At Christmas we have this word Peace floating around and it’s a really good word. It’s what we all want. And we’ll all claim to be advocates for it I’m sure. I don’t think there is anyone who is anti-peace in this room.

We have dreams where the lamb will lie down with the lion. We have dreams where we can live in a society of tolerance and freedom. We have dreams where we can work in places that the only challenge is the task set before us. We have dreams that we might be justified finally when the world realises that we were right all along.

We have dreams that if people would just know what we are feeling then everything would be ok. We have dreams that there will be a time when those things that cause us so much pain will drift into the past, never to be revisited again. We have dreams that everything will work out in the end.

And we can sustain many of these dreams because we live in a blessed society. We live in a country that is at war with no-one. That has relatively little civil strife and there is a great deal of freedom of speech, that is affluent compared to most nations, where there is welfare, and Government funding for education of all citizens, healthcare available to all, a non-corrupt police force etc etc etc.

Well, we know that in theory. We know that these are ideals that we hold as a nation, and you’d think that would help us feel at peace. But there is a whole lot of sinister stuff going on in the background. There’s a whole lot of stuff we cannot see. There’s a whole lot of stuff that simmers away and eats away at us because it’s not in the public arena. We tuck it away.

We think there is peace, but really, there isn’t.

We are tempted to say, “Where is the peace?” and point the finger violently at The War on Terror (maybe it would be better called the Terror on Terror). President Bush, claiming weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, moves in and deposes a ruthless dictator, but there were no such weapons. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. There’s no peace there. There’s no more peace there than there has been in any recent history. America knew that they couldn’t bring peace. They knew that. Anywhere between 27,368 and 30,877 civilian deaths have taken place in that country in the last few years. That’s 10 times the number killed in the WTC attacks. Moral economy?

Where is the peace in that?

Rwanda. 1994. half a million people are killed because they are a different tribe. Half a million people in 1994. tell me there is peace?

There are 39 wars taking place around the world at the moment. As I speak there are people fighting for anything from religious ideology to land disputes, to political control. They are being fought with passion and with a desire for peace. But that peace will come when they win. That’s the theory.

It is odd to me that peace would be a feature of the Christmas season. We have hope, joy, peace and love. Hope, joy and love I can understand, perhaps they can be felt at some internal level that is unaffected by our surroundings. They can be stimulated by something and we can transcend the moment and be elevated. but peace…well that is a different story.

Peace to me speaks of the environment that affects us, our surroundings, our feelings about these things. And when we introduce the idea of Peace as a Christmas theme, we are surely not talking of anything real. It’s the busiest season of the year.

Christmas day, a mass exodus of families to places where they collide for a meal before they go to the next family’s place to satisfy the in-laws. An organisational nightmare as people feel left out of the plans, the negotiations reach an impasse, “that family always gives expensive gifts and we can’t afford to”.

The stress of shopping in a mall crowded with stressed people who are buying things that they think people want and are afraid that they’ll hate. Grumpy people. Going from place to place. Frantically trying to do the right thing. Watching the debt creep up, and the bills be missed. This is the damned truth of it all. Contrast this with the idea of peace.

For me peace is sitting with a nice Monte Cristo no. 2, on my deck on a windless summers evening, listening to Miles Davis “In a silent way”. My gin martini with two olives awaiting. My soul ascends. My body relaxes. The world dissolves. My world of no intrusions. That’s peaceful to me. And it’s rare. And it never happens at Christmas.

What is peaceful to you?

That there would be peace on earth, seems like some kind of joke.

We’ve talked about this before. In fact early on I preached a sermon while we had live video streams of Baghdad being bombed. Peace? That iraq would find some peace after the british/US invasion? Where is the peace? It’s hard to trust the power of the incarnation, the power of the coming of Christ to this world, the power of the word become flesh, it’s hard to trust this wonderful event, when the end result is that nothing has changed.

There’s still war and famine, earthquakes and floods, tyranny and poverty. And we look around and see that really this world has no real direction. We aren’t progressing to something better, and even if we are, that dream is so fragile. People are people. It’s a simple fact and world peace just seems like some high-falluting ideal. It’s unattainable. It’s unreal.

There’s little peace on this earth. It seems if we want to have peace we have to find it. And it seems so unfair. But then, peace is probably like many things, including happiness, you have to make it to get it.

I no longer have any dreams of this world becoming peaceful. Flag that dream. It’ll never happen. People are people. I can’t pray for world peace, it seems that people’s wills are stronger than God’s intervention—either that or God doesn’t intervene, which is the more likely. I don’t dream of a day when the world is all Christian. That wouldn’t bring peace either. There’s still people involved. I don’t think that there’ll be peace on this earth until the very end. When all is silent. When no-one is left on this earth.

I suppose Mars is a peaceful place though it does have horrific sand storms. Jupiter isn’t—it’s just one big nasty multitude of storms. Neither is the moon. Even though it has no atmosphere, it’s been beaten by meteors since the day it was born. It’s not peaceful. The only peaceful place it seems is where there is an absence of everything…but that doesn’t exist in our environment.

It seems that peace might actually only be defined by that which we have a sense of control over, that doesn’t have forces noticeably greater than what we can exert. That is something we can participate in, spectate over. It seems that the beautiful view overlooking the mountains and the lake, the trees and the valleys, the natural rhythms of nature, where we see broad brushstrokes of wonder. That can be peaceful. Even though there is an unmentionable amount of violence held within that landscape before us. Animals eating animals, hunted down, suffering a brutal death : let’s not kid ourselves about how humane a spider is when they paralyse their prey to keep them alive longer, an insect version of refrigeration.

Trees being eaten from the inside out by fungus or ants. Collapsing and rotting for the forest floor to do it’s dirty work. Perish the thought of what environmental impact we are having on these natural wonders. Great amounts of violence as the ice shelf breaks apart in Antarctica. It’s true that this world is in agony and somehow even in this suffering, we can find peace. Somehow we can transcend the horror of existence and find peace.

And here is where we can connect with the idea of peace. We can’t solve the world’s problems. But actually what we want is peace in our own lives. There’s conflict all around us. People we don’t like, or think don’t like us, or think that they think we don’t like them, there’s a whole lot of unforgiveness that we carry around with us. Why is that? Why do we insist on carrying these massive burdens around with us? Why do we insist on being at odds with our world? Why do we insist that justice is only justice if I’m the one who doesn’t have to pay the price?

What is it about us that needs to bear grudges or have people to hate? Why do we need to be angry? Why do we need to have these barriers up?

What kind of security is this? It’s shallow and vulnerable. And a spiral downwards.

And we wonder why peace is hard to get a handle on? We point the finger accusingly at the lack of world peace and say “not fair!” when we commit the same crimes on a smaller scale in our own homes, workplaces or social circles. We say, President Bush, you’re wrong! When we’ve justified grudges with less reason than he had to invade iraq. We say, “this nation is going to the pot. There’s no morality anymore!” while we sit back feeling justified that we are taking the moral high ground in the lap of luxury. We’ll lie and be deceitful, we’ll torture people with our words, we’ll kill people with our indifference, we’ll walk by the needy on the street. And that’s because we’re afraid.

Oh, yes. We are guilty. And we are meant to be the peacemakers.

Do I believe in peace? Yep. But not world peace. Not anymore. But peace between us as individuals? You bet. How? Because while the Bible gives no examples of world peace (except perhaps the garden of eden, but there’s discussion we can have about the peace there if you want—why would God upset the peace by putting a temptation in the garden?), there are plenty of examples of peace between people.

And I’ve spoken about these in the last three years. The woman at the well : Jesus crossing cultural and gender boundaries and saying she is welcome at the heart of God. The tax collector Zacchaeus: despised by society as being a traitor and dishonest, and Jesus welcomes him to the heart of God, he is transformed and radically changes his life by giving his ill-earned money back to those he extorted from. The woman caught in adultery : stood by her, and exposed the crowd’s hypocrisy. You know the irony here was that the people wanted to exert justice to bring about peace. To bring about peace they had to eradicate sin. To eradicate sin, they could justifiably thrown stones at her until she died. Jesus exposed this injustice and hypocrisy.

Yet even the prince of Peace as Isaiah calls Jesus, states openly, “I didn’t come to bring peace but to bring a sword.”

And this is the crunch. Even Jesus knew that operating on this cancer of sin was going to require the violence of cutting the body open. If we want to bring peace into this world, it’s going to hurt our egos. We’re going to get damaged. And that’s the cost of peace. It’s not that we are doormats for people to walk over, but we choose to forgive when we needn’t. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do!” We choose to look at people with the eyes of Jesus, “Father they are ignorant of their actions and motivations. They’ve no idea the magnitude of their hate. But I stand asking you, to forgive them this error. Have mercy on them.” For the lord desires mercy.

When we seek peace in our own relationships, it’s a choice to look at life in broad brushstrokes. There is a panorama of beauty if we can look up from the horrors at the small level. Many of the disputes we have are not worth dying for, they’re not even worth living for. They’re not worth neglecting the beauty of life for. If we opt to forgive, to repent, to apologise, to be humble, to love, to care, then we can transcend this suffering world and see the beauty in the people. It’s like the beautiful landscape that we look across, though it’s constructed through violence, we transcend it by looking at it in broad brushstrokes.

Is it possible that many of the so-called bad people in society are just a little bit worse than most of us? Then why do we trample them into the ground? Why do we throw them to the fires of hell? Except that perhaps they mirror the darker regions of ourselves that we want to get rid of.

None of this is easy, but that is no reason not to do it. Let’s bring the peace of Christ into this world. It’s our responsibility to work at the micro-level. Then perhaps, at the macro-level, significant things will happen.