Darkness to Light: Christmas Peace to All

For those who were unable to hear the Sermon on Peace on December 23rd, I am posting it in lieu of a new devotional for this Christmas Day.

Morning Grace will take a break until the New Year. Have a joyous holiday season and look for the next devotion on Wednesday, January 2nd.

Merry Christmas!

Sermon 12/23/18 - - Peace

  

The shepherds ran with joy to Bethlehem. They just had to see for themselves this astonishing thing that the angels told them about.

As they went, most of them slapped themselves on the back. “Us!” they cried! “The angels came to us!” And their joy intensified with every step. 

It wasn’t only the fact that the angels told them a savior had come, but it was the fact that the angels had chosen them to tell. That they knew this before everyone else!

After all, hadn’t everyone else been ignoring them?

Hadn’t the leaders of their people forgotten about them? I mean, really! King David had started as a shepherd. Moses had been a shepherd! Abraham had been a shepherd!

But over time, it was as if the collective memory of their people had diminished, leaving them on the bottom rung of society.

It made no sense to them. How could they not be appreciated? Shepherding was hard work. Hard work with little or no return on investment. 

And yet everyone looked down on them. When had that happened? When had being a shepherd stopped being a noble profession and become something with which you could scarcely earn a living?

One of the shepherds hung back just a little bit. Didn’t run as fast as the others. The angels said “Peace among all those whom God favors.”

Did his brother shepherds actually think that meant them? When had God favored them?

He scoffed. What did peace even mean? For goodness sakes, it was already pretty peaceful on most of their nights out in the fields. Quiet. Not much ever happened. A fox or wolf from time to time, but they usually managed to scare them off.

And it was peaceful to be away from the citizens of the town who looked down on them. 

Or maybe the angel meant that Roman peace that had taken over Judea!

He scoffed again. Everyone knew what Roman peace was – the Pax Romana that had taken over the world. That peace was anything but peaceful for the Jewish people.

It was violent. Oppressive. And since God seemed to favor the Romans – I mean they had all the power after all – was Roman peace what the angels were talking about?

It had to be. Otherwise, how insane was this? After all, the angels had said that this savior – this Messiah – had been born. An infant!?

What a cosmic joke! What kind of infant could stand up to the power of the Pax Romana? The power of Caesar and all his forces?

He shook his head and caught up with the other shepherds. They were crazy, he thought. But he might as well see what this was all about.

When they got into town, it wasn’t hard to find the place the angels had told them about. The morning dawn was just beginning to break, and all the pinks and oranges seemed to settle most on a small, unassuming little home. 

There, in the back was a room for the animals, and as they got closer, a family came into view: a father, overwhelmed and harried. A mother exhausted from birth, and in the feeding trough for the animals, a tiny newborn.

The light of the sky began to turn shades of lavender and blue, and the shepherd – the cynical, doubting shepherd – looked into the face of that small infant and suddenly knew what it meant to be saved.

This was no Pax Romana. God was about to show them what peace truly meant.

--- 

Not long ago, during the midst of a fairly busy week, my husband called to me to go outside and look at the sunset. Now this isn’t something he usually does.  So outside I went. And this is what I saw.

And the world – my hectic, frenzied world – slowed down. For I don’t remember how long, Rick and I just were. We shared a moment together of simply looking at a sunset that was sublimely beautiful.

Now I don’t generally spend much time looking at my backyard, but just then I was able to see and appreciate everything. The way the trees were framed by the sky.

The gold of my neighbor’s forsythia bushes which, when framed against the pinks and purples of the sunset, looked just like they did in spring. 

Even the way the siding on my house reflected back those colors. 

Things I could see more clearly than I could in either the harsh light of day or the darkness of the night.

And for those moments, my hectic, frenzied week felt peaceful.

Peace is one of those words – rather like joy – that is hard to define but we know it when we see it. Or feel it.

We know what peace feels like sitting by the ocean and watching the sun either rise or fall over the horizon.

We know what it feels like when we watch the news and see two enemies lay down their arms and end a battle that has raged for years.

The definition of peace is both freedom from disturbance and freedom from war or violence.

Freedom.  Peace as freedom. Peace as salvation.

That’s what the Israelites were looking for as Moses led them out of the oppression of slavery in Egypt and into the desert.

That freedom comes, Moses told them, by the Lord blessing them and keeping them.  By God’s name being written into their very beings. 

That freedom comes, Paul says, by no longer being strangers and aliens from God and from each other. It comes from all being part of God’s household!  

Peace sets us free, whether we need freedom from a hectic life, freedom from the ravages of violence or freedom from our own anger.

It can find us sometimes even when we are in the midst of busy-ness or pain.

Etty Hillesum was a Jewish woman from the Netherlands who was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1943. The end of her life seemed the very opposite of peace or freedom, as she and her family were transported from one concentration to another before all of them lost their lives.

And yet what Etty was most known was not her death or imprisonment. It was for her letters and diary entries that showed a life filled with hope, love, joy, and peace despite her suffering. 

She did not at all deny the terror and evil happening in Europe by the Nazis, but she nevertheless wrote about the freedom – the peace - that the Nazis could not take from her.

“The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.” She wrote in one diary entry.

And in another: “The sky is full of birds. The purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully; two little old women have sat down for a chat; the sun is shining on my face – and right before our eyes, mass murder.”

For Etty, despite physical imprisonment and unspeakable horror, she was free. There was beauty that she saw in her daily life that gave her hope.  There was a dawn that was still going to come in the morning.

And she found peace in that. She found freedom in that.

There is something in the light of dusk or dawn that opens us up to the possibility of peace in a way that brightness or day or darkness of night cannot.

That gives us a way to rest in the idea that the peace of God is freeing despite being beyond our comprehension. And despite a world around us that may feel anything but peaceful.

We can’t explain it. But we know when it happens.

A view of the dawn breaking over a mountaintop.

Enemies laying down their arms.

A brilliant sunset calming a stressful week.

A shepherd finding God’s saving peace in the face of a newborn who will bring light to the entire cosmos.

An enslaved people trudging through the wilderness finding freedom in being blessed by God.

Strangers, foreigners, enemies, migrants, politicians, prisoners, workers, families, rich, poor, finding peace by knowing that all – ALL – are members of the household of God.

In Advent we've seen light that is the faintness of a candle, the brilliance of a supernova, and the excitement of fireworks.

But sometimes the light is diffused sunlight that opens our eyes to the possibility of a new day after a long night, or clears up our image of the world around us after the harsh light of day has faded.

And when that happens, the darkness lifts, no matter our circumstances, and the cycle begins again.

Hope. Love. Joy, and again peace.

The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, and guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.