Well, Good morning. This morning we’re going to be continuing on in our Advent sermon series. This is the third Sunday of Advent. They sometimes call this Gaudete Sunday. In our house, sometimes it’s called “Pink Candle Sunday,” because we light the pink candle on the wreath this day.

Actually, I’ve always liked the fact that we have different colors on the wreath, because it reminds me of the different themes of this season. Obviously, purple is the dominant color, and that’s a color that symbolizes repentance, penitence…just a sense of quiet and creating space and waiting.

And clearly that’s the dominant theme. But unlike the season of Lent, where the purple is also the primary color, underneath this sort of penitence theme there is always this underlying subordinate theme of joy. It’s joy just below the surface. It almost can’t be contained. It’s this kind of anticipatory joy. It’s almost like a little girl who looks under the tree and sees a big box there with her name on it. And it’s just a few days until Christmas and she’s so excited.

And it’s that kind of joy. And it’s like it can’t be contained except for it’s too great. And on one Sunday, it gets the upper hand. And that’s the third Sunday. So we have all season long reasons to celebrate, but particularly today we have reasons to break loose in celebration.

I realized that for this sermon series, I am the only one preaching here except for Tim Dearborn. And this is a little intimidating. And I say this because, if you’ve been here for the last two weeks or if you’ve heard Tim speak or preach on other occasions (which I have), you realize that he has seemingly an inexhaustible supply of really cool stories where God goes in and does miraculous things, and heals and reconciles, and angels and stuff…and I don’t have any of those stories. It’s not because Tim is the only one who’s ever traveled the foreign lands. It’s just that when Margie and I go away for a week in British Columbia, we don’t encounter these kinds of things.

So I thought, actually, in preparing for today’s sermon that maybe I would make up a story, but Margie thought that would lack in integrity. And so I’ve decided I’m just going take comfort in that old bumper story of “think globally, act locally.” I’m the local component of our Advent series.

As you know, though, we’ve been working each Sunday from the same text. It’s a wonderful prophetic word that’s recorded in Isaiah.

Reading: Isaiah 9:2-7 (followed by prayer)

We’re looking at the same text each Sunday. But as I was thinking about one verse that would really (in a sense) summarize the whole Advent series, it occurred to me that we might actually look to the New Testament – and in fact to a verse in Romans. And I asked that an applicable portion of it be put on the front of your bulletin. It’s from Romans 14 and it says, “The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy.”

In some ways that really sums up what we’re talking about this Advent. You’ll remember that last week Tim talked a lot about authority and how this child is to have authority – an authority that actually surmounts the authority of nations, powers and other rulers. An authority that lasts forever. An authority that continues to grow. He said that it was a different kind of an authority – and authority of love. An authority that often manifests itself more in weakness than in strength. But it would be the establishment, really, of the authority of the kind. This text points to the inauguration of the Kingdom of God.

Well we might ask, “What would that kingdom look like? What are its characteristics?” Romans says, “This is what it looks like – righteousness, peace and joy.” And while we’re sort of doing these in inverse order, if you remember back to the first Sunday of Advent, Tim talked a lot about joy. Joy bubbling up. Irrepressible joy. And next week, Tim is going to talk about righteousness and justice. And today, in between these two, I’m going to talk about peace…all characteristics of the Kingdom of God.

Now breaking them out this way makes sense for preaching sermons. But it’s a little artificial, and it sort of suggests that these are three different things, and it’s probably better to think of them as three different perspectives looking in on the same thing.

Peace is always connected with joy. You can see that in our text. They talk about rejoicing…increasing joy…rejoicing as at the harvest, as at the plunder. Because why? Because the rod of Midian has been broken. Why? Because the boots and the cloaks of the warriors have been burned in the fire. It’s because of peace that joy breaks loose.

And similarly, peace if connected with righteousness. In fact, they’re so close that in the Psalms there’s a verse that says, “peace and righteousness will kiss together.”

You’re probably familiar – this is bumper sticker Sunday – but there’s another bumper sticker that says, “If you want peace, work for justice.” It’s a deeply biblical thought. The two are totally interconnected. You can’t pull them apart.

But with that caveat, today we’ll want to look at peace. Peace that is prophesied in the Old Testament. And peace that shows up so prominently in our Advent and Christmas narratives. If you were listening closely to the passage that Lynne just read, it was the prophecy from Zachariah. And when he turns to prophecy about the coming Messiah, he says this. He says, “The dawn from on high will break upon us to give light to those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death.” Why? To guide our feet into the way of peace.

And when the Christ child is born, the angels fill the sky and they shout, “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth.” It’s peace that will characterize the kingdom – the in-breaking Kingdom of God.

Now I keep using the word peace because that’s the word in our text. That’s our English word. It’s the translation of our Hebrew word, a word many of you are familiar with. It’s the word shalom. It’s probably as good a translation as we can come up with, but it’s not a very good translation in the sense that our use of the word peace doesn’t really capture the fullness of shalom. Shalom is a very rich Hebraic word and it means lots of things.

Certainly, one piece of what it means is often what we think of when we say the word peace – in a sense, a cessation of hostility. We pray for peace in the Middle East, and what we mean most often is that the Israelis and the Palestinians will stop fighting each other and be able to grow up safely and beside each other. There is, certainly, with shalom a notion of protection, of safety.

You see that here in the text. Clearly, there’s a tendency (I think sometimes) when we read Old Testament texts to want to spiritualize them. But this was a very clearly a sort of geo-political prophecy.

At the time that this word was first given (and scholars debate this a little bit), it’s quite probable that Israel was facing a threat from the Assyrian army. It was the mightiest army of the day and they had either already attacked and occupied portions of Israel, or they were on the very verge of doing so.

And so when the prophetic word comes and says that the rod of the oppressor will be broken, they weren’t thinking that that was some sort of spiritual metaphor. They thought that it meant that the occupying troops walking around their village would be gone.

And when they talked about the boots of the tramping warriors and the garments cloaked in blood would be burned, these were very real images. These were images of the Assyrian army that was a threat, a danger to them, and so this prophecy was a word of protection, of safety. It said that when shalom comes, you will be safe.

And surely there are people around the world that so desperately need to hear that. There are people in other parts of the world that go to bed at night worried that why they sleep, bands of enemies will come in and will take them from their homes and send them out, take their possessions, rape them, rape their children, maim them, cut off body parts, torture, kill them. They go to bed with that fear. They wake up with that fear. And the word of shalom says there will come a day when those kinds of fears will be banished.

We’re told elsewhere in Isaiah that when that day comes – when shalom fills the earth, the lion will lay down with the lamb, the little child will lie on top of the snake den, and no one will be hurt, and no one will be destroyed on all of God’s holy mountain.

The shalom isn’t of course just protecting from those kinds of things. It’s protecting at every level. When shalom comes in this final, full sense, all of our fears will be put away. We will no longer need to be in danger of eviction or in danger of losing a job, or in danger of cancer because shalom comes with the promise of safety. It speaks to our deepest interior fears.

I mean, I don’t know if I’m representative of you or not; it’s not something we typically talk about, but probably 4 or 5 times a year I will wake up from a recurring nightmare. And sort of broadly speaking, it’s a nightmare in which I end up being abandoned. But when I wake up, it is the closest thing I think I feel to real terror…that my body is rigid, my heart is beating, my face if flushed. I am scared to death.

There are some deep, interior fears. And when shalom comes, those fears will go away. They will be banished because no one will be hurt and no one will be destroyed on all of God’s holy mountain. And at the deepest level, the fear of death itself will be banished. Death will be no more.

So surely, peace (shalom) means safety, protection. But it also means something more than that. In a more affirmative sense, it means taking that which is in disarray, disorder, and putting it back right. Putting things back into their right order, their right place, in a kind of sustainable harmony.

Margie and I love jigsaw puzzles. I don’t know if you do as well, but we work on jigsaw puzzles…maybe you’ve had this experience…you open a box and you cut up the plastic and you pour out all the pieces and you turn them all over, and there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of pieces on your card table, and at the first look of it, it actually can be a little dismaying. It’s just total chaos. There’s all these different shapes. All these different colors. They’re all sort of randomly associated.

But we do what I suspect everybody does. We look for straightedge pieces and the corner pieces and we gradually build a border. And when the border is there, it kind of gives us a sense of scale of how this is supposed to fit. Then we put pieces with the same color hues together and we begin to form little patches and little sections, and sections connect to sections, and so on.

I think there are a lot of reasons why people like jigsaw puzzles, but I’m actually convinced that one of the reasons is that we have this deep, instinctive desire to have order out of disorder. We have this deep desire to see where things are in disarray and in chaos – to have them put back in right relationship.

This is pretty powerful. This was actually driven home to me this past Thanksgiving week. We had my mother-in-law visiting, and so the three of us were working on a jigsaw puzzle. And we had essentially finished the puzzle, but there was one piece left. The problem was that we couldn’t find that piece anywhere on the card table or anywhere on the floor.

Margie thought that she remembered at one point seeing a piece slip off her mom and fall onto the chair – there’s a kind of lazy boy recliner kind of thing – and so maybe it had slipped there. And so we felt around all the cracks and we couldn’t find the piece. And somebody (I don’t remember who it was) said something like, “Good enough, really. We’ve really finished this puzzle –I mean, it’s just got this hole – but we know the piece is right there and functionally we’re done. We can declare victory and we can go to bed.”

We all said, “yea, yea, yea.” And we started, but you could tell that we were deeply dissatisfied with this. And we gravitated right back to that chair and we turned it over and we shook it and we stuck our hands down. And finally the piece fell out. And we stuck it in there. And then it was like, “Ah hah, okay…now.” And we went to bed.

In a sense, that’s another piece of shalom – that the great disorders, the brokenness of our world, will be put back and made whole.

Now there are a couple problems with the jigsaw metaphor. One is it’s kind of a static picture. And when I think of God’s shalom it’s much more dynamic; it’s pulsing with life. But it’s the sense that all the different parts are harmoniously connected and interacting within in a way that’s sort of a sustainable harmony over the long haul. If you want sort of a little sense of this, read Psalm 104, that talks about kind of the creation – how all the different pieces are supposed to mint together.

But the other problem with the jigsaw puzzle image or metaphor is that it suggests if you kind of just work at it long enough you can do it. Even if it’s thousands of pieces, if you’re patient you can eventually get there.

Another picture that might be better is that instead of printing this picture on cardboard and cutting it into little pieces, what if you printed it on a piece of glass and then went up 5 or 6 floors and threw it out the window onto the parking lot and it shatters everywhere and there are all sorts of shards everywhere. If anybody said, “Why don’t you gather up all those shards and put them in the right place, and put super glue on them?” it can’t be done.

But that notion of smashed and shattered is probably a better picture of the condition of our world today. There is brokenness everywhere, but when shalom comes, even the little shards of glass that you and I can’t find, even the smallest little pieces that are out of place, when shalom comes it all will be put together. It will be made right.

So shalom is safety. Shalom is wholeness and completion. I suppose the other thing I would say about shalom is that shalom is inherently relational. Actually, our own word peace captures it, if you think about it. When we talk about people being at peace, they’re at peace with each other. Nations are at peace with each other. There is peace within a family. Even when it’s just internal, I’ve made peace with some part of my past. Peace is a kind of a bridging word, a relational word. And when shalom comes, all relationships will be made right.

Many of you remember this story from Genesis, when early on Adam and Eve refused to live in the relationship that God has in mind for them. They disobey. And as a result, all of their relationships are broken. They’re shattered in every dimension. God and human. God and environment. Human and human. Human self. Every relationship is shattered like that pane of glass that was thrown out the window. And yet in shalom they will be made right.

Our relationship with God is broken in large part because of our sin. Our sin has posed, or put, a barrier and yet this babe who was born to us - this son to us is given - is going to grow up to be Jesus, who will hang up on a cross and in his death take upon himself all of the penalty, all of the burden of our sins, in order that that barrier will be broken down. In order so that we can once again have this right relationship with God. We’ll have a relationship with God intended from the beginning.

If you want to put it in Genesis terms, we will have the joy of walking with God in the Garden in the cool of the afternoon. Or in Revelation terms, we will have the joy of seeing Him again face to face and living in the same city where God lives.

The relationship with God will be put right. The relationship with our natural environment will be put right. I don’t care what your politics are, you have to concede that right now our human natural environment relationship is out of whack. Everywhere you look, you see problems…that the water tables are falling, soils are eroding, soil fertility is disappearing, climate is changing, pollution sits on tops of large portions of our world. There is a lot that is broken. And God is going to put it right.

We’re told in Romans that the whole of the created order – the whole of the created order – is longing for redemption, longing for this to be put back right. And there will come a day when that will be the case.

The same is true for our interpersonal relations. Maybe for some of you, that’s an annoying person at work that you have to work with, or an abusive an insecure boss, or maybe in a family situation it’s an estrangement…two people in the family because of some distant event, no longer talking to each other, unwilling to come to the same family events at the same time. Or maybe in a marriage. Maybe in a marriage there’s a hole, a scary area, an area that’s so toxic that the husband and wife just always gingerly walk around it.

Whatever it is, all of those relationships will be restored. They will be made right.

Even our relationships with ourselves. God looks at us and He says, “You’re my beloved. You are beautiful in my eyes.” And yet many of us carry around a deep sense of shame; a deep sense of unworthiness. Even in many cases I think it’s not too extreme to say a sense of self-loathing or hatred, and that relationship will be made right. Every single relationship will be restored as God intended from the beginning.

One of my favorite writers on this subject is a philosopher-theologician, a guy named Nick Walterstorff. And he said,

“Shalom is a human being dwelling at peace and all of his or her relationships. But the peace that is shalom is not merely the absence of hostility and not merely being in right relationship. Shalom at its highest is enjoyment in one’s relationship. To dwell in shalom is to enjoy living before God, to enjoy living in one’s physical surroundings, to enjoy living with one’s fellows, to enjoy life with oneself.”

So this is the shalom that’s promised, that’s prophesied. It’s safe. It protects us. It makes whole. It makes order out of disarray and it restores all relationships into sources of joy for us. That’s the shalom that is promised. That’s the shalom that will be part of this Kingdom of God that has been inaugurated. That’s what the Prince of Peace brings.

So what do we do? What is it…how does it connect with us? How should we, today, think about this notion of peace? Very quickly, let me suggest that as we think about peace, we are invited to look for it, to work for it, and to long for it.

We look for it, because unlike the original people that heard this prophecy in Isaiah, we have the blessing of living on this side of the cross and the resurrection. And we know that Jesus, when he was raised from the dead, was the first-fruits of the new creation. That is, God is in the process of making all things new.

You get a sense of that process even in the Isaiah process that says, “His authority shall grow continually.” He’s in the process of making all things new. The Kingdom of God is even now breaking into our world, and that’s why we need to be alert to watch for it.

Over and over, when Dan was here, he would tell us “pay attention.” And that’s why I think Jesus in one of his last directions to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane says, “stay awake.” We need to watch. We need to look. Every time we see someone that’s in danger being rescued – whether its Chilean miners or a homeless person being taken off the street and moved into transitional housing…every time we see that the Kingdom of God is breaking in.

Every time we see situations that are in disarray, or disorder, and somehow they are put back right with a sense of harmony, the Kingdom of God is breaking in. And every time we see a relationship that is broken, where reconciliation is taking place, the Kingdom of God is breaking in.

And we need to look for it. We need to point it out. We need to thank God for it. And we need to celebrate it.

So we look for shalom.

But we also work for shalom. We’re told in scriptures to seek peace. To seek the peace of the city. To seek peace.

Now, if you read the whole scriptures you’ll see that shalom is very clearly a blessing that God gives His people. It’s a gift from God. And in the New testament we’re told that it’s one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It’s God’s work. It’s what God is doing.

And yet, in some mysterious way, we are invited to participate with God as, in a sense, co-workers to help bring this shalom into being, to help bring this peace to the world we live in.

What does that mean?

Well, I think it means that at a minimum we should be praying. We should be praying regularly for the peace of the world. For the peace of our nation. For the peace of our neighborhoods. For our peace.

But also I think it means that when we see opportunity – when we see someone in danger, and we have an opportunity to project them – we ought to do that. Or when we see a situation that seems out of control and in disarray and we think we can interject in some way to help bring a sense of harmony or order, we ought to do that. And if we are in relationships that are broken, or we know of relationships that are broken, where we have some role that we can place – where we can sort of facilitate in some fashion at least the beginning of reconciliation – we ought to do that. We ought to not just look for shalom, we ought to work for shalom.

And then finally we ought to long for shalom.

And we long for it because fundamentally, we are advent people. We celebrate Advent for four weeks at the beginning of the Church calendar year. But we live in many ways in a perpetual Advent season. Because while we live on this side of the cross and the resurrection, we are awaiting the day…we are awaiting the day that Jesus will return. We are awaiting the day when this Kingdom of God which is already breaking in, will be finally and fully consummated. We are awaiting that day.

And so we do all the Advent things. We hope. We wait. We prepare. We repent. We get ready. But we are awaiting for that. I think that God gives us pictures, little snapshots of what it will be like in the end, not to distract us from the present, but to whet our appetites…to stir up our longings.

I know I’ve shared this with you before and I wish I could find words to say it more profoundly, but when I lay my picture of what the world looks like today alongside a picture of God’s shalom, it breaks my heart. It just breaks my heart. And makes me want to long all the more for that shalom that is to come…that shalom that’s promised.

And as I long for the shalom, I feel like that actually takes me even deeper. Because I’m not so much longing for the peace as I am ultimately longing for the Prince of Peace. You see, we are told that in the end, our peace is to be found in Christ. In Christ, we will be saved. In Christ, everything will be made whole. In Christ, all relationships will be restored. And so this deep longing for shalom actually animates some of my deepest prayers. “Come, Lord Jesus. Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus. Come, Wonderful Counselor. Come, Mighty God. Come, Everlasting Father. Come, Lord Jesus. Come, Prince of Peace.”

We look for it. We work for it. And we long for it.

Let’s pray.

Lord, we do pray. We do pray for Your peace. We pray for here and now, that Your peace will break forth in little places and little ways everywhere. We pray for the capacity and grace to on our alert, to see it and to celebrate it. We pray that You would animate us with Your Spirit – that You would stir up our wills and our energy to work for this peace. But You know our deepest longings, Lord. Our deepest longings are for everything to be put right. Our deepest longings are for this kingdom that You have pointed us to. Our deepest longings are for You. And so we do pray, and we do pray this morning with those who have prayed down through the centuries, that you will come – that you will come, Lord Jesus. Maranatha. Amen.