Christmas Eve, Austwick
Peace on earth starts within
Titus 2.11-14, Luke 2.1-20
Christmas Eve, Austwick
It’s Christmas. And we keep on hearing about ‘peace on earth’. Despite all the terrors of war in the world which trouble us, this seasonal, scriptural message persists: ‘peace on earth, goodwill to all’.
Is peace on earth an impossible dream? It seems so elusive to us that we might be forgiven for treating it with the same levity as we do Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
But, even after two thousand years of war and strife, still this gospel message persists. ’Peace on earth’. We still want it. We long for it. In the Middle East. On our city streets. In our living rooms and as we lay our troubled heads down at night. We long for it.
Is it possible to achieve it? Is this partially what draws us here to worship at this improbable hour, because deep down we have an instinct that God, in Jesus, shows us how, and can help enable us, to live together in peace?
We must acknowledge all the violence done in the name of Christ over the centuries, and the bloodshed and militarism which is still sanctified by the Church: and ask hard questions of it.
Because significantly, when the Bethlehem baby grew up, Jesus put an end to the poisonous fiction that God is ‘vengeful’. He demonstrated his good news by persistently befriending the poor, the outcasts, the little people of his day, including those who seemed his enemies. He listened to them and ate with them. Some he healed of maladies that diminished their lives. He kept on like that until he fell victim to the powerful. Even then he responded not with vengeance, threats or self-interest. Rather, he went calmly toward death, stopping along the way to heal a slave's ear, to comfort the women who wept for him, to ask forgiveness for his murderers and to bless his fellow condemned. [2]
Jesus' message and his self-giving life announce that there is no place for vengeance in God’s peaceable kingdom. No need for Christians to take history into our own hands to wage war on God’s behalf, for the ultimate battle between good and evil has already been fought and won in the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
Believing that God’s kingdom embraces all, thus abandoning the idea that nationalism or sectarianism had any part in their practice, the early Christians renounced violence and refused to serve in the military. Many in today’s churches continue in that ethical practice, whilst recognising that peacemaking in the real world is complicated and messy. We have to dig deep to realise a pacifist vision. To live peaceably we have to first recognise the violence we each carry in our hearts, and work to overcome it. Then to build peace substantially, hawks and doves must listen and talk to each other, and learn together.
Committed to that practice, whilst Head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt said, ’Neither brute violence nor naïve forms of pacifism on their own can tackle the toughest issues of our times. We must cultivate empathy with something far bigger than ourselves, something bigger and deeper than we can imagine or rationalise for ourselves.' [3]
This is what many have been doing throughout the decades-long conflict in Palestine. The Parents’ Circle Families Forum, comprised of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost children, or family members, in the ongoing violence, continue to come together 'to do the slow, deep, necessary work of talking, listening and building relationships - in order to get to know the personal and national narrative of the 'other' as an important step on the way to reconciliation'. [4]
In Jerusalem and Haifa, Jaffa and Kfar Saba, in Wadi Ara and Galilee, the Hand in Hand schools teach Israeli and Arab pupils together, studying in both Hebrew and Arabic in classrooms where two teachers - one Arab, and one Jewish - each teach in their mother tongue, developing bilingualism, immersing students in the stories, songs, and symbols of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions. [5]
All work of this kind requires courage and commitment, and will often begin with a change of heart. Ultimately, peacemaking starts within. The Northern Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mairead Corrigan Maguire said that ‘The spirit of nonviolence begins within us and moves out from there. As our hearts are disarmed by God of our inner violence, they become God’s instruments for the disarmament of the world’. [6]
Christmas gives us an opportunity to hone our peacemaking skills, when seasonal social occasions sometimes place us alongside people, some of whom we may struggle to get on with. What role do I play when family tensions run high? When conflict comes is it my instinct to fight, or to take flight, or to seek the light?
If we admit to ourselves our reluctance to let old wounds heal, or our strategies of avoidance of people we disagree with, or of sidestepping uncomfortable conversations, then we are at the start of building peace on earth. For the beginning of making peace from within is to ask ourselves why we act that way, and prayerfully, carefully, begin to work out what we might be able to do to change.
My friend Joe Campbell, who for years worked as a mediator in Northern Ireland’s conflicts, says that ‘Jesus invites us to pray for enemies. Usually we pray that the other person will change, and usually over time they do. But I understand Jesus to mean also to pray about my attitude towards them, asking for grace and strength every day to love more and more.’ [7]
Peace on earth, goodwill to all - the one born in Bethlehem showed us the way this can be done. It’s in our power and in our hands to fulfil it.
Notes
[1] This sermon draws on my earlier Peace on earth? Starts within, preached in Sutton Montis, Christmas Eve 2017, John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse, Corton Denham, 17 December 2017, and Among you stands one whom you do not know, Clapham, 17 December 2023.
[2] Fred Niedner, Living by the Word: Taking the Good News home, The Christian Century, Jan. 3, 2001, quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Notes, Girardian Lectionary, Year C, Epiphany 3c.
[3] Alastair McIntosh, ‘A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict,’ 2010, in David Whetham (ed), Ethics, Law and Military Operations. An offprint of McIntosh's essay is downloadable from Alastair McIntosh's website [pdf]. p.16.
[4] Parents’ Circle Families Forum.
[5] Hand in Hand.
[6] Alastair McIntosh, A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict, p.3.
[7] Joe Campbell, Refined in relationship: Handle with care. Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 14 January 2022.
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