During the Season of Advent, we progressively light four candles around our Advent wreath each Sunday.  This year we also watch our sanctuary banner grow with the addition of a new candle each week as well.  Each candle carries a special meaning: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.  

As part of our Advent preparations for Christmas, I am exploring each of these as a means of deepening our spirituality during this holy time of year.  Last week we looked at Hope.  This week, Peace.

As much as we desire the end of war in our world, if we are honest, we have a cultural obsession with violence.  It is, after all, what sells.  From movies to video games to music, violence is a social addiction.  It is exciting; far more exciting than peace.  And it has become familiar—sometimes even expected.

In such a climate, peace sounds, well, boring.  It might even be defined as a lack of action.  It sounds like being nowhere, anesthetized, “resting in peace” like those who have departed this world.  If we are anything, we are a people committed to making this world work for us and if violence is what it takes, so be it.  Peace?  The word itself doesn’t really go anywhere or accomplish anything.  It’s bland.  It’s sameness.

Time for a redefinition!  The truth is, peace is all about movement.  It is about social and individual improvement.  As anti-apartheid campaigner Alan Boesak famously said: “Peace is not just the absence of war, it is the pursuit of justice.”  Peace, then, is work and not just any work.  It is work that requires the ability to find personal and social power in the pursuit of the greater good rather than personal (or national) triumph over others.

The word “wholeness” is often attached to “peace” and it is well that it is.  Wholeness broadens things and reminds us that it is not necessary to have everything resolved, answered, and at equilibrium to have peace.  Wholeness is big enough to hold seemingly contradictory parts of ourselves like grief and joy, resentment and forgiveness, giving and receiving.  So it is with peace as well.

I agree with writer Jay McDaniel who says that Jesus would have liked jazz music.  In jazz, there is “the constant, responsive blending of discord, mistakes, beauty, competition, cooperation, unpredictability, and insight—all in the name of a larger harmony.”  And, I would add, it all takes place to the same beat—the beat set by God’s acceptance and love.  So it is with real peace.

So peace is not a saccharin, pie-in-the-sky, Hallmark-cutesy sentiment.  It is the real work of honoring the complexity of life, of what it means to be human.  

It is the real work of holding in tension the unity and diversity of God’s creation.  It is the real work of discipleship.  It is the real work of Advent.

See you in church,

–Rev. Dominic