Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All

 

Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All

For

Northshore UCC, Woodinville, WA

December 22, 2024

 

Scripture: Luke 1:46-55

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Have any of you been feeling much peace lately? I have to tell you, I haven’t. I think that’s partly because though I’ve been retired for nearly seven years, I haven’t really adjusted to it yet. I still spend a fair amount of time fussing about what I’m supposed to be doing, which, it usually turns out, isn’t much. I often feel my soul ill at ease. Perhaps some of you feel your souls ill at ease too. The results of this year’s presidential and congressional elections are another reason for my spiritual unease. I don’t know how all of you feel about that result, but I’ll tell you that it hardly brings me peace. It brings me more worry, fear even, than it does peace. The news of this country and of this world is so bad that I watch a whole lot less TV news than I used to, and I don’t read much news online or anywhere else either. The news just disturbs me too much. So for me, and perhaps for some of you, peace is a hard thing to come by these days.

Yet we are in the season of Advent, and Christmas is just three days away. It has struck me this year how many Christmas carols speak of peace. The lyrics of the carol “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” include the line: “When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling.” The Huron carol “’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” refers to “the radiant Child who brings you beauty, peace so mild.” The carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” says that the angels sing of “peace on earth and mercy mild” and of “God and sinners reconciled.” Another of my favorite carols, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” ends every verse with the phrase “Of peace on earth, goodwill toward men.” It certainly seems that the birth of the Messiah that we are about to celebrate once more has something to do with peace.

OK. But what is peace, exactly? It seems we must know what peace is, or at least is supposed to be, if we are to understand the peace that is somehow connected with Christmas. Dictionary definitions are of some help here. They say that peace is: The state of absence of disturbance. It is a state of tranquility or quiet, of freedom from disturbance, and from war and violence. It is also the state of not being interrupted by annoying things.

OK. Fair enough, but a Bible dictionary I use approaches the meaning of peace a bit differently. It says that in the Old Testament the word translated as peace is from the word shalom, which means “wholeness, or well-being.” This source says that the word “peace” means much the same thing in the New Testament as it does in the Old. So I think that we, as Christians, need to ask: How is the birth of Jesus Christ associated with, or how does it bring us, peace that is both freedom from war and destruction and from a sense of wholeness or well-being?

And I think we can get some answers to those questions from the scripture we heard this morning. It’s called The Magnificat, from its first words in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” “my soul magnifies the Lord.” In her magnificent hymn, for that’s surely what the Magnificat is, Mary does a couple of things. She first says that God has “looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” It is, I think, important here that Mary refers to her own “lowliness.” What does that mean? It means, I think, that, by the standards of the world, Mary was essentially nobody. Yes, she may have been personally virtuous, but she wasn’t rich. She was married to a carpenter in a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. She had no power. She had no authority. She was no one the world would take any notice of.

Yet God chose her to be the Theotokos, the Mother of God, as the Christian tradition has called her since a couple of ecumenical councils in the fifth century CE. God chose this young woman, probably  a very young woman by our standards, for the most sacred task God had ever given to anyone. God chose her, out of all of the women in the world, to do nothing less than bring the Messiah, the Christ, into the world.

Now, some of us have on occasion felt a divine call of one sort or another, but I doubt that any of us has been called to a task as holy as giving birth to the Son of God. God chose someone who was no one for that sacred task. And if God was so intimately present with the lowly Mary, don’t you think that God is with each one of us too? With every one of you? Even with me? I do. My favorite verse in the Bible, Romans 8:39, says that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. Mary’s lowliness didn’t separate her from the love of God. Our lowliness, whatever our individual lowliness may be, can’t separate us from the love of God either.

And I think that God’s unfailing, unshakable, unconditional presence with each and every one of us as love is where we can actually find peace in our troubled lives and in this very, very troubled world. God, after all, is the ultimate power behind the universe, behind everything that is. God is the only reality in all creation that represents eternal, universal peace. God’s peace is always available to us if we’ll just open ourselves to it and let God fill our souls with it. The peace I find, and about the only peace I can find, comes from my deep conviction that ultimately everything will be all right because—God. Because in the end, everything both begins and ends with God. Mary knew God’s love. So do I, as unworthy of it as I believe myself to be. God looked with favor on Mary’s lowliness. I know that God looks with favor on my lowliness too. And I know that God looks with favor on each and every one of you. Therein lies, for me at least, the only meaningful source of peace.

Now, an awful lot of the world’s lack of peace results from the gross imbalance of wealth and power that characterizes our country and a great many countries the earth around. The people of the world, more so in some countries and perhaps less so in others, are divided into the haves and the have nots. Between the rich and the poor. Between those with power and those who lack power. Between those who are heard and those who are never heard. Those divisions create tensions within societies. They produce stress in the lives of the have nots, of those without power, of those who are never heard, stress that robs most of them of inner peace.

Sometimes those divisions erupt into violence. Into civil war. Into terrorism. Frankly, folks, the pervasive presence of violence in our world appalls me and puzzles me. How did it ever get to be OK for some humans to kill other humans, be that in criminal acts or in war? More particularly, how did it ever get OK for Christians, who claim to follow the greatest prophet of nonviolence the world has ever known, to kill anyone? Ever. Because, folks, it just isn’t OK, but Christians have always been every bit as violent as other people if not even more violent.

May’s Magnificat gives us hope for peace in this world of division, oppression, and violence. In English translation, she speaks in the past tense. She says “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” I’ve always had trouble with the past tense here, though I understand that these words are in a different tense in the original Greek that means something more like these are things God is doing, has always done, and always will do.

I understand Mary’s words to give us God’s dream for the world. God’s dream of how the world should be; and, more importantly, how one day the world actually will be. Therein lies a hope for peace. The oppressions and injustices that so characterize the world are not how God wants the world to be. I don’t know why the world doesn’t conform to God’s dream of justice, though I sure know that it doesn’t. I can, however, take hope from Mary’s confession that some day the world will conform to that dream. That one day the world will be a place of peace because it will have overcome the causes of its present violence.

So today, as we think about peace, we can take hope. We can take hope for our spirits and our world. We can take hope from Mary’s words in the Magnificat. Even more than that, we can find hope for peace in what we’re waiting for in this Advent season. In the coming birth of Jesus Christ, our Messiah, in the traditional language of our Christian tradition, our Savior. For it isn’t really with Mary that our hope for peace lies. It is, rather, with Jesus, the one with whom Mary was pregnant when she spoke the Magnificat.

The day when we especially celebrate his birth is nearly here. Three more days is all. Yes, for most children, Christmas is all about presents; and in a sense it is about presents, or rather, a present, for adult Christians too. It’s not about the presents the magi gave baby Jesus. That’s what we celebrate on Epiphany not on Christmas. It’s not about the presents that may be under our Christmas tree at home. It is, rather, about the one great gift that God gave us when Jesus was born.

What is that gift? The Gospel of Matthew says what it is in one word. Matthew, citing Isaiah, calls Jesus “Emmanuel,” and that means “God with us.” On Christmas we celebrate the ultimate foundation of our peace. We celebrate God coming to us as one of us, as irrational and impossible to believe as that may be. Yet Christmas can renew and strengthen our trust that that is who Jesus was and is: God With Us. And therein lies our peace. For me, therein lies our only possible hope for peace. The only possible ground of peace. Peace for my soul. Eventually, though certainly not while I’m alive, peace in my world, which of course isn’t my world at all but is God’s world.

So on Christmas Eve, as we sing Silent Night, that most peaceful of all Christmas carols, let’s remember what and who we are celebrating. Let us cling to baby Jesus as God’s great gift to us, a gift in may ways but perhaps most importantly, a gift of peace. May it be so. Amen.

 

Giving Prayer:

Loving and gracious God, in three days we will celebrate the coming of your greatest gift to us, the gift of your Son Jesus the Christ. We have nothing we can return to you that is in any way comparable to your divine gift to us. Yet today we return a small portion of the blessings we have received. May they, and we, go out into the world to do the sacred work of building your realm of peace and justice on your good earth. Amen.

 

Benediction

Friends, the holy day is almost here. Two evenings from today, on Christmas Eve, in this church and in a great many churches, we will hear the Christmas stories and sing the old, familiar carols. I pray that for you, and for me, that it will be a night of peace and hope. For Jesus Christ is our peace. For Jesus Christ is our hope. So as you go on your way, may the One whose birth we await go with you. May he go before you to show you the way, behind you to encourage you, beside you to befriend you, above you to watch over, and within you give you peace this day, and forever more. Amen.