First Sunday of Advent: when peace asks something of you (11.30.25)

Isaiah 2:1-5

Matthew 24:36-44

We’ve had Omar’s brother and sister in town the last few days which we have loved.   I’ve known my in-laws for a long time—we met in what sometimes feels like it was another life time when I lived in Honduras.  Now, we all live in the US and things are different.   Today, Honduras will hold national elections for president.  Since the coup de’etat 16 years ago, tension has been very fraught and a few days ago, on the eve of these very important national elections, it was announced that a corrupt former president serving time in the US may be pardoned which will have grave ramifications for today’s elections.  There is such a painful of history in Honduras coupled with so much tension and desperation it’s difficult to understand how could this be?

As we make a turn to Advent where we’ll soon sing those words from Mary’s Magnificat at evening vespers, “you have cast the mighty down from their thrones, you have filled the hungry with wondrous things…”  the headlines in the world make me ask, Have you, God?

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Do you find yourself reaching for hope these days? I also stumbled over our verses in the book of Isaiah this week too, maybe you recognize these verses: 

“they shall beat their swords into plowshares 
and their spears into pruning hooks; 
nation shall not lift up sword against nation; 
neither shall they learn war any more.”  

Those words sound hollow as Ukrainian flags still fly in my neighborhood, as I hear stories about war and destruction in the middle east including tens of thousands of children who have been killed in Gaza, and as we hear of acts of violence here in our city of Chicago.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares…Right. So, exactly when was that part going to begin…?

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We can’t always see the world as Isaiah saw it.  Our attention is constantly called to weapons of war and acts of violence.  The idea of peace would have been provocative in the time of Isaiah and Amos, too, just like it is now.  On one hand, it was a prosperous time where the government was building a strong army but on the other hand, Isaiah cries out in judgement about the sinfulness of the people. His world was thick with problems. And apparently, even in the midst of that chaos and all those problems there was still a vision of peace. 

This image of swords being beaten into plowshares has come up in recent decades. We love the poetry. Many of our presidents, from FDR, to Nixon, to Reagan, and Carter have all given a shout out to Isaiah 2.   In 1959, the USSR gave the US an iconic statue based on this verse which sits in front of the UN. Given the state of the world these days, it is mind-boggling to me that a statue of this vision still sits there on the sidewalk with these unresolved conflicts raging around it.  Loving this imagery is one thing—everybody wants the poetry—but living it? Well, that’s another thing. 

For starters, I’m quite conscious that, for all we talk of peace, religions have been a source of conflict.  In the verses from Isaiah we have an image of peace where God is supreme and all the nations are streaming towards this holy mountain where God is. 

There is this cosmic uniformity in these verses.  It sounds a little like, “if everyone would just turn towards God who looks like this, we would have peace.”   But we are not all the same and neither is our understanding of God. On closer look,  We find these same verses—almost exactly the same—Are also recorded in the book of Micah—another prophet who was writing around the same time. But after the prophet Micah explains that everyone will stream in unison to God’s holy mountain, he adds that 

[everyone] shall all sit under their own vines 
and under their own fig trees,
    and no one shall make them afraid,
    for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.
For all the peoples walk,
    each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God

As Micah explains it, there is space for religious diversity here.  Rabbi Johnathan Sacks pointed this out.  Peace does not require sameness but requires making space for real difference and this is hard.  If you think about it, war is more emotionally satisfying than peace.  When we’re at war on a great or small scale, we get to dig our heels in, grip our opinions fiercely.  We like fighting. Peace threatens our identity.

We don’t want to compromise and we don’t want our leaders to compromise.  Sacks wrote, 

“those who show courage in the heat of battle are often celebrated. Those who take risks for peace are all too often assassinated, among them Lincoln, Ghandi, MLK, Anwar Sadat…the pursuit of peace can come to seem like a kind of betrayal. It involves compromise. It means settling for less than one would like. It has none of the purity and clarity of war in which the issues—national honour, patriotism, pride  are unambiguous and compelling.” 

If we actually want peace, we have to be willing to cede, to give a little—we have to be able to let go a little even if it’s something we feel very passionately about—we have to be okay with being a little dissatisfied.  We have to advance the ball a little, a few yards, even if imperfectly. This is why peace can feel like betrayal because we have to be uncomfortable, or lose a little. It costs something. This can challenge our pride, our identity, our need to be right.  Peace can destabilize the way we imagine ourselves.  It asks us to make space for the ones who are different from us.  It calls for restraint and humility. (Not exactly the most celebrated cultural values at the moment.)  Peace is both provocative and evocative. It pulls us magnetically toward God’s vision and, at the same time, it exposes these parts of ourselves that resist it (resist God’s vision)—Peace exposes our pride, our certainty, our ego. This is one reason the poetry of peace is more compelling than the practice.  No wonder we find war emotionally satisfying and peace emotionally costly… 

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The challenge of practicing peace isn’t only out there in global conflicts—it lives in the moral vocabulary and habits we carry every day too.  If peace is costly, then it needs a vocabulary that acknowledges that we belong to each other. One that acknowledges our duty to one another, but that vocabulary has been thinning…

Consider this: In the last 50-70 years, there has been a decline in the English phrase (American English phrase, that is) “I ought.”  It’s much more common to hear “I want,” “I choose,” or “I feel.”  Or even “you do you.”  There’s been a shift in recent decades away from language of moral obligation and towards language of personal desire and autonomy.

When I speak Spanish, as we do at home, I use words like deber or hay que much more frequently than words like must or ought in English. (I kind of never us the word ought.) We do use the word should, in English some (I use it), but we’ve taught ourselves to be suspicious of it.  Could be because we are suspicious of moral authority? 

As your institutional spokesperson for morality this morning, I want to emphasize that I’m not here to rail on you about the sins of dancing, cussing and living with your boyfriend.   Sure, I’ll talk about any of it, but, I am asking us this morning to trace a moral line and consider how our language leads us to think about the duty we have to one another. Peace requires a moral imagination that is bigger that just me. Sometimes, this means peace asks for restraint. Sometimes, it asks us to think of a common good over our individual good.

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So how do we, as ordinary people hold onto this costly, dazzling vision of peace? When I think of the vision of peace that Isaiah describes, I think of it like a lighthouse. Isaiah wasn’t describing a moment of peace; he was describing a direction like a horizon line of God’s longing for the world that we row our boat towards, that we walk towards, move towards. If peace is the lighthouse, what are the lanterns of peace that light our way as we walk in the shadows toward it? 

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Lanterns don’t illuminate miles ahead, They light the next few steps. They don’t solve world conflict but they orient us and  help us walk differently in our own lives.  They are lanterns of choosing curiosity over victory in a hard conversations. They are the lanterns of allowing someone else to be different without needing them to be wrong.  They are the lanterns of pausing instead of pouncing on someone, of asking a question instead of preparing our accusation. They are these small plowshares that we fashion instead of the swords of snap judgements or cutting anger. And here is where it gets even cooler: lanterns accumulate.

One small act of restraint, one word that is softened, one attempt at humility, one generous moment of giving someone the benefit of the doubt, all of them together, they glow. They gather into a path and they begin to change how we show up in the world. They begin to change the air around us. These small, simple, unglamorous lanterns do not look like geopolitical peace. They look like human peace—the kind that begins in us. We love the poetry of peace—but the lanterns are its practice where peace begins to come into view.  

Advent teaches us that God’s great light arrives not all at once but in flickers and glimmers in the shadows.  In one small  but sacred candle that lights the next, and the next, and the next until the path glows with more light than we first imagined possible.