A time for peace
This month at our Thursday gatherings, as you might expect in the month of December, we will be engaging with Advent. (Here is our blog’s brief primer on what Advent is about, if you want a refresher.) While most Advent observances cycle through four candles, four themes, and/or four Ninja Turtles, this year we have decided to focus on just one theme: peace.
I won’t spoil too much of our discussions. Just one little reflection on peace for now.
Sometimes you hear something that sounds pretty profound, but then you hear it 850,000 more times and it sounds less profound and more tired. For me, one of those is the idea that “peace is more than the absence of conflict.” This is a helpful reminder, as we often reduce peace to a lack of strife. But this aphorism only tells us what peace isn’t; it usually doesn’t move on to the more salient question of what peace is.
As I’ve done many times before, I will borrow from Lisa Sharon Harper’s The Very Good Gospel. She takes God’s shalom (usually translated “peace”) to be the centerpiece of our universe—God’s intention and God’s endgame. And while the word can be used in a very generic sense to mean something like abundance or well-being, Harper notes that throughout the Hebrew Bible it is so often expressed relationally: the peace of me relies on the peace of the other.
And so one picture of shalom is a network of relationships that are healthy and whole: the relationships between a person and themself, a person and their neighbor, a person and nature, a person and God. Because shalom is meant for everyone, we can think of this network as encompassing all things. Shalom, then, is a state in which everyone has everything they need to flourish—including dignity.
So this will be the theological backdrop I will personally bring to our December gatherings. This is the peace I will try to hold in my mind and heart as we consider what the Nativity story has to do with peace. What does waiting for Jesus’ birth have to do with healthy, whole relationships? What does Mary and Joseph’s journey reveal to us about paths of flourishing?
