I started the following in December 2016, with the intention of doing an Advent series. I found the unfinished draft while searching for another Advent document and decided to finish it this year (4 years...not bad). I hope to add 2 more posts this year. The first post in the series can be found here.
We humans, in general, have a strange relationship with weather. When it’s hot, we want it cold, and when it’s cold, we can only think about finding some place warm. Westerners living in West Africa during Christmas time have an especially strange relationship to hot and cold. We pay good money to cool down our houses, so that we can pretend it is cold outside. Don’t get us wrong, it isn’t exactly that we want your snow—well, if it could snow at 60-degrees, then maybe—we just want it to feel cool enough that we can pretend there is snow. So, we turn on the fans and the coolers, imagine snow falling outside, and light candles so we can feel warm on the inside. It’s a delicate balance; we are after something rather elusive.
I wonder if we’ve filled our Christmas imagination with images of snow and fire for reasons that go beyond strange nostalgia. Perhaps it is because in the experience of those elements we find a parallel to the sensation of peace, a sensation made the stronger for the sharp contrast between dark cold and glowing warmth. Certainly, staring into a fireplace or a lit candle on a cool night, watching the flames dance and flicker, brings a feeling of calm that evokes peace. And anyone who has ever come shivering into a home heated by a fireplace knows how you gravitate naturally to the hearth, peeling back the layers and laying aside the weight of damp coats and scarves, waiting while the heat washes over and then through you. There, basking in the crackling warmth, tense limbs relax, and for a tiny moment, all seems right.
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| Note the temperatures. Futile attempts at holiday peace. |
There is a curious phrase that’s been rolling around on my mind these past few days. Did you ever have anyone tell you to, “Come in out of the cold!”? It’s a strange little phrase; one strong verb inviting, directing, commanding, with those three prepositions all lined up pointing out the way. It’s almost certainly a mom phrase—showing tender concern, and yet chiding the carelessness of staying out and exposed to the elements so long.
The minor prophets are not exactly what you would call “motherly” in tone. They seem a bit heavier on the chiding and the rebuke, and for this, one hardly thinks of them as containing a treasury of teaching on peace. Yet I’m finding in my readings a thread that reveals both tender concern and an invitation to true peace.
As with authentic Christian hope, true Christian peace has an abundance of counterfeits. This is why, for all their rough edges, we can thank the minor prophets for disabusing us of all counterfeit notions of peace. In Hosea, the Lord mocks Israel’s attempts to get peace by allying itself with Egypt and Assyria. In Amos, those who’ve gained wealth (by oppressing the poor) find that their finances cannot secure them. Edom’s natural advantages of living in mountain fortresses offers no long-term safety, Obadiah says. Jonah makes clear that running away from a task that you’d rather not do will only cause more trouble. Micah strips away the idea that ritual and religion can provide peace. They all roundly condemn idolatry, which might just find its very definition in the idea of seeking peace in something other than the God of the universe.
The minor prophets are writing in a time of empires. It’s a volatile time; each new king wanting to make a greater name for himself by furthering his conquests. Power changes hands with dizzying speed. Then come the Romans. They conquer further afield than any before them, and they rule with an iron fist. Eventually, they have the audacity to claim that they’ve brought about peace on earth—Pax Romana.
Into a world of Roman domination, into this supposed peace, the Prince of Peace is born. From the outset, His story is marked by a lack of peace—parents that must return hurriedly to an ancestral city for a census; their nighttime flight to Egypt to save His life from an egomaniacal king who, at the slightest perceived threat to his powers, orders babies killed; and even their eventual return, marked by needing to avoid the new king by settling in a town in the backwaters of the country. Every Christmas, we rehearse these events in readings, pageants, and nativities, and to our peril, our familiarity with them can reduce them to innocuous parts of some fairy tale, as nothing more than struggles our protagonist needs for character development.
Yet, when we look anew at this story, we see something shocking and unnerving, something we rarely associate with Christmas: this little baby, this innocent child comes wielding judgment, the very judgment of God. By His very life circumstances, before He ever preaches a word, He calls up short the most powerful kingdom of this world. They claim to have instituted peace on earth, but when true innocence and goodness comes into the world in the form of a baby, it is met with oppression and terror. The religious establishment fairs no better. Charged with guiding their community in paths of peace, religious leaders are so busy placating the power systems that they totally neglect the arrival of their true source of both power and peace. Apart from a few expensive gifts, brought—it must be pointed out—by mystics of another religion and ethnicity, Jesus had no wealth on which to rely for personal and familial peace, let alone the kind of wealth needed to gain influence in broader society.
Like the minor prophets, baby Jesus disabuses us of our false notions of what provides peace. This world’s power structures, wealth-generation machinery, and religious systems all have the vicious habit of getting ahead by crushing and excluding the most vulnerable. We all cry out in exasperation, “God where are you?” whenever we find ourselves being stepped on, but when we find ourselves on the winning side of one of those systems, we have the very unfortunate inclination to go along, basking in the peace of the moment, and pretending those who are excluded have just obstinately chosen not to participate, likely due to immorality or a personal character flaw. And yet, the testimony of Jesus persists stubbornly, calling all of us up short and denouncing the hollowness of our supposed peace. Baby Jesus, contrary to all the cuteness and blandness our annual celebrations have tried to bestow on Him, is, in a word, very judge-y.
Our culture has a strange relationship with judgment. We’ve come through a couple decades were the very strong message was, “Don’t judge!” because, after all, there is no absolute standard by which to judge. So, don’t judge my sexual ethics and lifestyle choices, and don’t judge the way I use my money or my unspoken biases. If we all just went along with this “say nothing” approach, we assumed, peace would be the result. This ethos is still around and is quickly brandished as a retort to any evaluation of ourselves we don’t particularly like, but in recent years, we’ve abandoned the hope of “all getting along,” and have realized that the postmodern lack of any clear boundary markers was untenable. Here, we’ve grouped into tribes that define our absolute values and now have license to judge, humiliate, and cancel anyone not holding to our dogma. At least, we think, we can have peace within our group. Except, those groups seem to be getting smaller and smaller because the legalistic demands of membership are so stringent that it is easy to run afoul of our own tribal identity. Today’s canceler soon becomes the canceled, and the effort necessary to keep up with ever-shifting dogmatic beliefs is anything but peaceful.
To those who hope God’s standard is “anything goes,” Jesus says, on the day of judgment everyone will be accountable even for their careless words (Matt 12:36). To our cancel-culture, Jesus warns that the standard we apply to others will be applied to us (Matt 7). There are no truly innocent people in our world, and the sword of Christ’s judgment cuts a line that runs through each of us.
But to all of us, the testimony of Jesus and the prophets is resoundingly clear, even if completely counter-intuitive: God’s judgment is good news!! In the face of evil and oppression, God is not apathetic or resigned. He cares deeply that the systems of this world crush underfoot the vulnerable. And in response to our constant idolatry, in other words, our constant quest to find peace outside of Him, we see God as jealously protective of what rightfully belongs to Him. He does not sit idly by while evil power holds our hearts captive, making us complicit in the greater evil of this world. As antidote to our whiplashed culture, His standards of judgment are absolute (knowable), universal (applied to all), and unchanging (not beholden to the zeitgeist du jour).
The minor prophets and Jesus make one final and critical thing clear: God’s judgment is always accompanied by His redemptive grace. Yes, like a mother, He chides and rebukes, for He must—we often forget how dangerous being out in the elements can be—but inherent in this correction is a warm invitation to be transformed, to be warmed through by His love. He judges and delivers, condemns and pardons, burns with anger and loves intensely. The fire of His judgment proves more purifying than destructive for those who will accept it. He calls us to the hearth of His love but must insist that we strip away the wet coats and mittens so that the warmth can penetrate deep within.
And THIS is peace. True peace.
This Christmas (2020) in West Africa, all illusions of false peace have been stripped away by war, famine, and pandemic, and worldwide some of the same forces are making the “peace” of holiday cheer ring hollow as well. What a wonderful opportunity to remember the truth about peace.
True peace is never found without both judgment and deliverance. True peace is found when we both heed the rebuke of our folly for dabbling in this world’s elements and accept the invitation to come in out of the cold. We must actively step into peace.
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