Peace

You can take interactive notes here. At the end of the message, you can email the notes to yourself.

  📍

Uh, in 1995, Pepsi ran an infamous ad to boost their sales and compete with Coca-Cola. Now, it was a basic rewards program common to us now, but novel in the nineties. The idea was that you would buy Pepsi products and earn Pepsi points, which you would then redeem for, uh, more Pepsi products. Now in the initial commercial, rolling out this rewards program the last few seconds showed a hairier fighter jet as a possible reward for enough Pepsi points, 7 million Pepsi points to be exact.

Now, it was obviously intended to be a joke. Nobody really believed that. Among Pepsi t-shirts and Pepsi jackets, you could also redeem your Pepsi points for an actual Pepsi fighter jet. Nobody except a man named John Leonard. Yeah. Now, Leonard was 20 years old when he tried to call out Pepsi on their marketing lie.

He calculated that to earn 7 million Pepsi points to redeem for the jet, he’d have to buy $700,000 worth of Pepsi, which I, I think is a pretty good price for a fighter jet after an actual legal batty with the Pepsi corporation in which Leonard sued them for refusing to give him an actual fighter jet.

As he tried to redeem his points, the court ended up siding with Pepsi stating no objective person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial actually offered consumers a Harrier jet. In other words, nobody in their right minds would actually believe that Pepsi would really make good on that promise.

Which kind of brings us to our passage this morning. Now, today is the second Sunday of Advent. Advent as we’ve been talking about, uh, the past couple weeks, is the joyful season in the church calendar that marks the weeks leading up to Christmas. Advent is basically an ancient Christian name for Christmas time.

It’s a time for followers of Jesus across the world and across centuries to look back on Jesus’ birth as a fulfillment of God’s future promises. Uh, during Advent, we celebrate Jesus’s birth and we anticipate his future return by spending a week focusing on a theme, hope, peace, joy, and love. Advent is a season of celebration.

It’s a season of gratitude. It’s a season of fellowship, generosity, and it’s a season of waiting. See, during Advent, we acknowledge that we are in the middle of an unfinished story. We’re waiting for God to make good on his promises. Promises to fulfill our hope, promises to give us unquenchable joy, to surround us with tangible love and to bring us peace.

And that’s our theme this morning. 📍 Peace. It’s what the angels promised the shepherds in the passage that we just read. It’s what God promises to give his people stretching all the way back into the Old Testament. But if we’re honest, it’s the thing that God seems to have forgotten about each advent season.

📍 Glory to God in the highest heaven. That’s what the angels say. And peace on earth to the people he favors.

So where is it? Where’s the peace? If it’s supposed to be here, the moment that Jesus arrives as a baby in the middle of the night in a Jewish field of shepherds, what happened to it? See, the world around us has racked with anxiety, fear, and paranoia about the future. All of us know this. This is nothing new.

It’s what we’ve talked about really all year and even before that. Certainly anything but peace. There’s political tribalism that surrounds us, international conflict, and even relational distrust that just seems to be the default and the norm nowadays. In a 2023 Pew research survey, they found that 65% of US adults say they feel that the nation is more fearful, angry, and divided than ever before.

And God’s people, the one that he supposedly favors. The church itself, honestly, we’re no better. Looking from the outside in at the church, only 21% of non-Christians looking at us believe that the local church has any real social value scandals, celebrity pastors, and a growing awareness of the incongruence between the life and teachings of Jesus and the lives of cultural Christians all make the church a lot less appealing than it did in the forties and fifties.

An increasing number of denominational divides and church splits make it clear that we are more affected by chaos and conflict within the church than by God given peace. And then there’s you and me as individuals. Our interior lives are likely anything but peaceful. According to the American Psychiatric Association in 2024, just last year, 43% of US adults said they feel more anxious than the previous year, the highest increase ever recorded.

So where’s the piece? If we’re honest, some of us may feel like John Leonard waiting, uh, wanting to sue God for not making good on that promise. And we feel maybe we’ve never say it, so I’m saying it for you. It’s okay. Maybe we feel like we’ve racked up enough spiritual points through our church attendance tithes and morning quiet times that we want to redeem for just some internal peace and quiet.

What we actually find is an experience more adjacent to the court’s decision in that Pepsi case, well, no objective person reading the story of Jesus’ birth here in Luke, Luke two, could it reasonably have concluded that God himself actually offered real and experiential piece, right? Maybe all the angels meant was that through the birth of Jesus, we have judicial peace with God, meaning he won’t punish us through our sins when we die if we believe in him.

But for now, the most we can hope for is peace in the new creation. Certainly not here. Now, I believe all of that is true, and we do have judicial peace with God through Jesus, but all of this really depends on just what exactly we mean when we say the word peace. See, when most of us think of peace, we actually think of absence, an absence of chaotic external circumstances that allow for an absence of chaotic internal circumstances like calm waters that let the smooth sails of our interior selves push our lives forward with ease, even on a societal or a global level.

When we talk about peace on earth, that’s also defined by absence, an absence of injustice, an absence of war, an international conflict, or absence of political partisanship and tribalism. But the Bible actually has a radically different, far more holistic and utterly beautiful definition of peace than we do.

In fact, I would argue you could summarize the entire story of the Bible as a story about peace, what peace is, how we lost it, and how Jesus brings it to us through his birth, his life, his death, and his resurrection. So to understand exactly the type of peace that Jesus comes to bring at his birth at Christmas time, the actual peace that God has promised and the real peace that you and I can experience to today, we’re gonna trace that biblical story, that theme of peace through four movements created peace, broken peace, promised peace, and shared peace.

Sound good? Sounds good. Let’s do it. 📍 So first created peace. Now, Genesis one. Is for many an apologetic against scientific theories like evolution and a billion year old Earth, which is fine, but the original readers would’ve read Genesis far more than that. It would’ve been more than just an explanation of how we got here.

Genesis painted a picture of the world that God created in its purest and most wholesome state. See, most people don’t realize that Genesis actually functions as a polemic against other creation stories and theories that were popular at that time. And so the nations surrounding God’s people, the Israelites, all had their own stories and theories about how the world was created, what God or the Gods were like, and what the purpose of humanity was.

And most of those stories you can read them are, are pretty rough. And all of these other Pagan stories they tell about the world being created out of war and conflict between the gods or about humans being just the byproduct of intimate relationships between the gods, or in a lot of them humans are made simply as slaves to serve lazy gods that didn’t wanna do anything and stay up in heaven.

But the Bible paints a more beautiful picture of reality. See, according to Genesis, God created the world out of love, not conflict or necessity. The first pages of the Bible would’ve read more like love poetry than scientific theory to its original audience. It’s a love story between creator and creation that culminates in a picture of shared communion among God and his people.

See, God creates a world teaming with life, with beauty and with relationships. Humanity is created, represented by Adam and Eve to steward, to live among, to serve and to cultivate this creation. This is peace as described in the Bible. Now, the word for peace used throughout the Old Testament is the Hebrew word 📍 shalom.

Though it’s not explicitly used in the creation narrative of Genesis one and two, most Jewish scholars agree that the perfect picture of Shalom is demonstrated in these first pages. Later in the Bible. Shalom has a wide range of meanings. In Deuteronomy 15, for example, it means full and honest weights and measures.

So not deceptive or missing anything. In Joshua one eight to renew their covenant to the Old Testament law, Joshua builds an altar for the Israelites made of uncut pure stones. Literally in Hebrew, it’s shalem een or intact in or intact. Complete whole stones. In Job chapter five job’s. Friends tell him that, uh, he knows he’ll be safe.

Uh, if his tents are shalom, meaning secure, nothing is missing. In One Kings eight, Solomon gives a benediction and a blessing to the Israelites, and he tells them to be wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord. In other words, devotion to God that lacks nothing. Shalom, IM Yahweh in Hebrew. So a more full definition of shalom is wholeness, fullness, or completeness.

In Genesis one, we see shalom at its core, it’s God taking uncreated, chaotic nothingness, and putting creation order and beauty to it. God is moving towards chaos and disorder in order to redeem it and create something beautiful from it. See, according to Genesis one, peace is not about absence. It’s about presence.

It is God stepping into disorder and chaos, not removing it, but in order to make something out of it. And what he does with Shalom echoes throughout all of creation. Adam and Eve share unbroken peace, wholeness, fullness, and completeness with one another as they walk together, unclothed and unashamed. But this piece doesn’t last, so next 📍 broken piece.

Now in Genesis three, we get the breaking and undoing of God’s Shalom. When something doesn’t have shalom, according to the Hebrew in the Old Testament, that just means it’s missing something like a brick in a wall that loses, uh, like a brick wall that loses a brick and then quickly falls apart. And that’s exactly what we see in Genesis three, all of the fullness of creation undone by sin.

Right? See, when Adam and Eve introduce sin into the world, it’s not just moral wrongdoing that they introduce, though it is that sin actually breaks peace in at least three ways. So first, sin breaks peace by affecting 📍 our relationship with God. So where humanity once walked in communion with God. In Genesis one and two, that picture of wholeness, fullness, and perfect peace.

Now our sin separates us from God. The union that we were literally made for communion with the transcendent personal being we call God is impossible because of our sin. Second, 📍 our relationship with creation, the harmony that existed at the beginning of time between humanity and creation is broken and disordered where there was wholeness.

Now there’s chaos, war. Disasters, poverty, pollution, oppression. What you can trace from Genesis three all the way to the end of the Bible basically is a story of creation gone wrong and undone by sin that gets worse and worse and worse. Even our relationships with each other that were once marked by true peace are now marked by chaos.

That’s why in Genesis three when God curses Adam and Eve, he includes that line about Eve’s desire being for Adam, but Adam ruling over her. It’s a disordered relational effect of sin. It’s broken peace. Third, 📍 our relationship with ourselves. See, sin doesn’t just affect our relationship with God. It actually does something to our very souls.

It dis unifies us and it fragments us into smaller pieces. Passages like Romans seven and James four make it clear that we live disintegrated lives torn apart by conflicting passions and desires that wage war within us. True. And that’s why you and I can’t find peace today. There’s outer chaos around us.

International conflicts attacking economy, unpredictable housing markets, egg prices changing all the time.

And then there’s inner chaos, the anxious thoughts that we all carry every day that just become background noise. We almost don’t even recognize them anymore. The fear of an unknown future that makes hope impossible for us to live by the to-do lists that never seem to end the trauma that we’ve experienced and still feel the effects of in our own bodies.

Both our inner and outer worlds are broken, shattered, because they’re missing something in the biblical story. This is what much of the Old Testament shows. So if you haven’t read the Old Testament, this is basically what it’s about. God’s people broken, incomplete, and incapable of creating peace for themselves.

Trying though to create peace for themselves, and they do this in a lot of ways. They follow a specific king or a political leader. They align themselves with other national powers, or they just give into their own disordered needs, wants and desires, right? Right. But any peace that we try and create for ourselves is temporary and cannot weather the temperamental storms of our circumstances.

Sure. And so God offers his own solution. So next 📍 promised peace.

And when the angels appear to a scared group of teenage shepherds in the middle of a field at night and declare that peace is now on earth for those whom God favors, they’re actually echoing a promise that’s repeated throughout the Old Testament. See all throughout the scriptures, that promise of restored shalom is repeated, beginning in Genesis three, and then finding its crescendo in Isaiah chapter nine.

Now, Isaiah was an Old Testament prophet, and again, prophets were those who were spokespeople for God, critiquing God’s people, and then pointing them towards hope. Here’s what Isaiah says about peace. Isaiah chapter nine, verse two, the people walking in darkness. That’s you and I today. That’s people going back to the beginning of Genesis three.

We walk and we live in a cultural air of disorder, chaos, and darkness. 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, 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 to 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. Now, that promise was enough for God’s people to hold onto and look forward to.

See, just like God’s people in the Old Testament, our anxiety often comes from ambiguity. A lack of peace comes from a lack of clarity. Where is my life going? Where is the world going? If God intends for all things to work together for the good of those who love him, then what did these circumstances say about my good and my love for him?

That God gives a promise to give the world a prince of Shalom is to say that all of this is going somewhere and that our perspective must change and we have to obey in response to that change. See, this promise in Isaiah nine also reveals something vital about peace, and that is this 📍 peace cannot be created.

It has to be given. Sure. Right. See, our attempts at creating or finding peace for ourselves, they all fall short. Quieting the inner chaos is possible for a moment, but not for a whole day. Restoring wholeness and fullness to the world by filling it with more education. So social reform or religious culture.

Some of those things are good, but they won’t last. Restoring wholeness and fullness to our lives by filling it with career, relationships, or wealth. See, we need peace to come from outside of ourselves as something that we can accept, not create. Yeah, that’s true. And so our Prince of Peace is born. See, this is what makes Advent so radical.

Just like God, in the first chapters of the biblical story, stepping into chaos and creating Shalom, the story of Jesus’ birth is about Jesus, God himself in the Christmas story, stepping into our created world, chaotic in order to create shalom. Shalom is not just a passive word, it’s an active practice of reconciliation.

Everything that Jesus does in his life on earth, peacemaking justice, restoration, healing, it’s God himself, coming and physically inhabiting our world, our own space, and if we allow him our lives in order to bring wholeness. See, this is why that we celebrate God had to come physically, not just spiritually in what we call the incarnation.

Exactly. Yep. Yep. 📍 Emmanuel, that’s his name. God with us, not God. Providing a way out of this chaotic and disordered world from a distance peace via some kind of lifeline, but God coming to be with us in the midst of the chaos, in order to calm our fear and remind us who we are and who he is. And Jesus himself had a life that was anything but peaceful, conflict, chaos, confusion followed him just as much, if not more than it does you and I today.

And yet, in the life of Jesus, rather than spreading, giving into, or escaping the chaos that followed and surrounded him, Jesus manages to spread peace in the midst of it. Right. See, it was his presence that comforted his disciples. It was his teachings that brought truth to a world of chaotic and disordered lies.

It was his miracles that broke through reality and demonstrated what God’s intended shalom really looked like here on earth. See, Jesus brings active peace or shalom by intervening into the broken, fragmented world 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, right where sin brings death.

Jesus brings life where Satan spreads lies. Jesus teaches truth where evil and wickedness in the air around us bring us separation from God farther away from our creator. Jesus brings connection and communion back to him. This is what Paul means when he writes to the church in Ephesus later after Jesus’ death and resurrection in Ephesians chapter two.

But now Christ Jesus, who you were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For he is our peace. Yes. Who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility? See, the brokenness in our relationships with God and with others are only restored through Christ himself.

God gives us peace by becoming peace, Emmanuel God, with us. See, 📍 peace is not the absence of chaos. It’s the presence of Christ. It. It’s the capacity that we have to orient ourselves around the presence of God no matter what’s going on around us. See, like hope, peace doesn’t prove itself in the absence of pain or suffering, peace proves itself in the middle of it, right?

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 into God’s creation. Someone to bring shalom, someone to bring peace. New Testament scholar, Scott McKnight, argues that the entire biblical story can be summarized this way.

📍 Wholeness, brokenness, back to wholeness. What was once created whole and broken by sin has been and is being restored back to wholeness and completeness. And so when we celebrate Christmas or when we observe advent, we’re not just singing songs about peace to little baby Jesus. We are rejoicing with the host of heaven as our passage describes rejoicing with the angels, with the prophets and the saints that God has come to take back creation and give us wholeness again.

And when we read that the angels proclaim peace on earth to some teenage shepherds in a Jerusalem field, we’re not reading about the eradication of all war, the end to all conflict, or the solution to global and internal chaos. But we are reading about the Prince of Peace himself now currently in our midst.

We also celebrate the access to peace that we have today. In John 14, Jesus tells his disciples, peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. In other words, there’s some kind of peace that was not possible before Jesus came. That is possible to us now. But look at what he says. I do not give to you as the world gives.

In other words, you can’t create this piece. So don’t let your hearts be troubled or fearful. Two chapters later in John 16, I’ve told you these things so that in me, you may have peace, you will have suffering in this world. But be courageous ’cause I’ve conquered the world. Then in Philippians four, the Apostle Paul again riding to the church in Philippi.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I’ll say it again, rejoice. Let your graciousness be known to everyone the Lord is near. So don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God. Why? ’cause he, he’s near and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.

In other words, it doesn’t make sense how you could have this kind of peace and where you get it from, but that’s the kind of peace that God gives. That’s the peace that will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Nowhere in those passages is peace defined by absence. Peace is defined by substance, something real in us and around us that’s given, not created by God himself.

One more movement, 📍 shared 📍 peace. After his death and resurrection. Jesus surprises his disciples as they’re huddled together in an attic by appearing to them suddenly when they’re not expecting it. John tells the story this way. Now, when it was evening on that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they were fearing the Jews.

Then Jesus came, stood among them and said to them, peace be with you. Having said this, he showed them his hands and his side, and so the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me. I also send you peace be with you. Literally is just the word shalom.

It was commonly used as a greeting, like, hello. But here it’s more a 📍 proclamation and an invitation. So it’s a proclamation. First, peace to you. Jesus says, after his death and resurrection, after he’s defeated and conquered sin, satan, and death on the cross and by walking outta the tomb, peace is here. That long awaited peace, that shalom, that restoration, the renewal of the world that has been happening now, the world is being made right.

You now have peace restored between you and God if you want it, but God won’t force his peace on you. In a season of chaos and consumption and competition, we must choose silence, stillness, and service. See, the inner chaos of the wilderness and anxiety that you and I carry every day can be quieted if we are aligned with king Jesus.

Times of quiet stillness before God in prayer remind us that we have peace within us, right? Solitude with God’s word in small moments throughout the day, or silence in the morning or the evening, to allow our hearts to settle and to hear God speak. That’s what peace looks like. Peace is real and it’s experiential, and it’s available if you want it,

but it’s also an invitation. See, Jesus says, 📍 peace be with you. As the Father sent me. I also send you the apostle Paul carries this invitation forward in his letter to the church in Rome, Romans 12 and 14. He says, as far as it depends on you, be at peace with everyone. Pursue what promotes peace. In Colossians three, he says, let the peace of Christ rule your heart.

And then in James chapter three, he says, cultivate peace. Reap righteousness. In other words, inward peace that we receive and experience in our lives today must lead to outward peace, making peace be with you. That’s the proclamation, but I’m sending it with you as well. Go and share it with others. That’s the invitation.

Be a part of how peace is restoring the world through me. Jesus says, we receive peace and we give it away. To receive peace is to see reality for what it is. A world created good, broken by sin, but redeemed by the Savior, and for what? It could be a restored world, made whole again, through communion with God in a world without peace, desperately searching for it and trying to create it.

We must go like the shepherds to declare what we know to be true. Peace is here. It’s a person, Jesus. God himself, Emmanuel with us.

So while we celebrate Advent, we celebrate Christ’s first coming, but we also anticipate and look forward to his second. We can see glimpses of his restored shalom here today, but we won’t fully see that peace that we truly long for until Jesus comes again to fully restore all things back to peace when he unites heaven and earth in full.

See, the biblical story is book ended with peace. Genesis one, the first chapter, God creates the world in a state of complete peace. And then in Revelation 22, the last chapter of the Bible, God restores peace back to us. That longing for peace for the end of the war and the chaos for the inner quiet and the satisfaction isn’t a longing to go back.

It’s a longing that you and I have to go forward to see the realized beauty of God’s original creation made completely new peace or shalom 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 orient ourselves back around that story, as we experience peace in quiet moments throughout the day, and as we share that peace with others, we wait.