The Promise of Peace on Earth

Luke 2:1-14

For the last week I have tried to keep my ears and my heart open as people have spoken about the word peace in my hearing. It is not that I was asking them to define the term for me. Instead, it was a matter of different people talking about their concern for peace from different points of view. Some of the voices and opinions about peace came to me by way of the news media. Some of the voices came from the world of entertainment. Others came from people with whom I was in conversation who were talking with me about the word peace.

Here are some of the opinions and points of view about peace that came to me just this week. There was a story in The New York Times about a doctor from the Central African Republic who left his country to study medicine in France. After several decades as a physician and researcher, the article said "he decided to leave the peace and security of his life in France in order to bring much-needed medical care to the people of his homeland." In this case, peace was a physical location and an economic position that guaranteed happiness and security. Is that what the angels meant when they spoke of "peace on earth"?

A second reference to the word peace that I encountered this week occurred when an evacuee from New Orleans sat in my office and said with a heavy sigh that more than anything else, he wanted some peace. For this person, peace involved the end of the emotional upheaval that tens of thousands of displaced persons from that city still feel to this day. Peace would be a sense of once again feeling settled in some permanent home and knowing that their lives will eventually be restored to some order and normalcy. The peace desired by the man from New Orleans was not that much different from what the man from France had given up in returning home to Africa. One man was in search of peace and the other man had given it up, but was either man experiencing what the angels intended in the skies over Bethlehem?

Another reference to peace came to mind when I read the words of a person who had come out of a 20-year addiction to heroin. When attempting to explain why his addiction lasted so long and why his attraction to that drug was so powerful, he said, "heroin gave me a little bit of peace for a short period of time." That person is not alone; our nation and the world are crowded with people whose only way to soothe their spirits and calm their troubled minds is an over-reliance on drugs or alcohol.

Then there are the words from "Ma Dear" in The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which Peggy and I watched again on Friday night. Cicely Tyson was talking about the words "Peace, be still" that Jesus spoke to the winds and waves on the Sea of Galilee. Ma Dear reached into her purse and took out her hand gun and remarked that if you want to have some "peace be still" you better get yourself a "piece of steel." There are a great many people who seem to feel more at peace when they are carrying a gun. Is that what the angels had in mind on the night that Christ was born?