its highest is enjoyment in one’s relationship....To dwell in shalom is to enjoy living before God, to enjoy living in one’s physical surroundings, to enjoy living with one’s fellows, to enjoy life with oneself (69-70).
The Messianic texts we heard today look far ahead to the rich fullness of human life when God’s work of peacemaking, his healing, reconciling and making right and whole will be complete. Happiness, joy, rejoicing are what characterize the human future lived in the presence of the God who delights in us.
Until then we have our time to take up what Wolterstorff describes as “both God’s cause in the world and our human calling” (72). As those who bear witness to God’s reconciliation in Jesus the Messiah, it is our task to do what can be done now, however imperfectly and incompletely, to heal where hatred and conflict has done harm, to make peace, to strive for reconciliation, even where this seems impossible in merely human terms. The works of peace, when they do not flow from faith in the God who came as Jesus to make peace, are ultimately hopeless, however laudable and heroic they may be. Faith in that God without the works of peace is, as James would tell us, lifeless. Living faith that witnesses to the reality of what we celebrate in this Advent gratefully expresses itself by sharing in the work of the God of peace.