Titus 2.11-14, Luke 2.1-14(15-20)
Christmas Eve 2017, Sutton Montis
A police officer recently told me that tonight, Christmas Eve, is their busiest night of the year, especially for what they call ‘domestics’ - family pressures, intensified by Christmas, set fists and crockery flying. And yet we keep on talking about ‘peace on earth’.
2017 has been a year when the personal spats of a tweeting President and a Supreme Leader have raised the real prospect of international nuclear conflict whilst undermining diplomacy and bypassing democracy. This year 28,300 people a day were forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. We watched them go, in fear and ruin: from Syria to Turkey, from Myanmar to Bangladesh, from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from South Sudan to Uganda. [2] And yet this seasonal, scriptural message persists: ‘peace on earth, goodwill to all’.
Peace on earth seems an impossible dream. It is the message at the heart of the gospel stories of the birth of the Son of God, but it seems so elusive to us that we treat it with the same levity as we do Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
So why then, after two thousand years and more, does this gospel message persist? ’Peace on earth’. We still want it. Perhaps, just tentatively, we’ve an instinct that it may be possible to achieve.
Though at times it seems an impossible dream we gather here in worship and in understanding that God, in Jesus, provides the resources for us to live together in peace.
Now I’d forgive you if you sneer at that, remembering all the violence done in the name of Christ over the centuries. For it is true; after the Roman Emperor Constantine assimilated the Christian faith early in the Fourth Century the idea emerged that Christ’s “everlasting kingdom of love and peace” could be brought about through conventional power politics. [3]
From then on a culture of violence fed into the Crusades, justified Christian nations occupying and subduing so-called ‘virgin’ lands, and provoked aggressive forms of missionary activity and the brutal and exploitative forms of Church schooling which have only recently been brought to light and challenged. [4]
[But:] Jesus never taught ‘just war’ theory. Jesus taught full-on nonviolence. ‘Put away your sword,’ he told Peter. ‘We shall have no more of this.’ And to Pilate at his trial he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it was, my followers would fight to save me.’ [5]
Significantly, Jesus deliberately avoided ever talking about “the vengeance of God”. His 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.
Yes, you may say, but in the real world so far, nobody has managed to rid the world of war by non-violence. But neither have they done so using violence. [6]
‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that,’ said the champion of nonviolent conflict resolution Revd Dr Martin Luther King. And who - hawk or dove - could disagree?
But, yes, the real world is complicated and messy. We have to dig deeper behind King’s words to realise his vision. To live peaceably we each have to first recognise the violence we carry in our hearts, and work to overcome it. To build peace substantially so-called pacifists have to collaborate with police and military in peacekeeping roles; hawks and doves must talk to each other and learn together.
I’m impressed to follow the conversations which take place annually between delegates of the British Army Advanced Command and Staff Course and the peace activist and lecturer Alastair McIntosh. These meetings of very different minds tease out together principled, ethical ways to resolve conflict in the world. McIntosh affirms that “hope for peace in the world resides in pacifists and principled soldiers,” and cites General Sir Richard Dannatt who whilst Head of the British Army spoke of the importance of “an Army entrusted with using lethal force … maintain[ing] high values,” and of the moral and spiritual dimensions to that.
“Neither brute violence nor naïve forms of pacifism on their own can tackle the toughest issues of our times,” said the General. “We must cultivate empathy with something far bigger than ourselves, something bigger and deeper than we can imagine or rationalise for ourselves.” [7]
I’m similarly impressed by a quite different initiative which began in 2004: The Forgiveness Project, which “sets out to tell the real stories of people whose response to being harmed was not a call for revenge but rather a quest for restoration and healing.”
A touring exhibition called ‘The F Word’, has so far been seen by over 70,000 people in 14 countries worldwide. The stories “reflect the complex, intriguing and deeply personal nature of forgiveness.” They show how peace-building is hard work. Stories of:
A murderer facing the family of his victim to answer their questions ‘why?’, a PTSD-affected soldier trying to rebuild a life which fell apart on his return to civilian life, a daughter visiting her father in prison for the first time, thirteen years after he began a life sentence for murdering her mother, his wife. [8]
There are countless other examples of peace-building projects worldwide; each one a reason why we can justifiably keep talking about achieving ‘peace on earth’.
With those words of the angels on the Bethlehem hillside ringing in our ears we’re entitled to ask: what if we gave the same resources to peace-building as we give to warfare? Compared to the 1.72 trillion dollars spent on the military last year, just half of one per cent of that - 10 billion dollars - was spent on peace-building. [9]
If we want to play our part in bringing peace to earth then we may involve ourselves in social and political action on these issues, but for each of us to act with integrity, our peace-building will begin at home.
Note how Jesus modelled this during his ministry - by encouraging his friends and some religious leaders to open their homes to Jesus’ rag-tag band of followers, bringing together people who would never normally share a meal. And the Christian life as described in the Acts of the Apostles, was of small communities offering mutual care and support, eating and worshipping together, the wealthy and the poor.
None of this was achieved without argument - recall the reaction of the others around the religious leaders’ meal-table when Jesus invited in a woman from off the street to rub perfume into his feet with her hair; consider the stories of those in the early church who decided to keep back something for themselves rather than put all their wealth into the common fund. But from these laboratories of peace, full, rich community emerged.
Ultimately, peacemaking begins 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. The life of active nonviolence is the fruit of an inner peace and spiritual unity already realised in us, and not the other way around… As our hearts are disarmed by God of our inner violence, they become God’s instruments for the disarmament of the world. [10]
Christmas gives us an opportunity to hone our peacemaking skills - around those tables where we are placed, sometimes uncomfortably, alongside people we may only see once a year - and some of whom we’d prefer to see even less often, if we were honest.
If we’re honest with ourselves, if we admit to ourselves our reluctance to let old wounds heal, or our strategy of avoidance of people we disagree with, or of avoiding topics we’re uncomfortable about, 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.
Peace on earth, goodwill to all - the one born in Bethlehem showed us the way, it’s now in our hands to fulfil it.
Notes
[1] This sermon in part references, and complements, my Advent 3 sermon, John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse, Corton Denham, 17 December 2017.
[2] David Jackson, Trump insults 'short and fat' (and nuclear-armed) Kim Jong Un. USA Today, 12 November 2017. UNHCR: Figures at a glance. Accessed 21 December 2017.
[3] Marcus Peter Rempel, Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross Culture Stories, p.13, 19ff.
[4] Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, p.119. / Marcus Peter Rempel, Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross Culture Stories, p.13.
[5] Alastair McIntosh, Poacher's Pilgrimage: An Island Journey. p.125.
[6] Alastair McIntosh, ‘A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict,’ 2010, in David Whetham (ed), Ethics, Law and Military Operations. Offprint of the essay downloadable from Alastair McIntosh's website [pdf]. p.1.
[7] Alastair McIntosh, A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict. Dannatt quote p.16.
[8] The Forgiveness Project: Founder. The story of Marina Cantacuzino.
[9] Interview: Sue Claydon, Anglican Pacifist Fellowship chair, Church Times, 21 December 2017.
[10] Alastair McIntosh, A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict, p.3.
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