"Peaceful Joy"

"Peaceful Joy"

Isaiah 7: 13-15 & Matthew 1: 18-25

Then Isaiah said, “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.      Isaiah 7: 13-15

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

“Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son,
    and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.                     Matt 1:18-25

The tradition of kissing under the mistletoe has an interesting story behind it.  In medieval days, when knights on horses approached an enemy, they began to draw a sword and prepare for battle.  The two or more knights, sitting on their horses started riding toward one another with swords drawn, to slice into or pierce the enemy.  And so, the struggle begins.  But, if, during one of their encounters, they looked up and saw mistletoe hanging in a tree above them in the forest, they had to stop the battle and give each other an embrace of peace.  In fact, if a knight were sitting under a tree with mistletoe in it, he could not even shoot an arrow from that place.  This is the lore behind our modern tradition of embracing under the mistletoe.  Even today, chance encounters under mistletoe bring an embrace or a kiss.

Today’s emphasis on Peaceful Joy may seem a bit poignant with the Ukrainian President making a plea for the US to send more money to help with the war against Russia and then all the news about the war between Israel and Hamas.  With the shootings in our own country and the world’s focus on terrorism, peace seems more elusive than ever.

The word peace means many things in scripture.  It refers to rest, ease, security, completeness, shalom, quietness, and unity.  One can hold one’s peace, make peace, or follow the way of peace.  Peace is something one can give or take away.  Although peace is ambiguous, it is significant in scripture, appearing 325 times. 

Madeleine L’Engle wrote this about the subject of peace: “Peace is the center of the atom, the core of quiet within the storm.  It is not a cessation, nothingness; more lightning in reverse is what reveals the light.  It is the law that binds the atom’s structure, ordering the dance of protons and electrons, and that finds within the midst of flame and wind, the glance in the still eye of the vast hurricane.  Peace is not placidity; peace is the power to endure the megaton of pain with joy, the silent thunder of release, the ordering of love, peace is the atom’s start, the primal image; God within the heart.”

We may also be removed and passive about our involvement in the wars going on around our globe.  What can we possibly do?  It does not impact our daily lives.  And we cannot even relate to the suffering of the refugees or the reality of terrorist groups.  We are not really at war.  But, if peace is not just the absence of war, then how do we in Wichita, Kansas, find peace?

There is a story of a young girl who was working so diligently on her homework that her father became curious and asked her what she was doing.  “I’m writing a report on the condition of the world and how to bring world peace,” she replied.  “Isn’t that a pretty tall order for a young girl?” her father asked.  “Oh no,” she answered, “and do not worry.  There are three of us in the class working on it.”

Peace is not an absence of something.  It is a tangible, active process that brings wholeness, harmony, integrity, and well-being.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1979.  Believe it or not, some people were unhappy that the Peace Prize went to her instead of going to a notable political or religious leader.  Was Mother Teresa, they demanded to know, doing anything deserving of the world’s most coveted award for peacemaking?

Certainly, she was not a peace activist.  She was, like Francis of Assisi, after whom she patterned her life, simply a saint devoting her life to wholehearted service to the poorest of the poor.  That meant educating children, washing putrid sores of the dying, caring for people with leprosy whom society shunned, taking in street urchins, giving medication to people with tuberculosis, and, in sum, loving the unwanted, unloved, and abandoned.  

What better example of a peace-loving person? This is what Mother Teresa said of her work as a peacemaker:

            “I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look only at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time.

Just one, one, one.

You get closer to Christ by coming closer to each other. As Jesus said, ‘Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me.’

She continues:  So, you begin… I begin.

I picked one person – maybe if I did not pick up that one person, I would not have picked up all the others.

The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if we do not put the drop in, the ocean would be one drop less.

Same thing for you. Same thing for your family. Same thing in the church where you go. Just begin… one, one, one.”

Against Mother Teresa’s critics, I would like to suggest that she was putting her finger on the very issue that most prevents us from doing things that make for peace – focusing on the issue in macrocosm and throwing up our hands in despair. Mother Teresa threw herself into the task in microcosm, where she was in touch with the problem, and trusted God to use her small efforts. She did not let the apparent insignificance of what she was doing overwhelm and render her useless.

If we discover the deep-down security of God’s shalom, Teresa’s approach would direct most of us to undertake small acts.  After all, most of us will not be Jimmy Carters or U.N. Ambassadors shuttling back and forth to hot spots that threaten the world’s security.  We do, however, have daily or weekly opportunities to do the Teresa-size things that are beautiful for God.

It is true that peace begins at home.  It begins with each person finding an inner sense of peace and sharing it with those in his/her home.  The fact that inner and family peace is the starting place, however, is not a total picture of Biblical peace.  From our own soul’s peace, we discern the need for others who have no peace.  As Christians, we are called to be agents of peace in the world. 

Gayle Boss wrote a fantastic book titled All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings.  As the title suggests, it is an Advent devotional.  Each chapter describes the way an animal adapts to winter—with the loss of heat and light. One chapter describes the life cycle of a firefly.  Did you know that the common Eastern firefly dies off every year? But, in a sense, their little lights never cease.  Because a firefly egg, buried deep in the ground, gives off a faint glow. And after only two weeks it will hatch, and the little red larvae will radiate a soft constant glow.  

Far beneath our feet, they have spent the winter months crawling through the soil, eating and growing.  “When it senses it has grown fully, a larva will construct a sort of mud cave for itself in the soil.  It will lie in the cave, glowing and still, while every part of its body melts and is remade.  It will have crawled through the dark earth for more than three hundred days to be made ready for a transformation that happens in ten or twelve. A new creature, nothing like a worm, will push out of its cave, dig, and break above ground. It will rest a moment and breathe, then rise on fresh wings, its light, long hidden, released to dance through the wide nights of summertime.”

This quiet and persistent light of the firefly is something like the peaceful joy we celebrate today. We celebrate God’s light and love, soft and persistent, “radiating love to all the earth.” We celebrate God’s peace, and we anticipate how it might be manifest in the world.  It might be hard to believe that God would come to this world to be with us.  Harder still to believe that God would come to us as a baby.  No wonder then, that an angel visits Joseph in his dreams to show Joseph how the Messiah would be born into the world. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel.  There is much to be afraid of!  The 9 months of pregnancy allows plenty of opportunity for feelings of fear and anxiety to take residence in hopeful parents.  In this time of transition, this time of gestation, God sends a messenger of peace.  The peace God offers, peaceful joy is deep and wide, nudging its way through our lives and occasionally bursting forth in radiant light.

Peaceful joy brings balance to what feels out-of-sorts in the world.  In a world that so often feels scary, peaceful joy speaks words of comfort.  In a world that values strength and fortitude, peaceful joy portrays vulnerability.  In a world full of kings and rulers fighting for power, peaceful joy is born in the form of a warm, floppy baby.

Can we have an impact on all the shootings we see on the news?  Yes.  We cannot change that it happened.  We can advocate for more peaceable laws one letter or call to a congressperson at a time.

Can we have an impact on the war in Israel or Ukraine?  Yes.  Although we cannot stop what the terrorists are doing, we can engage in support for refugees, and policies that make terrorism less attractive to young people.

We are to be as Teresa, agents of peace and love… one person, one policy, one light, at a time.

Resources Used:
McFee, Marsha.  "Heaven and Nature Sing: 300 Years of 'Joy to the World'" worship series