Peace Surpassing Understanding

What is it that you want for Christmas? Picture what it is that you’d like in your head. Some in here would like a new toy—a new train, a new scooter, something that brings fun with it. Some would like, perhaps, toys of a more expensive sort. A new washer or dryer? A new car? A new tool? Some of us may say that we have everything we need, and we really don’t want something for Christmas.

Yet I don’t believe that. There is something that each of us wants. We want long tables filled with friends and family and laughter. We want gatherings that are free from the stress of strained relationships and fear of axe-grinding comments.

We want joyful feasts to give way to peaceful moments, loud exuberance to be followed by a quiet in which we are not scared to be alone with ourselves and with our thoughts.

We bodies that are not racked by pain. We want the weight of age and of decay to be lifted. We want to move as we feel we should be able to and to think and remember well and have our emotions fuse well with our intellect.

Outside, we want neighborhoods that glisten in pure snow and crisp, clear air which allows shadows of joyful walkers free of fear to travel the sidewalkks

We want a society in which all people find purpose and meaning and beauty. We want government that knows how to cultivate the atmosphere for such a society and the will and resources to make it happen.

In short, we want peace. Not peace as a lack of conflict, but peace as the Hebrew people understood it—wholeness. Shalom.

Yet here we are on the precipice of 2019, and what do we have?

We have doorbells that monitor our front porches so that no one steals from us.

We have families that are broken or struggling or flat-out torn apart. There is fear in gatherings about who will say what this year.

We have refrigerators and pantries which don’t have enough or even any food to provide. There are children and adults and seniors who worry about the source of their next meal.

We have fear in walking neighborhoods.

We have government and social service agencies that are overwhelmed by poverty, by the breakdown of community, and by crime. We have suicide rates that are rising at alarming rates.

And we have empty chairs at the tables where loved ones used to sit.

There is pain; there is discord; there is fear and brokenness. There is no peace. There is no wholeness. There is no shalom. Just fragments.

Yet here we stand on Christmas eve, because we believe that we won’t find that peace, at least not on our own strength. Our hope isn’t in our own strength, but it’s in, of all things, an infant born in a stable over 2,000 years ago. It doesn’t make sense, but then you’d think that after millennia of trying to govern ourselves, of looking for meaning for ourselves, of trying to secure happiness for ourselves, we’d come to an understanding that our salvation wouldn’t come from within.

But on the child of Bethlehem, we place our hopes. The hope of Job to see our redeemer in the flesh, long after our own skin has been destroyed. The hope of Isaiah for the peaceable kingdom and the Prince who brings peace. The hope of the prophets who longed for the fulfillment of God’s promises and a holy society. The hope of Simeon and Anna, who longed simply to fix their eyes on the one who would bring about the end of sin’s reign in the world. The hope of John as he cried out, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” as he saw Jesus approaching. The hope wholeness, of restoration, and of justice. The hope for peace in all of the texts that we read tonight, for they all longed for peace that only God could provide and peace to which we can only receive and respond.

We place our hope on the Word become flesh, and we seek to follow him in the hope of peace. This is the call and promise of Christmas, both for us and for our world. Peace within and peace without. Ponder this through the face of the infant Christ. Amen.

The hope of Simeon and Anna, who longed simply to fix their eyes on the one who would bring about the end of sin’s reign in the world. The