Tag: Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth

Jesus, in the song you wrote
The words are sticking in my throat
Peace on earth
Hear it every Christmas time
But hope and history won’t rhyme
So what’s it worth?
This peace on earth -U2

It is hard to hold out hope for peace.

We attend to peace like a river, mindful of where it is moving us to, and we yearn to have the peace that passes understanding down in our hearts to stay. We work to prepare the way for the Prince of Peace to come. But we feel the cognitive dissonance between the world we experience every day and the promised peace of our soon and coming King. “Jesus, in the song you wrote/ the words are sticking in my throat,” sings Bono and we feel with him the angst of a hope and history which just won’t rhyme. How can we hold out hope and sow peace in our wartorn land of discord?

Gerard Manley Hopkins poem Peace describes this same sense of elusiveness—our longing for promised Peace when we’ve only seen a peace, piecemeal and poor:

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

When, Peace, will you, Peace? How long, O Lord? What pure peace allows/ Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it? 

I had planned to write, today, ways we can welcome more of God’s shalom in our midst, but it struck me that such preachy platitudes would ring hollow if we didn’t stop and notice how hard it really is to hope for peace. We know far too much of grief and sorrow, death, terror and war, oppression and hate, we know far too little peace. It is hard to watch the news and not feel profoundly disillusioned and cynical. There is too much that is broken. How can such a world be made whole?

And yet we hope and wait, work and wonder. Peace is our hope but we hate the delay.  We’ve seen just enough to have some trust, but hope the way is not far off.  The opening lines of Bono’s song are:

Heaven on earth
We need it now
I’m sick of all of this
Hanging around
Sick of sorrow
Sick of pain
Sick of hearing again and again
That there’s gonna be
Peace on earth

We are sick of all we see and suffer. We long for your Kingdom come. How much longer? Prince of Peace, don’t drag your feet. 

Image source: Land art sculpture by Hein Waschefort, Maluti Mountains near Lesotho (Wikimedia Commons)

And Let it Begin With Me

The Advent call to “Prepare the way for the Lord” is a call to conversion (Luke 3:4-6). Anti-shalom marks our systems, structures, and institutions.  Injustice is business as usual. War and rumors of war haunt us. We are anxious people. We long for the peace of God to reign—in our hearts, in our lives, and in our world. But how should we live?

Let There Be Peace on Earth by Jill Jackson-Miller and Sy Miller describes how the call (and hope) for peace compels us to live differently:

Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me
Let There Be Peace on Earth
The peace that was meant to be

With God as our Father
Brothers all are we
Let me walk with my brother
In perfect harmony.

Let peace begin with me
Let this be the moment now.

With every step I take
Let this be my solemn vow
To take each moment and live
Each moment in peace eternally
Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me

The peace of God will one day reign on the earth, but to take up our role as Divine image-bearers means we live out God’s shalom now. This is how we welcome the Prince of Peace and allow the peace of Christ to reign in our hearts (Col. 3:15) But how do we do this?

First, we need to become a people of prayer. Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians is apt for these anxious times:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 4:6-7)

To pray is not to gloss over struggle, conflict, worry, and pain. It is to bring these things to God and invite His presence into them.

Committing to bringing everything anxious thought to God in prayer requires self-awareness about the things which are troubling us. This is easier if our anxiety is a troubling diagnosis or financial worry, but sometimes we have to probe our hearts a little more. We can’t present what we can’t name. When we are able to, our hopes and heartache laid bare before God, we provide the context for the peace of God to enter us more and more.

Secondly, in a world were darkness yet reigns, we are called to a stance of resistance. Peace is not just an inner-state, but a life which accords with the purposes of God for the world. This means as we follow Jesus, we learn to oppose anti-shalom in every form we encounter it.

Walter Wink notes three general responses to evil, ” (1) passivity, (2) violent opposition and (3) the third way of militant non-violence articulated by Jesus” (Jesus and Non-Violence, Fortress Press, 2003, 12). Jesus’ “third way” is not the middle path between revolution and passive fatalism. It is committing to shalom—well being and justice for all—and understanding that ends and means are convertible terms (MLK, Gandhi). This is not passive, it is the revolution. Anti-Shalom may be our lived-reality but the kingdom of God grows, as wheat among tares now, even in the shadow of Empire. Resistance is fertile.

Let it begin with me, but it can’t end there. The Peace of God calls us to not only cast all our cares on Him but to allow His shalom to form us to respond to the anxiety and pain felt by our neighbors, our community, our country and our world.

(Image: Flower Thrower by Bansky)