Advent: Peace

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 In 1995, uh, Pepsi ran a commercial. Uh, and the commercial was designed to put them ahead of the competitor, obviously being Coca Cola, and make them the primary, like, soda. Buying company in America. And so what they did was they introduced a reward system called Pepsi points. How many of you guys know this story?

Okay, this is good. I found out about this very recently. Pepsi points were designed like any reward system. You buy Pepsi products, you rack up Pepsi points, you buy more Pepsi products. So the more cans of Pepsi you buy, the more points you get, and you can pay off things like T shirts and jackets and Pepsi memorabilia and things like that.

And it would have been a mostly benign ad had it ended there, but at the end of the advertisement, Clearly as a joke, they showed, uh, a prize on screen, which was a, uh, a British Harrier fighter jet worth 7 million Pepsi points. Again, obviously a joke. They didn’t intend for anybody to buy that much Pepsi and, and try and then purchase a fighter jet with their Pepsi.

Pepsi points, but that’s exactly what happened. There’s a man, a 20 year old student named John Leonard. This is the story you guys know, right? I’m not going, you know this story. Okay. John Leonard decided, uh, to go for the Harrier jet. He got a rich friend of his and they estimated that it was actually a really good deal to buy 7 million dollars worth of Pepsi, or 7 million Pepsi points was only 700, 000 dollars.

So, in the grand scheme of things, they Would have gotten a British Harrier jet fighter jet for 700, 000. And so that’s what they did. They bought 700. They wrote a check to Pepsi, 700, 000. They sent it into the company and they said, where’s my jet. Obviously Pepsi did not want to sell them a jet. There was all sorts of legal issues with selling a civilian a jet.

They did research. Can you sell a jet to a civilian? And it turns out you can. You just have to like disarm it. And then if you’re a civilian and you want to own a jet, you can own a fighter jet as long as it’s not armed. But Pepsi didn’t cash the check. And they went back and forth for a while. And for four years a legal battle ensued.

Pepsi sued John Leonard. John Leonard sued back and they went back and forth until finally a judge in 1999 ruled in favor of Pepsi saying this was obviously a joke. There was no legally binding contract saying that if you buy 700, 000 worth of Pepsi, you can own a fighter jet. So John Leonard lost. It’s a Netflix documentary, uh, came out last year called Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?

So you can learn all about this if you’re interested. That’s where I got this information. Uh, look into that on your own. Now I tell that story. Why do I tell that story? Uh, one, I think it’s funny. I think it’s very funny. I think it’s hilarious. A man working the system, going back and forth for four years, committed to this, like, the comedic bit of trying to buy a Pepsi product, uh, enough Pepsi products for a jet.

Um, but I think it, when I read passages like, Like what Jubal just read in Luke 2. What’s happening here? The angels, this is a Christmas story we all know, right? The angels are sent from heaven to earth to come down and declare the message that the long awaited Messiah, the Son of God himself, is going to come to earth.

And with him comes lots of things. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men. Peace on earth. And we read that, and sure, we know that the shepherds are talking about something that will happen ultimately in the future. We did a revelation series a few months back where we talked about what that looks like, peace at the end of the new creation.

Where is this all headed? This is all headed towards peace. But what the angels had in mind was actually a real peace. Peace that was coming with the birth of Jesus, not his second coming. Peace that comes from the Messiah being born in our midst, in the earth, in Bethlehem. And I think for a lot of us, we know that on an intellectual level, we know that Jesus brings peace.

That as we celebrate Advent, what we’re celebrating is the coming of the Messiah and the coming of peace. But a lot of us feel like I imagine John Leonard did. We cash our check. We do what we’re supposed to do. We show up every Sunday and we say, where’s my jet? Where is my peace? Where’s the peace on earth?

Jesus was supposed to usher in peace and clearly that’s not happening. For a lot of us, I think peace feels like, um, like a far off fairy tale feeling or like some kind of elusive ideal that none of us are ever actually going to reach. Humanity certainly is not going to reach it. Or, if you’re more, um, yeah, if you’re more cynical like me, it just feels like a lie.

Like a blatant, like a joke. Like, just in the face of the reality of humanity, peace cannot be real. We have to be missing something. It’s what I imagine Mary felt. She’s the mother of Jesus watching her son being crucified. Where’s the peace that the angels promised the shepherds who came and told me that morning when my son was born or the disciples, they huddled in the upper room, traumatized by the public execution of their rabbi.

Where’s the peace that he promised? Where, where is it? Or, you and I, today, this morning, coming in with our anxieties, our, our, the to do lists on our mind, the Christmas things that we have coming up, the events, um, even the hard broken stuff that nobody likes to name, the, the diagnosis, um, the court decision that didn’t go in our favor, the broken relationships that we’re gonna feel the tension of during the holiday season.

Where’s the peace? And for a lot of us, peace It feels elusive. It feels like it’s not really here. It feels like a joke, maybe, or a lie, or something that we feel like we should have, but we don’t, we don’t really know why. We’ve cashed our checks, and we’ve racked up our points, but we don’t know where the piece is.

So if you have a Bible, I invite you to turn to Isaiah 9. We’re going to start there, we’re going to actually cover a lot of passages, and we’re going to move pretty quickly. Uh, but we’re going to start in Isaiah 9. As you’re turning there, uh, we’re in the middle of a series. Actually, this is week 3 of our Advent series.

Advent comes from the Latin word, which means arrival. So Uh, during Advent for centuries, the church is celebrating and observe the time leading up to Christmas because we observe the arrival of Jesus into the world that we inhabit today. And with the four weeks of Advent, uh, we’ve covered four things that the, again, for centuries, the church has always kind of meditated on and pondered things that Jesus brings.

We started with hope. Jesus brings hope. How, we talked about how does, how does Jesus actually bring hope for today in our day to day lives? And we talked about joy. What is joy? How do we have it? How do we work through it? How do we, uh, live it out? How do we spread it and share it? Uh, so up on the docket for today, if you haven’t guessed already, is peace.

So Isaiah 9, starting in verse 2. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. A light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness. You have enlarged the nation and increased its joy. The people have rejoiced before you as they rejoice at harvest time and as they rejoice when dividing spoils.

For you have shattered their oppressive yoke and the rod on their shoulders to staff the staff of their oppressor just as you did on the day of Midian. For every trampling boot of battle and the bloodied garments of war will be burned as fuel for the fire. For a child will be born for us. A son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders.

He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. The Dominion will be vast, and its prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now on and forever. The zeal of the Lord of Armies will accomplish this.

Let’s pray.

God, we ask that you would reveal your peace to us this morning, that as we wrestle with this idea that you’ve, you’ve come to bring us peace, a real peace that we can Tap into and, and, and receive today. As we wrestle with that, that you would reveal more of yourself to us. And that we would find what we’re looking for.

As you promised that when we seek you with all of our hearts, we will find you. And so we ask that you would enable us to seek you this morning with all of our hearts. That we would put aside our convictions. Um, put aside our worries, our fears. We would allow your word to speak to us and confront us as it’s always done.

That you would inform us. That you would encourage us. And that you would transform us into people who look more and more like you. We pray all this in your name. Amen. So Isaiah 9, the prophet Isaiah says it. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. His prosperity that he brings to the nation, the Hebrew word is the same word for peace there, so the peace that he brings will never end.

And that’s the rub, right? That seems to be the lie. That’s the problem. Where is this peace? What happened to it? Clearly it’s not here. Or at least it doesn’t look like what we think it looks like. Because chances are, if you think of peace, when you imagine like a world with peace, that peace that will not end or go away, you imagine, um, a lack of something.

You imagine a lack of chaos or a lack of war. I mean, you take everything that’s making the world not a peaceful place right now. The, the wars that are happening, the, you know, the, the economy, the election season coming up next year. I mean, it’s just all crazy. When you think of peace, you, that’s gone, right?

It’s completely gone. Or take the inner peace that we don’t have. For all the outer chaos that exists in the world, we, oftentimes we know this. We have an inner chaos. There’s an inner wilderness inside of us that if we’d lean into silence and solitude and things like that, we don’t like it because we’re racked with anxious thoughts and fears and traumas and sins and all sorts of negative lies from the enemy and everything that makes us uncomfortable sitting in silence in the presence of God.

That’s, that is not peace. When we think of peace, we think of quiet and we think of a lack of war. We think of no fighting. No raising prices, everybody has a house, we can all afford to buy a house. I mean, that’s what we think of when we think of peace. And that’s sort of the problem, is that the world’s definition of peace is really shallow.

For most of us, like, we’ll settle for that. Like, that peace is good enough. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a thing about peace that seems so ethereal and so ideal and so far off that we’ll, we’ll take just not having conflict. But the Bible actually paints a radically different, far more holistic, and I would say utterly beautiful definition of peace than we do.

In fact, you could summarize, I would argue, again, the story of the Bible is a story of peace. How we had peace in the beginning, how we lost peace, and how Jesus actually brings us peace, and what we do with it. And so that’s what we’re gonna do for the rest of our time this morning. We’re gonna work our way through the four movements of peace throughout the Bible, starting with movement one.

I call this created peace. It starts in the first pages of the Bible. So Genesis 1, if you’re familiar with it, tells us a story of how we got here.

He created the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the land. He creates humanity and he calls it all really good. Now, for a lot of us, Genesis 1 is It’s just a sort of scientific apologetic against other theories that try to explain where we came from like evolution or a billion year old earth and all of that.

And that’s fine, but the problem with that is to its original readers, it would have read far more than just an explanation of how we got here. It would have told people why we got here and what the world was supposed to look like. Because most people don’t realize that Genesis is actually written as a polemic against other creation narratives at the time.

So, At the time Genesis was written, you had all these other nations and religions and cults and worldviews that all tried to explain how humanity got here for centuries. They’ve told stories, and usually the stories had something in common. They were all really similar. It was something like this. Humans were created by the gods.

There’s a plethora of gods that were either fighting with each other in wars, or fighting with humanity, or procreating with each other. And that’s where humanity came from. There’s one bizarre story where Uh, one god, you know, procreates on the earth, and that’s where we come from, and it’s all bizarre.

But, at the end of those stories, humanity always serves the gods. The gods need humanity to work the earth. Um, they need humanity to serve them. And so, humanity, humans are created as slaves to the gods. And that’s what most people would have been familiar with, that would have made sense. Why is there war and fighting?

Well, it’s because the gods are at war and fighting with each other. And that’s why the world is the way that it is. But the Bible paints, I would say, a far more beautiful picture of reality. Because the Bible says, in Genesis 1, this is the main idea of Genesis, is that God created everything, creation, humanity, everything, out of love, not out of conflict or necessity.

And so the first pages of the Bible would have read more like love poetry to its original readers than scientific theory. culminated In a picture of what shared communion with God and humanity was supposed to look like. So, so in the first pages of the Bible you have that. It’s God creating the world.

Out of love, he, he, it’s teeming with beauty, and with interrelationships, and with communion, with a lack of shame. Humanity is created, represented by Adam and Eve, right? Adam and Eve are created to share in that, with God. The love that they have with God, and the communion with each other, they’re meant to steward creation, make the most of it, expand the Garden of Eden, and expand beauty, and expand the presence of God, and the peace of God.

Because this is peace described in the Bible. The word for peace used throughout the Old Testament is the Hebrew word, anyone know it? Shalom. It’s the Hebrew word shalom. I don’t know who said it, but you get Emily, I don’t know, bonus points, brownie points. You’re a better Christian than everyone else. Um, that was a joke.

Shalom. It’s not a word explicitly used in the first pages of the Bible, but most scholars agree that it is a perfect picture of what shalom looked like in the first pages of the Bible. Later in the Bible, shalom has a wide range of meanings. Far more than just a lack of conflict. A few examples, in Deuteronomy 15, it’s used to describe honesty.

So if you’re going to barter with somebody, Deuteronomy is a book of law, how you actually deal with each other as merchants, as farmers, things like that. And God institutes through Moses a way for people to deal fairly with each other. If you weigh your items that you’re going to trade, use fair, complete, whole, honest weights.

Shalom weights. In Joshua 1. 8, Later in the biblical story, Joshua is leading the people of God into the land that God has promised them, and he wants to renew their commitment to the Old Testament law, and so he builds an altar for them to worship on, made of shalom eben, literally intact, uncut, complete, holistic stones, not touched or tainted by, uh, metal tools.

In Job, later on, if you know the story of Job, Job God allows a lot of things to happen to Job that are really bad to test him, and he has his friends that are trying to encourage him because he’s gone through all this suffering, and one of his friends tells him that he knows that he’s going to be safe.

He’s prophesying over him, saying, you’re going to be okay. Your tents are going to be shalom, meaning they’re going to be whole. All your property is going to be what it needs to have to function. It’s going to be holistic, complete. You’re not going to be missing anything. You’re going to be at peace, at shalom, safe with what you have.

Later in 1 Kings 8, Solomon, the king, is giving a benediction and a blessing to the people of God, to the Israelites, and he tells them to be wholeheartedly devoted to Yahweh, literally, shalom im Yahweh. Be wholeheartedly, holistically devoted in their lifestyle, their devotion, their thoughts to, to God. And so a more full definition of peace, as defined by the Bible, is not just about a lack of something, it’s wholeness.

It’s fullness, it’s completeness. And in Genesis 1, we see Shalom at its core. It’s God taking uncreation, chaotic nothingness, and putting order and beauty to it. That’s the first time we see Shalom. It’s not God removing something, removing conflict, but God stepping into chaos, into nothingness, and creating something out of it.

And what he does is he creates shalom, harmony, wholeness, fullness, and completeness that reverberates throughout creation. So Adam and Eve experience this when they walk with each other naked and unashamed. God, it says in Genesis 3, walks in the cool breeze of the evening. That there’s a communion between humanity and creation and God that we were meant to have.

But as you know the story, you know that it doesn’t last. And so we get to the second movement of shalom, which is broken peace. So in Genesis 3, you get the breaking and the undoing of, of God’s shalom, of God’s peace. And so when something doesn’t have shalom, when it’s used literally in the Bible, it usually means it’s missing something.

So imagine a wall that’s missing shalom, a wall made of bricks. It’s missing a brick, the whole thing comes crumbling down. When something is missing shalom, then it doesn’t have peace. And that’s exactly what we see in Genesis 3. All the fullness of God’s creation is completely undone by sin. So you know the story, Adam and Eve eat the fruit.

Tempted by Satan, that God told them not to eat, and they introduced disobedience and sin into the world. But it’s more than just moral wrongdoing that they introduced. It’s more than just breaking God’s law that they did wrong. Right? Sin breaks peace, breaks the shalom of God’s creation in at least three ways.

The first and most obvious way is in the relationship that we share with God. So where we once had wholeness and fullness in our communion with God, in interaction, relationship with God, not separated by anything. Now that relationship is broken by our sin. We also have more than that. It goes deeper. Our relationship with creation is broken.

And again, where we once had harmony and where there was once fullness with creation. Now there’s war. And now there’s poverty, now there’s, I mean, all sorts of, you look at the world around you, the ramifications of this are pretty obvious. The world is not as it should be, and, and scripture says it’s because of sin.

The reason that we don’t see peace when we look outside of these walls, or even just, even sometimes within these walls, uh, is because of sin. Shalom is broken because of the sin that Adam and Eve brought into the world. That also includes our relationship with each other. We, we experience the, the broken shalom.

Uh, when there’s tension between us, when there’s conflict, when there’s selfishness, ambition, rivalry, all things that the Bible speaks against the people of God are not supposed to have in their midst. We have that naturally because our, our peace with God is broken. And lastly, our relationship with ourselves is broken.

Uh, we talk about this a lot at our church, that we, we, the primary struggle that we have, uh, sin comes from, we call it disordered desires, that there’s, there’s, there’s something in us that’s broken and fragmented. Scripture talks about this in Romans 7. Paul says that we have desires that are waging, or James, we have desires that wage war with each other, that we want different things that are at odds with one another.

Paul says in Romans 7 that, uh, there are good things that we want to do, but we always end up doing the bad things. This conflict, this inner turmoil that happens inside of us. And this is why you and I experience a lack of shalom today, a lack of peace. We have the outer chaos of a broken world. Again, a war in the Middle East, or a tanking economy, or, um, you know, a housing market that’s just going off the rails, or not going off the rails, depending on who you talk to.

I don’t know who to believe anymore. Um, uh, I was at BlackRock a couple weeks ago. BlackRock’s raising their prices. Like, this is chaos. This is a lack of peace. Shalom, right? Not to mention the inner chaos. Like, forget all of that stuff. We have, in, in our very souls, an anxiety. Just a low grade fear. Anxiety that is always there.

That we can never really find peace from. We’re reminded of past mistakes. Sin done by us. Sin done to us. Sin done around us that we’re affected by. We face and inner chaos, a lack of shalom, a lack of peace. It’s because the peace of God is broken inside of us. And the biblical story, this is what much of the Old Testament shows, is how do God’s people reckon with that peace?

You see them try and do a lot of the things that we’re still trying to do today. They put their faith in a king. They want a king or a government to make peace for them. Um, they pursue their desires at all costs, trying to find peace. We try and fill that hole. Again, if shalom, a lack of shalom is to miss something, to miss something vital in our lives, we try and fill it with all sorts of things.

And you know what this is. I mean, this is everything that we’ve talked about over the last few months. It’s career, it’s wealth, it’s reputation, it’s status, it’s love, it’s a marriage, it’s favor from somebody, approval from others. The things that we try and do to create peace for ourselves ultimately fail, and that’s what the Bible tells us all throughout the Old Testament.

But God does offer a solution, so we get to the third movement, which is promised peace. So God obviously knows and experiences this brokenness of humanity with us. The shattering of his shalom, creation not. Uh, functioning like it’s intended to, and so he puts a plan into place. And all throughout the scriptures, the promise of the restored shalom that God will bring, uh, is repeated from the beginning.

Actually, the first instance you get is in Genesis 3. All throughout the prophets and the stories of the Old Testament, God is promising to bring restoration, promising to restore peace to his people. And those promises find their crescendo in Isaiah 9, the verses that we read. Verse 6, a child will be born for us.

A son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. Again, what do you put your hope in? Is it the kings of the Old Testament? Is it the government of today? Jesus will be the foundation of that. Jesus is the one that holds that up. It’s not the government that’s going to do anything good.

It’s Jesus and his rule and reign. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. And it goes on. The promise that God gives his people was enough to sustain them. So by the time Jesus comes on the scene, this is, this is the, he’s the arrival of what people have been waiting for.

They’ve been waiting for the restoration of the Shalom and they’ve been riding on that promise of God for a long time. Because like God’s people in the Old Testament, this was, this should be comforting. This was comforting to them because the lack of peace often comes from a lack of clarity. We have fear.

It’s not, it’s not usually not the chaos that brings us a lack of peace or anxiety. It’s the fear of what the chaos will bring. It’s the unknown. And what God does through these promises is he promises that, that there is an end to the story, that he does see where this is going, that this is going to make sense.

And maybe not sense in the way that we think of it, but, but, but peace will be restored. Shalom will be restored. This promise also reveals something vital about peace, and that is that it can’t be created. It has to be given. That our attempts, and we know this, our attempts at creating shalom, finding peace in ourselves or through ourselves, they all fall short.

You can’t quiet that inner chaos on your own. You can’t restore wholeness and fullness to the world by filling it with more good things, more of what we’re trying to fill it with. You can’t restore wholeness and fullness to your lives by filling it with the things that you’re trying to fill it with. At the end of the day, we know this, right?

We need peace to come from outside of ourselves as something that we can accept, not something that we create. And so our Prince of Peace is born. Like God in the first chapters of the biblical story, stepping into chaotic nothingness and creating shalom, when Jesus is born, he comes stepping into our chaotic world and also creates shalom.

And what we see through the life of Jesus is that peace, defined by the Bible, is not a passive word, it’s not a word of abstinence, of abstaining from something, it’s a word of presence, it’s a word of action, it’s a word of Jesus doing what he was meant to do, it’s reconciliation. It’s Jesus peacemaking, providing justice, offering restoration.

It’s God himself. This is what peace is. God himself, physically, inhabiting our physical space, coming into the world that he created that’s been broken, and, if we allow him, coming into our lives, to bring wholeness, fullness, and beauty back to what he created. This is why God had to come physically, he couldn’t just come as a spirit or provide a way out or whatever.

He came as a human and lived the life in the midst of the brokenness that you and I feel today. This is why his name, the angel tells Mary, is Emmanuel, meaning God with us. This isn’t God providing peace by way of lifeline, giving us an opt out. This is God providing peace by coming into the chaotic world of nothingness.

into the chaotic world of brokenness and evil and sin that we participate in, live in, and contribute to. This is God coming to be with us in the midst of that, to calm our fear, and to remind us who he is. And if you notice, Jesus’s life was anything but peaceful. Chaos. Confusion, conflict followed him just as much, if probably more, than it does us today.

And yet, what we see in Jesus is not spreading, giving into, or escaping the chaos, confusion, and brokenness. Instead, Jesus takes over that space. He reclaims what was lost and he spreads peace. Right? His presence confronted and comforted his disciples. His teachings brought truth to the world of lies that they lived in.

His miracles broke through what was called reality at that time and demonstrated what God’s intended shalom was supposed to look like. And so Jesus comes in the pages of the four Gospels bringing active peace into the world by intervening into the broken and fragmented space that we live in and setting it right again.

Every healing Every teaching and every miracle is the shalom of the kingdom of God breaking into our world and restoring what was broken. So where sin brings death, Jesus breaks in and brings life. When Satan brings lies, Jesus breaks in and teaches truth. Where evil brings separation from God, Jesus brings connection back to him.

This is what Paul means when he writes in Ephesians 2, 13, that now in Christ Jesus, you who are far away, have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for He is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility. God gives us peace by becoming peace. Immanuel, God himself with us.

And so peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict. It’s the presence of Christ. The whole biblical narrative is pointing to the one who is supposed to come and make the world right again, to restore what was broken, to mend what needs to be healed and to bring justice and wholeness back to God’s creation.

We need someone to bring Shalom, someone to bring that peace. So when we celebrate Christmas, when we observe Advent, we’re not just singing songs about little baby Jesus. We are declaring, is that from Ricky Bobby? Is that from, okay. We’re not just singing songs to little baby Jesus. That’s what we feel like, right?

And we feel like we’re just singing songs. We’re going through the motions. What we’re actually doing is we are declaring and rejoicing with the angels and the prophets and saints that have come before us, that Jesus has come to take back his creation from what was lost to restore wholeness, peace and goodness again, bring Shalom back into the broken world.

And when we read that the angels proclaim peace on earth to the shepherds somewhere in a Jerusalem field, we aren’t reading about the eradication of all wars, the end of all conflict, or the solution to global chaos. In fact, Jesus birth brought about more conflict. Genocide, wars, the destruction of the temple, a lot of chaos followed him.

What we do read about is the presence of peace himself, Jesus, in our midst. We also celebrate in Advent the access to peace and shalom that we all have today. In John chapter 14, right before he’s about to be crucified, Jesus gives a vital teaching to his disciples. And this is one of the last things he says is, Peace I leave with you.

My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. The peace that the world offers, this is not the right peace. Don’t let your hearts be troubled or fearful. Again, I would argue the opposite of peace isn’t chaos, it’s fear. In John 16, just two chapters later, uh, Jesus says the same thing.

I’ve told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. That’s what Jesus says. Peace is not about not having suffering. You’re going to have suffering. You’re going to go through seasons of chaos and broken shalom. But be courageous, Jesus says. I have conquered the world.

Later in Philippians 4, Paul is writing to the church in Philippi, and he says this, Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, rejoice. Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.

will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So we have a promise for the outer chaos of the world around us, and we have a promise for the inner chaos of the world within us. That anxiety we face can be quieted if we choose to allow it to be quieted, because the reality is that God will not force his peace on us.

That with Christmas season also comes a season of chaos, consumption, and competition. But in the face of that, we must choose silence, and stillness, and service. Which leads us to the last movement of peace in the Bible, which is sharing peace. Now right after he’s crucified, Uh, Jesus spends three days dead and then he’s resurrected, miraculously brought through death and into life, and he appears to his disciples for the first time.

John chapter 20 explains it this way, When it was evening on that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews who had just murdered their rabbi. Jesus came, stood among them, and said to them, Peace be with you. It’s likely Jesus used the Jewish greeting, Shalom.

Shalom meant a lot of things, but it was also used as a greeting. Peace to you. Peace be with you. Jesus says, Shalom. Having said this, he showed them his hands and his side that had been pierced by the nails and the spear of the Roman soldiers. So the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them, again, Shalom, peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, I also send you. And when Jesus says, Shalom, peace be with you, to his disciples, he’s giving them both a proclamation and an instruction. A proclamation. Jesus is proclaiming that the long awaited peace that’s been promised since Genesis 3, crescendoed in Isaiah 9, and experienced through the life and death of Jesus in the Gospels, has found its arrival.

That it’s here. That the wholeness, the restoration, the renewal of the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus has been made right. That’s the proclamation. But notice John then goes to Jesus instructions, Just as the Father has sent me, I send you. I’m giving you my peace, now go and share my peace.

The Apostle Paul carries this instruction forward in his letter to the church in Rome, in Romans 12 and 14. It says, As far as it depends on you, be at peace with everyone in your community. Pursue what promotes peace. In Colossians 3, he says, Let the peace of Christ rule your heart. This is coming off of him describing how to live.

How do we live as Christians? We let the peace of God overwhelm our hearts. That impacts not just how we feel and what we think, but how we live. And then James, as we just read, we just finished our series on James, James chapter 3 tells us to cultivate peace and reap righteousness. Because inward peace leads to outward peacemaking.

And we choose solitude. That solitude must turn itself into friendship. And when we choose silence, we spend time silently contemplating, hearing God speak to us through his word in times of prayer. That then spurs us on to active words of encouragement. We take time in stillness that spurs us on to acts of service.

We receive peace and we give it away. That in a world without peace, desperately searching for it and trying to create it, we must go like the shepherds did, to declare what we know to be true, that peace is here. And it’s a person. It’s Jesus. It’s Emmanuel, God himself with us. And so as we close at our church, you guys, you know this, we always end with a practice.

How do we habituate the teachings of Jesus so that it becomes second nature to us? How do we actually take something as ethereal, and as elusive and as ideal as peace and find it, put it into practice in our lives. Sunday is great, but there’s always Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. Most of us are not on Christmas break yet.

And so I want to give you ways to, to do two things. First is a way to find peace. Uh, if you, if you haven’t had a chance to, to, to grab our Advent Guide, we have a few more on the table. Uh, you can also find it online. But the first part of that Advent Guide is a simple reading plan that takes you through integral passages that explain the prophecy, the birth, the life, the death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I would argue one of the most basic ways to find peace is to start or end or throughout moments of your day, actually turn your attention away from the chaotic world around you, away from the chaotic world within you, towards the stable, peaceful Shalom Word of God. What if we start our mornings instead of reaching for our phones or turning on the TV or with our to do lists, giving God the first word of the day?

What if you allow God to quiet the inner noise in your life, just a moment of silent contemplation, prayer before God, let those emotions come to the surface, bring them to God and then let them go, let God have his way with them and then speak to you through his word. I think for many of us, a week of that.

will change how you view your inner world, how you live through the outer chaotic world that we still inhabit today. So the first practice is simple. Choose a moment, 5, minutes a day, whatever you can for the next week or so. We’re leading up to Christmas. Being formed by Jesus. In the Advent Guide, that’s what the heading is.

Spend time in the Word of God. Quiet the inner noise. Find peace. But the second practice is to share peace. At the other parts of the Advent Guide, give you suggestions on how to do this. For some of us, we receive the peace and then we keep it to ourselves. And that’s not how God’s peace is meant to be handled.

God, again, instructs us, spread peace, go make disciples, spread the love of God. For some of us, that means living life together. And so in the Advent Guide, you have opportunities, suggestions on ways to actually be peacemakers with each other. Sometimes peace happens through reconciliation over a meal with somebody that’s hurt you or wronged you.

That’s a form of spreading and sharing peace. That’s a tall ask. Some of you are like, I don’t know if I can do that. That’s, that’s hard. We’re heading into Christmas season. I know we’re going to be at tables and conversations with people that have hurt us or that we don’t like. There’s a way forward, a way through that.

To actually share the peace of God. We’re gonna expand on this more in the hospitality practice next year. But, but look through, figure out what is, what is God calling me to do to share peace with those around us? Maybe it’s as simple as inviting people into your home, sharing a meal, having a game night, something like that.

Live life in community with others. And then actually do life for the sake of others. You’ll also find service opportunities, ideas, ways to actually use your time, talent, and treasure for the sake of others. By giving up who we are. Our resources for the sake of others. That is a form of sharing peace, that we partner with Jesus in restoring shalom back into the world by spreading the peace of God to those around us.

Now as we close, while we celebrate Advent, we celebrate Christ’s first coming, but we also look forward and anticipate his second. That through all of this, we have glimpses of peace and restored shalom here today, but We won’t fully see peace that we really truly longed for until Jesus comes again to fully restore back completely everything to peace when he unites heaven and earth.

Because the biblical story both starts and ends with peace. Genesis 1, it starts with God creating the world in a state of peace and it ends in Revelation 21 and 22 with God himself living in our midst, restoring what was lost and what was broken. That longing for peace, that you and I have, that we feel like we won’t actually really feel fully in this life, is not a longing to go back.

Because the truth is, there’s no era of human history where we had true peace. That longing we have is actually a longing to go forward. To see the realized beauty of God’s original creation made completely known. Shalom. Peace. In its fullest sense. Your life, and mine. made whole and complete by communion with God and fellowship with each other.

And so as we celebrate Christmas, as we make and share peace this Advent season, uh, we wait. So why don’t we stand, um, and respond