One of the main tactics of the enemy is to convince us we are already receiving from the world what is promised in Christ, and peace is no exception.  To say the same thing differently, Satan wants to sell you cheap imitations of the real things God alone can give.  In the garden, for instance, to people made in the image of God who knew God face to face, the enemy offered God-likeness.  To Jesus, the Lord of Lords, he offered authority over the nations.  To us, instead of God’s peace, the enemy would sell order, the absence of conflict; and in a society of individuals, the enemy offers a peace of removing oneself from the troubles of the world.  Those offers are tempting; resist them.  Peace in Christ is not an absence at all, but the overwhelming presence of God in redemption and restoration among his people; and peace in Christ is deeply relational.  We need to learn to long for, to work for peace, but real peace, rejecting the substitutes.  Advent can teach us.

When I was young, I thought faith in God was mostly about denying myself things I wanted, and there is certainly an aspect of our faith of ignoring disordered or worldly desires.  But working as a pastor, I find I spend most of my time trying to awaken and strengthen desire, not pare it down.  I find myself “irrigating deserts, not cutting down forests” as Lewis writes.  To give a common example, the path toward healthy sexuality is not desiring less from people (as is often the advice), but desiring more than mere physicality.  If the relationship is romantic, learn to build a healthy marriage and a life together.  In other relationships, desire to relate to people as people, not objects, as sisters and brothers, not photographs.  Don’t buy the cheap imitation of that for which your heart actually longs.

So it is with peace.  Our desires for peace are far too weak if our goal is mainly the absence of conflict, or escaping as an individual from the troubles of the world.  Peace as an absence, an escape, is insubstantial and flimsy.  It disappears the moment you go back to work.  It breaks when you come home from vacation.  Peace as an absence is certainly not something you can take with you into a hospital room or to a front line.  We need something more solid if the peace we hold is to help us in this life and teach us to long for the next.

When Christ came to bring peace on earth, as the angel declares at the first advent, he came not only to die an atoning death, but also to lead a restorative life among his people.  Not only did he forgive sins, he also made crippled men walk.  Not only did he heal relationships, he healed blindness and illnesses.  He disrupted the scammers at the temple and asked Zaccheus to give back what he stole.  He set people free from spiritual possession and from slavery, both.  All of this is part of what the Bible means when it uses the word peace.  Again, peace, in the Bible, is not just order, or the absence of conflict, and it’s not just spiritual—peace in the Bible is not an absence at all, but the presence of restoration in a community.

This is why Christianity doesn’t teach peace in the individual.  Peace is restored relationships.  I love the picture of peace in Psalm 85, the beauty of verse ten.  “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky.”

Two images, back to back.  The first image of meeting and kissing each other.  This is not romantic, this is how people who loved each other would greet each other.  This is an image of friends, family who have been apart, maybe for a long time, coming back together.  And the second image of springing up from the ground, looking down from the sky, is an image of green and growing things, the sun shining down, the crops coming up, which in that culture meant feasting and food on the table.  This pictures both the family and the harvest restored through and because of the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Lord.

God’s peace has to do with every aspect of our lives and societies—our relationship with him, with ourselves, with others, with creation itself, a peace of broken systems being reformed or replaced, and injustice turned back.  Oftentimes peacemaking brings us into conflict, into good trouble.  It’s tempting in church to focus on the spiritual restoration the Lord brings, because truly without that we’re lost, but we as the church should facilitate and celebrate every kind of restoration.  Our God didn’t just give us the law and wish us well, see you next Sunday.  He took on flesh and came down.  He preached liberation of captives and good news to the poor.  He died to set us free.  In the same way, our peacemaking should take on flesh, empty itself and come down.

The body of Christ today is the church, in our communion here and in our lives in the world.  Christ is still the head, we are his hands and feet.  His hands touched those who were unclean in order to heal them.  His feet walked through crowds focused on other things to find people who needed him.  He sat at the feast tables of those who were despised for their wealth and broke bread with those who were despised for their poverty.  He spoke the truth of the kingdom, and he washed feet.  He restored families, his own and others, giving parents back their children and sisters back their brothers.  He forgave sins and made just judgements.  In short, he made peace, in the biblical sense.  If we are his body today, we are called to the same kinds of incarnation.

We’ll have peace when love and faithfulness meet.  We’ll have peace, already and not yet, in our lives in this world when we respond to the constant, steadfast love of God with faithfulness to him as his people.  In the final advent of his return, we will have peace in full.  Until then we train our longings on him who is the “fullness and unfailing source” of both peace and “pleasure incorruptible.”