Peace on Earth?

Date Published: 12/24/2009

One of the Christmas letters we received this year, the sender said that every year he prays for peace, and every year wars and violence continue. He commented that he keeps hoping for a president or congress that will take the Christmas prayers and longings for peace seriously.

English teacher and writer Leonard Beechy writes about a Rabbi asking a class of Christian seminary students, “If Jesus was messiah, where is shalom?” (The Christian Century, November 17, 2009, page 20)

Last Sunday evening our congregation’s Christmas Vespers closing prayer was the singing of Let There Be Peace on Earth, and the key line is “and let it begin with me.”

Yesterday I was with a group of clergy who were discussing Greg Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea. One of the questions was whether building schools or counter-insurgency was more effective. We asked whether pragmatic outcomes are appropriate for discerning what personal actions to take and how whole societies make such monumental moral decisions.

We all resonate with the words of the angels in Luke 2:14: “On earth peace among those whom [God] favors!” Yet, a face value reading suggests that either the peace has not come or we are out of God’s favor.

As I muse on this every Christmas, I have come to be certain that no president or congress can be the channel of God’s promised peace. That’s just counter-intuitive, incongruous with being commander-in-chief, which is not to say that those in government don’t have moral responsibility and opportunity. Settling for an ambiguous inner peace without relational and even international peace sells God’s promise short and evades reality. Jesus reminds us that there will be “wars and rumor of wars” (Matthew 24:6; Mark 13:7) but to use that as an excuse for avoiding peacemaking contradicts all that Jesus stood for. Somewhere “let it begin with me” seems to be on the right track but doesn’t go far enough.

The answer is somewhere in a mystery that transcends pragmatic effectiveness. It is buried in the mystery of the hiddeness of the Kingdom and of the Gospel (Matthew 13:44). It is realized in the great reversal of the incarnation (Philippians 2:1-11). It is experienced in brokenness and wholeness when the Church lives as community of grace, as community of Christ’s Kingdom of Peace.