PEACE - Advent Week 2

Walls we make

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” begins Robert Frost’s iconic poem as he reflects on the constant vigilance required to maintain fences. It’s as if the universe itself opposes walls; nevertheless, humans have found ways to build them in almost all cultures. I recall, for instance, seeing walls made of sharp plants in the Tanzanian bush. Frost ponders the necessity of these walls while his neighbor quips, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Walls between neighbors maintain peace. They demarcate what’s mine and yours, keeping in what we want in and out what we want out. This applies to metaphorical walls as well. In the past two decades, much has been written about boundaries. You can find bestselling “Boundaries” books on marriage, kids, and dating. Like physical walls, these boundaries preserve peace.

Peace We Seek

These concepts resonate with us because people are often a risk. Frequently, we need to protect our sanity from others. Maybe your mom can’t help but criticize your weight, or maybe your spouse’s constant nagging invades even your dreams. Ironically, we often need boundaries to keep ourselves in check, too. We struggle to hold our tongues when we should. We make boundaries and rules for ourselves to conceal parts we’d rather not reveal. Walls help us keep a precarious peace or at least a cold war.

Some of us struggle more with the peace within. Some world religions recognize this struggle to solve it through detachment. The fears and anxieties plaguing us are because we love the things of this world too much. Even the distinct “I” itself is a mere illusion. These suggest that our true problem is our attachment to things that are not real.

Christianity offers another perspective. The world is not only real but fundamentally good, although broken. The real problem isn’t the world but our disordered loves. We suffer from competing desires that pull us in contradictory directions, often pitting us against ourselves.

We love our children, but we also love our reputations, so we shame our children when they act out in public. We love thinking and talking about helping people experiencing poverty, but we also love looking stylish and cool with our friends, so we spend the money on ourselves. We have a hard time keeping ourselves in check. We are constantly trying to put down and control our desires with other desires, and we manage to merely function. What if you could love deeply without the constant fear of loss or need for control?

This sort of functional detente with others and precarious peace within ourselves falls short of our human potential. We were made for more than just getting by. While the history of Christianity is complex, often marred by conflict and misuse of power, its original vision offers a radical, unexpected understanding of peace.

When God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he told them to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it .’ There was a wildness about the world, but it did not threaten Adam and Eve: it was a dynamic landscape of potential. Eden may have started as a small garden, but it was to cover the whole earth. Successive generations were to work in a garden that freely gave its fruit. Adventurers were to wander into a wilderness eager to collaborate with man, creating an ever-expanding Eden through which God would walk with his precious creatures, taking in the beauty they made together.

This is what the Bible calls shalom. It is a generative peace where humans don’t just survive. They flourish. This isn’t a peace about building walls but about an ever-expanding vision of creation’s relationship with God.

A Surprising Tactic

This is the peace on earth announced by the angels. No wonder the shepherds that heard were excited. They knew their own struggles with peace in their hearts, in their families, in their own society, and with Rome. Angels were the Bible’s heavenly warriors. The shepherds knew a momentous change was coming.

However, as history shows, this vision was not immediately realized. In fact, this is what puzzled the Jews when Jesus started talking about his kingdom. They imagined a kingdom won with swords and shields, chariots, and war machines. Like most liberation movements, they wanted peace through force. Jesus reminded them of what their scriptures taught: The real battle isn’t fought on battlefields but in the human heart.

This sounds naive or impossible. After all, hasn’t Christianity been misused to justify violence throughout history? But, the original Christian vision was surprisingly radical. Jesus offers weakness, a snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat, as the answer to our internal and external turmoil. True peace comes through healing what is broken inside us.

A Path to Peace

The first peace to accomplish was peace with God. Only God could win this peace, and He won it through Christ. Jesus enables this peace by reordering our loves around something truly worthy, Himself. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit invite humanity into their eternal loving communion when we recognize our disordered loves and God’s supreme value. We are at peace because we are freely offered what we now supremely value. Like a baby at his mother’s breast, we can relax. We have everything in the world that matters.

As you can imagine, people like this are easier to live with. When we have what we need, we no longer need to fight for our own way. We no longer need to defend our rights. We are free to love the other person and pursue their best. The kingdom of Jesus is full of happy, satisfied, and grateful humans who are at peace. No more conflict between husband and wife, child and parent, white and black. Beating our swords into plowshares is the biblical image. We can use rockets to explore the universe rather than carry bombs to our enemies.

Renewed by this communion, we have the power to exercise our wills over our disordered loves. Our rightly ordered loves can suppress our love for our reputation and gently correct our misbehaving children. Our satisfaction with the love of Christ frees us to patiently endure nagging and then forget about our own annoyance. We can lay down our phones with no FOMO. We take the peace we have and push it outward. Because we have peace with God and within us, we can be at peace in all relationships and work for justice without worrying about ourselves. We work to establish this kind of peace in our community as a witness to the peace offered to all. Something in us doesn’t love a wall. What if this was your vision of peace?