Whose Peace?

Isaiah 40:1-11
First Reading for the Second Sunday of Advent (Year B)

In early June, the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery spurred a group of high schoolers to plan a Black Lives Matter march. They didn't know if anyone would show up. 10,000 people took to the streets that day and lifted their voices in peaceful protest.

Peaceful.

It’s an interesting word in the context of 10,000 people pulsing through downtown Nashville. That show of righteous anger does not really paint the picture of peace. I guess you could split hairs to say that it was non-violent and that is somehow different than peaceful. But the mandate from those young women beforehand was that this would be a peaceful protest. And so it was.

Yet the chant that still rings in my ears six months later is No justice! No peace! Again and again it would ring out; its staccato cadence bouncing off the buildings. No justice! No peace! Each syllable like a punch; a fierce passion jabbed into speech. No justice! No peace!

The second Sunday of Advent is about peace and it’s keeping me up at night. I grew up in a context where the stuff of Christianity was almost all personal. The primary concern was to make sure that your individual relationship with God was in the right alignment. If that personal relationship was right then you could personally experience hope, joy, love. And peace.

Reading scripture disabused me of those notions. Don’t misunderstand. I still very much believe in the personal relationship aspect of my faith. It’s almost surprising how important it still is. Yet in reading the prophets and the gospels, I cannot escape the notion of how intertwined we all are. You cannot read about the commands to care for the orphan and the widow, to love your neighbor, to look out for the vulnerable and think that this faith thing is all about you.

And you cannot read those commands and ignore the cries of No justice! No peace! Even if you don’t understand them. And you cannot pretend like 280,000 people in this country haven’t died of a virus just because it has left you and your loved ones relatively unscathed. Peace is not yours or mine to possess. It is ours and it is a fragile and fleeting thing.

I think the fragility is what has been keeping me up at night. Because often at Christmas it is hard to make reality rhyme with the announcement of peace on earth. And this year particularly it feels like we’re trying to hoist a “Mission Accomplished” banner over a fiery battlefield.

But then I take a deep breath and remember that “Mission Accomplished” is not what the angels said. A child was born to us and that was the beginning. The Prince of Peace came to us and called us to follow his way. He invites us into this ongoing project—this march—of justice and peace for the world that God so loved. He taught and demonstrated all the ways that you, I, God, and our neighbor are bound together in mutuality.

The prophets remind us that this march is not going to be easy. Isaiah and then later with John the Baptist tell us that the Way of God is a pathway in the wilderness. It is a highway in the desert. It is across rough terrain. The march for justice and peace will make us uncomfortable especially if we are privileged enough to get to be comfortable.

Isaiah also tells us that God will fill the valleys and lay the mountains low. The uneven places will no longer trip us up. The rough places will become as flat as the prairie. That is the hope we live with. It always comes back to hope. We hope that God made a way, that God is making a way, and that God will make a way. And not just a way for your individual peace or mine, but for all of us.

So may we keep marching forward. May we listen. May we learn. May we work for justice in our relationships and in the systems in which we participate. May we reframe our relationship with peace so that we are just as attuned to our neighbor’s well-being as our own. May we wear a mask. May we feed the hungry. May we ask God to make us instruments of peace and help out wherever we can. For justice. For peace.