Advent Week 2: Peacemaking
“Be a peacemaker.” This was a phrase I heard as a child often, without time given to explain exactly what that meant. The phrase was frequently used to remind me not to quarrel with my parents or friends, not to question an authority figure, or to question at all; not to disrupt. As a result, I came to see peace as the means of embodying silence, of maintaining balance and order at all costs. This made for confusing theology as I entered adulthood and Bible college. Many representations of Jesus painted him as quiet, gentle, and submissive. However, the Jesus I was coming to know through scripture didn’t seem passive. Gentle and patient, but never about simply keeping the status quo. He was literally disrupting Empire.
Rich Villodas invites us to understand peacemaking as much more than peacekeeping, both in his book The Narrow Path and his new Advent book, Waiting for Jesus. Villodas writes:
“Peacekeeping tries not to rock the boat, avoids conflict, and is superficial. It ensures that no one gets upset. That’s not real peace. When, out of fear, we avoid conflict and appease people, we are false peacemakers….Peacemaking is quite different. Peacemakers don’t avoid conflict; in fact, sometimes peacemaking creates it. We see this in Jesus. As an epitome of love, he wasn't always nice, at least not in the way modern people visualize niceness.”
Advent is a season of waiting and longing; it is filled with tension, and the push and pull of the already-not-yet place we find ourselves in. It is not passive. Peacemaking, Shalom, is the restoring of something that is broken, and fixing broken things is rarely easy. Kat Armas, in her book Liturgies for Resisting Empire, says, “Shalom is the fullness of life, the kind of peace that mends every crack left by sorrow, every fracture carved by violence.”
As I reflect on peacemaking in this fuller way, it reminds me of the spaces where I have seen peacemaking:
It is the co-worker who, inside a juvenile detention center, sat with a teenage boy and asked if we could pray for him. She knew it was against the boundaries of her job to do so, and the guard standing outside the cell could easily report her for her actions. But she knew that petitioning for the boy's soul to the Lord was much more valuable than her job.
It is a Pastor who started a conversation with a self-proclaimed white supremacist and a muslim man at a protest outside a mosque that led the man to turn his white power shirt inside out and leave.
It is a family advocating for the proper help that was never given to the accused perpetrator of their son, so that they might all find healing.
It is the young woman of privilege sitting on a dirty mattress in a prison in Guatemala, listening to the stories of a gang member and seeing him as a child of God.
It is a group of private school kids organizing their class to bring pizza and prayer to a homeless encampment.
Peacemaking is not clean; it is messy. Peacemaking requires proximity, to be in the midst of the mud and mess with others. It is disruptive by nature because it is correcting all that is not the way it should be. It looks like Jesus.
In this Advent season, I cannot help but be reminded that, from the moment of his birth, Jesus placed himself directly in the midst of tension: born of a virgin, in a barn, with shepherds as witnesses. Born in vulnerability, oppression, and poverty, Jesus never shied away from brokenness. Instead, he headed straight towards the areas of deepest need to make peace and restore Shalom.
I wonder how Jesus could be inviting us to set aside comfort this season to truly embody what it means to follow the Prince of Peace?
