Tag: Advent Peace

The Coming Shalom of God

The coming of Christ we await at Advent is the coming of God’s peace. The establishment of Christ’s reign—the coming Kin-dom of God— is the Shalom God promises. And thus far, our Sunday readings from Isaiah, have given us some pretty vivid pictures of this coming peace (Isaiah 2:1-5, Isaiah 11:1-10). But what is it we mean when we talk about peace?

A lot of times, when we talk about peace, we mean simply the absence of war or conflict. In the world that Jesus was born into, the pax Ramana (the peace of Rome) was an era of relative stability because Rome was so good at conquering people. It was the ancient equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Rome was really good at enforcing  peace on people whose freedom they took. Sometimes when we talk about peace, we mean the absence of anxiety. The Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, regards inner peace as a a mindful awareness of all of life, and awareness that we are connected with everything around us.

Like our own multivalent understandings of peace, the bibilical concept of peace, rooted in the Hebrew word, Shalom, is supple. It has the idea of absence of conflict, but also welfare, wellbeing, wholeness, healing, belonging.  It is a state where all the broken things are mended, everything is as it should be, and anything that shouldn’t be, is not. 

Nicholas Wolterstorff, observes, “Shalom is the human being dwelling at peace in all his or her relationships: with God, with self, with fellows, with nature.”[1] Wolterstorf explains shalom in relationship with God:

Shalom in the first place incorporates right, harmonious relationships to God and delight in his service. When the prophets speak of shalom, they speak of the day when human beings will no longer flee God down the corridors of time, a day when they will no longer turn in those corridors to defy their divine pursuer. Shalom is perfected when humanity acknowledges that in its service to God is true delight.[2]

Part of the peace of God is peace with God. When the Messiah comes we will live at peace with our Creator. But we will also be at peace with one another. Here is Wolterstorff again:

Secondly, shalom incorporates right harmonious relationships to other human beings and delights in human community. Shalom is absent when a society is a collection of individuals all out to make their own way in the world. And of course their can only be delight in human community, when justice reigns, only when human beings no longer oppress one another.[3]

When riots and demonstrations break out, following an unjust shooting (such as the unjust shooting of a African American by law enforcement) or a killer is acquitted on a technicality, we may hear the crowds chant, “No justice, no peace.” But in another way, we only know peace, when we know justice. The Shalom of God envisions a totally just society where we live at peace with another, without oppression, classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, or other forms of hatred. We will finally be at peace wit hour neighbor. As Walter Bruggemann says, “when Yahweh’s righteousness (Yahweh’s governance) is fully established in the world, the results are fruitfulness, prosperity, freedom, justice, peace, security, and well-being (shalôm).”[4]

Thirdly, Wolterstoff, argues:

Shalom incorporates right harmonious relationship to nature and delight in the physical surroundings. Shalom comes when we, bodily creatures and not disembodied souls, shape the world with our labor and find fulfillment in so doing and delight with the results.[5]

This aspect of Shalom, means a right relationship with nature, and a taking up our Creation mandate as caretakers of the physical world (Genesis 2). Too often, unworldly escapist versions of Christian eschatology have denigrated the physical realm (“who cares, it’s all going to burn anyway?”).  But the shalom of the coming Christ, means a new heaven, a new earth, and a new humanity (of which Christ is the head), all living at peace with one another.

The peace that God has promised us in Christ, the peace that Christ brings, is a revolution of all our relationships. We will be made new, and whole, and complete in love for God, in our just care for others, and our just care of God’s creation.

Anything less, is just a piece of peace. Not the wholeness and wellbeing God offers.

[1] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1983), 69

[2] Wolterstorff, 70

[3] Ibid

[4] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 303.

[5] Wolterstorff, 70.

This Dissonant, Disorienting Season of Advent

The chorus of the Rich Mullins’s song, Hold Me Jesus, goes:

So hold me Jesus,

Cause I’m shaking like a leaf

You have been King of my glory

Won’t You be my Prince of Peace

Maybe these lines do nothing for you, but in anxious times, these line find me and become a prayer: You have been King of my glory, Won’t You be my Prince of Peace?

Those of us who have grown up singing hymns and songs about God’s grandeur and goodness, if we have lived long enough, have bumped up against hard things—a disheartening diagnosis, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one. We’ve felt the dissonance between our belief in the transcendent and omnipotent God and our longing to feel God’s comfort and presence with us in places of profound struggle.

As we enter the second week of Advent the theme is peace, and honestly isn’t this so much of what we long for through the whole season? And the rest of year too? That Jesus would come to us and the peace of God would reign? That violence would end, that God would comfort our anxious thoughts and worries that keep us up at night? You have been King of my glory, Won’t You be my Prince of Peace?

In several of Walter Brueggemann’s books on the Psalms, he employs the typology of “Orientation, Disorientation and New Orientation on the Psalms”. When you read through the Psalms there certain ones that burst forth in praise to God, confident in his sure rescue, his glory. These are confident songs, which believe fully in a King of Glory. These are psalms of orientation

Then comes psalms of disorientation. The psalmists encounter war, sickness, oppression, exile. They cry out to God. They lament. They long for God, and ache at God’s absence.

Lastly there are psalms of New Orientation. These are songs for those who have gone through difficult times, and emerged with a new confidence that God has brought them through.

Brueggemann’s typology is useful, not only for categorizing Psalms, it also names stages of faith (akin to Ricoeur’s movement from a first naïveté to a second naïveté), and I think it is makes sense of our liturgical seasons. It has only been two Sundays ago that the liturgy proclaimed “Christ is King” before we entered this disorienting land of Advent. And it is now we lament, and we long, and we sigh, “how long?” When Christmas comes (because ‘a baby changes everything’), we occupy a space of ‘new orientation,’ sensing that God is with us, here, in the struggle of everyday life.

Certainly we may feel each of these to varying degrees. But in Advent I always feel the disorienting dissonance and the weight of absence of Christ’s already-not-yet reign. I feel the angst of wanting to know the peace of God more fully.

Somewhere in the communion of saints, Rich prays over us, ” You have been our King of my glory, Won’t You be our Prince of Peace?” as we long for swords to be beat into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4) and predators to give up their predatory ways (Isaiah 11:6-9).

A Wild Peace.

78 years ago today, at 7:48 AM, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack was meant to cripple the U.S. Navy, and it nearly did, sinking The USS Arizona, capsizing the USS Okalahoma and damaging the six other battleships in the U.S. Pacific fleet. 21 ships in total were lost or damaged. 2,335 military personnel were killed, and 68 civilians. Another 1,143 military personnel and 103 civilians were wounded. Japan declared war against the US later that day. President Roosevelt called it “a date that would live in infamy.” It was the worst attack on the U.S. until September 11, 2001, nearly 60 years later.

These attacks defined generations. Pearl Harbor shook the US out of its neutrality, and plunged them into World War II. Since 9-11, the U.S. has been in a state of perpetual war. This past spring the class of 2019 graduated from high school in a nation that has known no peace. And despite our efforts, terrorism and war are not on the decline.

Of course, this doesn’t affect most of us, most of the time. These days, our military takes out enemy targets in relative comfort with a precision drone strike. And civilians. Donald Trump said on the campaign trail, “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” The war on terror has transformed to a war on children. And earlier this year, Trump revoked the Drone Strike Civilian Casualty Report. Once a tragic outcome of war, civilian casualties is increasingly our strategy, with little, or no accountability.

Isaiah’s Messianic oracle in Isaiah 11 gave a vivid depiction of eschatological peace—a peace which passes comprehension:

6 The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

7 The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

9 They will not hurt or destroy

on all my holy mountain;

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.

10 On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Isaiah 11:6-10, NRSV

This is quite the menagerie! A wolf lying down with a lamb, a leopard with a goat kid, a lion with a calf and fatling. A bear forgoes a nice ribeye to graze with the cattle and a little child plays with his hand in a snake hole.

Lets be clear, if you put wolves together with lambs, leopards with goats, lions and bears with cattle, I’m reporting you for animal abuse. If your child is left unsupervised in a snake pit, I’m calling child protective services. Predators kill. It is their natural instinct. If we allow that these images are metaphors for oppressors and their victims, this imagery is equally discomforting. In a #metoo and #churchtoo era, can you imagine women and child victims, cheerfully hanging out with their victimizer? It strains our morality. We want the predator to be destroyed!

But Isaiah’s hopeful vision describes a world where the victimizers are victimizers no more. The vulnerable, the beatdown, the down-and-out, the oppressed, the manipulated, the young and easily dominated, will be with the powerful, and they will not fear for their lives. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. No more war, no more fear, no more destruction.

And no more victims. The timid lamb and the young goat kid stumbling on skinny legs will be transformed into confident creatures, standing shoulder to shoulder with wolves, and lions, leopards and bears. The fatling, and calf will roar, the ox will bear its teeth. The weak will be made strong and the strong will not misuse their strength .

We are in violent times, and I fear that being an American puts us more in the predator column than the prey column, though clearly these are semipermeable categories. We hurt and are hurt, we kill and are killed. Our Advent Hope is that we are ever closer to the day when we shall be transformed. We will no longer be victims. We will no longer victimize. We will no longer be killed and no longer will we kill. We will all be gathered together by our King of peace.

Let’s Neatly Stack Anxiety’s Sweaters

Johnathan Swift’s essay, A Modest Proposal, was a brilliant satire, designed to expose and mock callous attitudes to the poor in 18th Century Ireland. [Spoiler Alert!] Swifts’ solution to abject poverty was intentionally untenable, the eating of children. Swift took aim at those who would try to offer quick-fix schemes and cure-all-solutions in the face of real economic, social predicaments, and he lambasted the commodification of the poor. 

Like Swift, we too live in age where the poor and marginalized are commodified, and devalued by those in power. Refugees are called terrorists, migrants are called very bad people, rural Americans are denounced as hicks and rednecks, people of color are dismissed as thugs, welfare recipients are declared a drain on our economy, and the LGBTQIA are decried for destroying tradition.  But when people are routinely robbed of  their value, it isn’t too long before we hear demands for  their sacrifice (and we’re okay with it). The real horror of Swift’s proposal wasn’t the graphic description of raising children as livestock. The horror was that poor children, and the marginalized, were already laying their lives down to keep the reigning aristocracy well-fed. Swift’s modest proposal was “why don’t we do the things we are already doing to the poor?” It was satire, but it laid bare the upheaval and classism of 18th Century Ireland. And it’s true for us as well. 


Joy Ladin is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University Modest Proposal. She is the first openly transgender woman employed by an Orthodox Jewish University. Her poem Modest Proposal lacks the biting irony of Swift’s essay. She is more straight forward, in her proposal:

Let’s not kill or die today.
Let’s make angels out of yarn, men of snow, mashed potato animals
that smile as we spoon
their eyes of melted butter.

Instead of killing ourselves or one another,
let’s neatly stack anxiety’s sweaters
and scratch our itchy trigger fingers
by whittling turtles for our mothers,

or pretending to understand Heidegger,
or imagining the sexual embrace
through which time and space
first conceived of matter.

If we still aren’t over killing and dying,
we can search the stacks for library books
that haven’t circulated in generations
and savor the mold

that spores their spines
the way wine snobs savor the nose
of vintage wines bottled
between wars to end all wars.

Look, we’ve played all day
and haven’t spilled a drop of blood
apart from the occasional paper cut.
In an hour or two, when it’s very dark,

let’s make up stories out of stars,
and fill them with all the killing and dying
we didn’t do today, except in our imaginations.
Let’s pull our comforters over our heads

and sing ourselves to sleep
like good little civilizations.


From The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Joy Ladin. 

Ladin isn’t being ironic here. She’s exploring the “what if,” wondering, “what if we stopped wars and violence, brave sacrifices and wounding one another? What if instead we were free to play, explore, read old books—savoring their mold—, make stories out of stars, pull the covers over our heads and sing ourselves to sleep?”

It sounds idyllic and unattainable, even less plausible than Swift’s gory satire. We want peace, and celebrate the laying down of arms, provided that the other side lays theirs down first. I like Ladin’s proposal, but it is less modest than Swift’s. He told us what we were doing, she asks us to change. 

But isn’t this something we’ve read before?


The wolf shall live with the lamb,
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
 They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.
Return of the Remnant of Israel and Judah
On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Isaiah 11:7-10, NRSV

The predators—the wolves, the leopards, the lions, the bears, the snakes, the rich, the powerful and despot, the very bad people, the terrorists—will not bare their teeth. They will velvet their paws and stand alongside those they once victimized. Enmity and violence will be gone. Instead prey and predator alike will make angels out yarn and mash potato animals, the Little Child will lead us as we stack anxiety’s sweaters and whittle turtles for our mothers, pretend to understand Heidegger, contemplate the cosmos, We will play, explore, and dream. No more killing. No more dying.

With Ladin I am done with this serious business called war and long for the play of peace where there is no bloodshed outside the occasional paper cut. I long with Isaiah to see the day when all the violent predatory behavior cease and to have a Little Child to lead us to make stories out of stars. I will entertain no more proposals that advice me to eat the young and vulnerable. Peace is the proposal on the table. Advent says it’s coming. 

The Dejected Landscape Consorts Well with Our Shame and Bitterness

The world is not as it should be. Advent is the season for marking hope, but it is a specific hope. It is the hope that in the coming of Christ we may experience God’s peace—a peace which passes all understanding. Our piecemeal peace falls short. God’s shalom is different than these tenuous ceasefires. It is the experience of relational, spiritual, emotional, and cosmic wholeness. In God’s shalom everything is the way that it was meant to be, there is no lack, there is no anguish, there are none of the conflicts we find ourselves mired in. 

Denise Levertov’s poem In California During the Gulf War describes a world deciding not at peace. Blight-killed eucalyptus, trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frost, hills exhausted by a five-year-drought—even the promise of certain airy white blossoms inspire no hope—the dejected landscape consorts with us in our shame in bitterness:

Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,

certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink–
a delicate abundance. They seemed

like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed
festival day, unaware of the year’s events, not perceiving
the sackcloth others were wearing.

To some of us, the dejected landscape consorted well
with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue,
daily sunshine, disgusted us like smile-buttons.

Yet the blossoms, clinging to thin branches
more lightly than birds alert for flight,
lifted the sunken heart

even against its will.
But not
as symbols of hope: they were flimsy
as our resistance to the crimes committed

–again, again–in our name; and yes, they return,
year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy
over against the dark glare

of evil days. They are, and their presence
is quietness ineffable–and the bombings are, were,
no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophony

simultaneous. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.

The first Gulf War was a popular war in the US, in part because of its perceived justness—Iraq had aggressively invaded Kuwait—and partly because of its brevity. Officially it lasted only 5 weeks from January 17, 1991 -February 28, 1991. American soldiers had few casualties and most of the Patriots that entered Kuwait and Iraq for the duration of the fighting were missiles.  By late February, the Iraqi military was desperately surrendering to news crews. 

✹

I was also in California during the Gulf War, at least the start of it. I was a sophomore in high school.  My mother, an artist, and musician was invited to the NAAM Convention at the Anaheim Convention Center. She was representing  Baldwin, there to demonstrate their latest electric organ. As a teenager and budding guitarist, I spent the entire convention on the hunt for celebrity autographs and free guitar picks. We were aware of Operation Desert Storm from watching the evening news in our hotel room. It was an anxious time. War and the threat of war are never fun. But the mood inside the convention center was not dampened. Everyone was clamoring to see the latest keyboard, effects pedal, and sound system, and play new model guitars, unaffected by the bombs being dropped half a world away. 

On Sunday, my dad and I went to church at the Crystal Cathedral, the set of Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power, a weekly telecast of positive preaching which aired every Sunday morning. I am not sure if the camera panned to where my dad and I sat that day. I may have been on TV, if only briefly. 

Schuller’s sermon centered on how George W. Bush called and talked to him before declaring war on Iraq and how we should support him. Flags were waved and we prayed for our country. ‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land. God bless the USA.

✹

Levertov’s poem proved prescient. When it was claimed the war had ended, it had not ended. This was only just another episode of violence between the US and the Gulf region. In the next decades there would be an Iraqi assassination attempt on former president Bush’s life (41), Bombing of the region by every US president, Sept. 11 and the Second Gulf War, the Hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction, ISIS, the Syrian refugee crisis, the Saudi War in Yemen and tomorrow, who knows. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed the war had ended, it had not ended.

It’s 2018. There is more drought and exhausted hillsides, and the blight still kills eucalyptus in California, despite certain white blossoms and the distraction of celebrity sightings. We are a world not at peace. 

Even so, come Lord Jesus.