Hello my friends,

I hope you have all had a wonderful week. Many of you have been reading along in the daily reflections I wrote for the season of Advent called "Arrival." I've really enjoy hearing from you along the way. Being able to reflect on these themes together has been such a joy.

For those of you who would still like to join the daily reflections, you can do so by clicking the link above. When you do, you will not only get the daily reflections in your inbox, but be able to download the previous days as well.

This week, I wanted to think with you over the concept of peace. I will often tell my congregation that peace is something the world never seems to have enough of. Out of anyone, we who claim to follow Jesus should be the ones who are most intent about embodying peace in our world. But how and where? Let's think about this together today.

Before we do, here are some resources to consider.

RESOURCES YOU MIGHT LIKE

-I am always trying to think creatively about how to "make peace" within some of the major issues we are facing. I just recently finished a really powerful and informative podcast called "The Gun Machine." It is only an 8 part series, but it dives into the 250-year relationship between America and the gun industry and explores on both a societal and personal level how that relationship shapes our collective relationship with guns. I highly recommend listening to it.

-I thought I would share with you one of my most favorite Advent hymns, "O Day of Peace" by Josh Garrels. It is one of those songs I can't make it through without weeping. Not only is it so calming and beautiful, but it paints the picture of peace I so long to see in the world. He uses the words of Isaiah 11:6-9. I would invite you to listen to it this morning.

-I also want to recommend the book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire by Alan Kreider. It is quite thick, but it is so worth the read! It shows the early church's commitment to nonviolence and how it participated with the politics of the Roman empire. It is such a needed reminder of who we are as Christians in our world today as we seek to be peace makers.

-I again want to recommend the book called A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing by Scott McKnight and Laura Barringer. It is such a powerful work on creating a culture of peace through the church.

-Lastly, I wanted to recommend the book "Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege" by Dominique DuBois Gilliard. It is one of the best books I have read that focuses on the scriptures where God clearly calls people to leverage their privilege for the sake of others in their world. It is a great resource to understand the Bible's overall call to be peacemakers.

Okay, on with today's content.

What is peace?

Peace is not just the absence of violence.

Peace is the proactive pursuit of opposing and dismantling the ways of violence.

Peace is proactively seeking justice and flourishing for all people.

Peace is actively resisting the ways of death in the world and insisting on the ways of love.

Peace is what Christ brings into the world and calls us to reproduce ourselves.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.

These are not just lofty ideals or some unthinking pacifism.

No, this is the vision of the world we are given by the prophets who foretold what God would do through Jesus Christ.

One of the scriptures you often here during the season of Advent is Isaiah 11:6-9.

In it Isaiah writes, “The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion will feed together, and a little child will lead them. The cow and the bear will graze. Their young will lie down together, and a lion will eat straw like an ox. A nursing child will play over the snake’s hole; toddlers will reach right over the serpent’s den. They won’t harm or destroy anywhere on my holy mountain. The earth will surely be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, just as the water covers the sea.”

Last week, I preached from Isaiah 2:3-5, which is one of my favorite passages. It is a prophecy about what God plans to do. God will judge between the nations, and settle disputes of mighty nations. Then they will beat their swords into iron plows and their spears into pruning tools. Nation will not take up sword against nation; they will no longer learn how to make war.

These passages both paint such a beautiful picture of peace! Animals and humans not hurting or killing any longer and lions will feast on plants from the ground like the OX. Nations will then hammer their weapons into gardening tools and will cultivate life rather than learn how to make war ever again!

It’s hard to even imagine a world of peace like that though, right? Especially given the ongoing tragedy of war happening even now in our world as I write these word. Children are dying, families are being ripped apart, and death seems to have more authority than life in certain areas of the world and for what? Nations seeking power and control. How can there be peace in this kind of world?

It feels like our minds are so conditioned by the coercive ways of fear, hostility, and violence that we shape our lives and political perspectives based on either justifying violence or assuming the threat of violence from others is inevitable.

Violence rather than peace just seems to be as common as the air we breathe in our world. The ways of fear, hostility, and violence seem to be treated as more accessible and more productive than the ways of peace. We just don’t think the ways of peace will work because so many in our world don't seem to operate in those ways at all.

How then are we supposed to think in different ways? How then are we to participate with the ways of peace in a world of violence?

In our Matthew 3:1-12, John the Baptist is baptizing people from all over, including the capital city of Jerusalem.

Let’s quickly look at this passage together:

"In those days John the Baptist appeared in the desert of Judea announcing, “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” He was the one of whom Isaiah the prophet spoke when he said: The voice of one shouting in the wilderness, “Prepare the way for the Lord; make his paths straight.” John wore clothes made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist. He ate locusts and wild honey. People from Jerusalem, throughout Judea, and all around the Jordan River came to him. As they confessed their sins, he baptized them in the Jordan River. Many Pharisees and Sadducees came to be baptized by John. He said to them, “You children of snakes! Who warned you to escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon? Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives. And don’t even think about saying to yourselves, Abraham is our father. I tell you that God is able to raise up Abraham’s children from these stones. The ax is already at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be chopped down and tossed into the fire. I baptize with water those of you who have changed your hearts and lives. The one who is coming after me is stronger than I am. I’m not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can’t be put out.”

Now doesn’t that just put you right in the holiday spirit? "Merry Christmas, you children of snakes!" Who needs the Grinch when you've got John the Baptist.

What does this have to do with the concept of peace we are reflecting on today?

As we just read, we see that there were Pharisees and Sadducees among the crowd.

After getting pretty fiery with them, we hear John the Baptist call for them to “repent.”

He said to them, “Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives,” implying of course that he, a fellow Jew, seems to know that must not be doing that already.

Much to our dismay, we Christians so often think of repentance as only applying only to “non believers,” not to Christians, let alone our Christian leaders. John doesn't seem to hold this same view for the religious leaders of his time and his religion. John the Baptist calls his religious leaders to "produce the fruit of repentance!"

What do these religious leaders need to repent from? Well, we get a little hint when John says, “don’t think of saying to yourselves that Abraham is your father for God could raise children of Abraham from these stones.”

Many religious and political leaders of John’s day had used their pedigree and status as children of Abraham to not see any need for their own repentance and used it as a justification for how they were treating others.

You see, in that context, which historians call the “Second Temple Period,” Jerusalem’s population was characterized by extreme social stratification, both economic and religious, which grew incredibly pronounced over the years. There existed in the city a clear distinction between a rich and powerful elites and the wider poor population. Many of the religious leaders were among the rich and powerful, who propagated and benefited from unjust practices against the poor.

This is actually the reason Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers, ruining a whole weekend of business. They were using the Temple, the house of God, for the sole purpose of exploiting the poor, rather than prayer, worship, and loving their neighbors well.

This act of Jesus clearing the Temple is why it is so important to make the distinction between keeping the peace and making peace.

"Keeping the peace" means maintaining the status quo, even if it means doing so by force and coercive laws. Even if it means exploiting others to do so.

"Making peace" on the other hand means proactively bringing an end to the practices that harm and hurt the most vulnerable and instituting measures that benefit them instead. Measures that actually “make peace.”

So what does repentance and making peace have to do with each other?

The Greek word for “repentance” used all over the New Testament is μετανοέω (metanoeó). It literally means “change of mind” or “change of purpose.” In fact, it is the root word for the word metamorphosis, the process we use to talk about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It is a real shift of mind and of purpose to something radically different!

So, this “fruit” of a changed heart and life that John is asking the religious leaders to produce is living in a way that is radically different from the systems in which they were currently participating. They can’t just rely on their religious pedigree, social status, or the status quo. No, they must produce fruit that is inline with the peace of the “kingdom of heaven.” The vision of the world we hear Isaiah prophecy about. The vision of the world we are promised through Christ Jesus.

As we Christians read this text, it is so important to understand that we are who John is talking to. Especially in the United States, we Christians are among the rich and powerful religious elites. We are the ones who have held privilege and power since the founding of the United States. We, as in mostly white Christian males such as myself, are the ones who have had a say in the direction of the country, its economy, its laws, and its land.

With this long legacy of controlling wealth and power, we Christians must ask what ways John would be calling us to collectively “produce fruit that shows we have changed our heart and lives” today!

You see, it is no secret that in the history of the United States, indigenous Americans, people of color, women, people of other religions, and members of the LGBT community have been subject to discrimination and violence at the hands of Christians with a lot of wealth and power.

It is no secret that white supremacy, antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, greed, patriarchy, and nationalism have all majorly influenced Christianity in periods of our nation’s history as it still does today.

So, what ways would John be calling us to collectively “produce fruit that shows you have changed your heart and lives?”

Growing up Evangelical, I heard over and over again that I needed to call out sin. Yet sadly, when so many of us Christians call out the very real sins of bigotry, greed, jingoism, and political idolatry within American Christianity, we just get called sinners ourselves by other Christians.

But the hard reality is, when we Christians don’t reckon with these sins, when we don’t collectively repent from them, especially those of us in positions of privilege and power, the damaging ways are just allowed to continue on as they did before. We are choosing to perpetuate chaos rather than peace.

We must follow Jesus away from the ways of fear, hostility, and violence into his ways of peace. That is the fruit produced by repentance. It is embodying a glimpse of the world prophesied about Jesus in the world around us through the way we live our very lives. It is where the work of our lives contribute to the dismantling of violence and the flourishing of our fellow human beings. Our world is desperate for a people who produce this kind of fruit in our world.

I think what John is getting at is that peace needs to start within ourselves. Within our own “hearts and lives.”

When we continue to allow ourselves to be shaped by the fear and hostility that seems so abundant in our world, we can’t help but treat others with fear and hostility as well, especially from our positions of power.

But we must understand that no one deserves to live in constant fear and hostility, including ourselves! Including you!

So please hear me today, making peace begins by accepting the reality that YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE. Embodying that reality is the beginning of having the ability to start making peace in the world around you. We cannot make peace in the world when we are not at peace within ourselves.

Paul tells us that “the peace that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 4:6). When we take hold of that peace as our own, that is the beginning of being able to produce the fruit that shows what governs our hearts and lives: peace.

Peace is not just the absence of violence.

Peace is the proactive pursuit of opposing and dismantling the ways of violence.

Peace is proactively seeking justice and flourishing for all people.

Peace is actively resisting the ways of death in the world and insisting on the ways of love.

Peace is what Christ brings into the world and calls us to reproduce ourselves.

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” -Jesus

May the Peace of Christ be with you.

Now I'd like to hear from you.

What have been some of the most helpful ways you've found to navigate peace? Did you find this description of repentance helpful? Send me a response and let me know.

If you benefit from this project and would like to support it through a recurring gift, you can do so here: There's a $5/mo, $10/mo, and a $25/mo available.

If you’d like to support it through a one time gift, you can do that here: one-time-gift.​

As always, thank you all for reading and for all the ways you support me and this project every week.

I truly appreciate all of you,

Ben

Remember, you can now view all previous newsletters and invite friends to join through just one link: https://benjamin-cremer.ck.page/profile.

​
​