Scripture: Micah 5:2-5; Luke 1:39-55

“He himself will be peace.”

-- Micah 5:4

“Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

-- Luke 1:45

Some of our Puritan forbears did not celebrate Christmas because they regarded it as a Catholic festival of Mary and therefore idolatrous. They were an admirable bunch on the whole but did tend to view enjoyment with suspicion, if not alarm. From them our culture gets its admirable traits of moral seriousness, commercial efficiency and insidious guilt, which together make us the vibrant enterprise that we are – active, optimistic and driven to improve. They also gave us less positive things, but we choose to ignore them here. Today, let us rather meditate on the symbol of Mary, despite what our ancestors might have thought about Christmas, and let us take as a theme, the title of the hymn we shall sing shortly, that Mary is the woman of the promise. Micah the prophet sums up the promise tersely, “He himself will be our peace.” What then is God’s promise to and through Mary? It is the promise of peace.

It is remarkable how the longing for peace permeates the Bible. We who live in a world still formed by the Bible take for granted that this longing is universal, but it is not. Many, perhaps most, cultures glorify war and the warrior. Most recently in our Western history we saw the amazing militarism of German culture after the unification of the German states in the 19th century. German thinkers lauded war as the mother and father of virtue and progress. There was no honor like the honor of the warrior, no nobility like the self-sacrifice of the soldier, no discipline like steadiness under fire, no cunning like the strategy of a great general. These are, of course, admirable traits – honor, self-sacrifice, courage, and cunning - and to this day we honor them in the soldier; but unlike militarist cultures we try to cultivate them without blood and iron, simply by education and example, and for us who believe, by prayer, preaching and personal piety.

My colleague at the Center for Conflict and Negotiation at Stanford, Byron Bland, has wisely argued that it is strategically futile to go into a negotiation for peace with a preformed vision of what peace is. It is much better to see peace as a by-product of the rectification of the grievances felt by the respective sides. This means that the word “peace” has no single and abiding meaning but changes with the circumstances, and emerges on the scene when the parties involved feel that their grievances have been rectified enough to warrant setting violence aside.  There is a clear pragmatic wisdom in this; nobody is asked to accept an exhaustive blueprint drawn up by somebody else, but they are invited to enter a process. Pragmatic wisdom leaves the nature of peace to emerge from a process of rectification and reconciliation, and does not define it beforehand. Clearly everything depends here on the personal openness and willingness for peace of the participants in the negotiation.

Therefore there is also a spiritual wisdom in this position, which I think the prophet Micah has in mind when he says of the future peacemaker that he personally is our peace. This is also the spiritual truth that Mary symbolizes. Her marvelous pregnancy is a symbol of God’s personal presence in our lives, of peace on earth and goodwill to all. Where is this peace on earth? It is in Mary’s womb. God enters Mary’s life in the most vivid and concrete way, and whatever we make of the claims about a virginal conception the message remains that God identified Himself personally with Mary and entered her life in the most intimate way. Mary is the symbol of the possibility and reality of the divine intimacy in our lives, of the place of the divine peace on earth.

This point is essentially the same as the one we made last Sunday, that in this world peace is a quality of inwardness. Out in the objective world there will never be a peaceful utopia where all are well and happy and at perfect peace with one another. We cannot control what happens to us but we can control our response to it, and thus with God’s help, cope with the anxiety that comes along with our human frailty. Micah’s word, “He is our peace,” is a compact way of saying that those who believe in him, that is trust him and commit their cares to him, will have the inner peace the passes human understanding. They shall have the confidence they will need to work for peace in our warlike world, the hope to sustain them through discouragements, the resilience to bounce back from setbacks, and the patience to keep trying. Confidence, hope, resilience, patience, these are the words that describe the energies that come to and from the person in whom Christ is their peace, and Mary is the symbol of the possibility of such an experience of inward peace.

How are we personally being peace this year? I believe we at WVC are showing extraordinary confidence, hope, resilience and patience this Christmas. We have done what we could in the small corner in which God has graciously given us to work. Through our home alone, due entirely to Rosemary’s being in the loop, about 150 little gifts passed to children in the region; and in the last few weeks we have refurbished the landscaping of a local school, sent significant sums abroad to feed hungry children, and given food to be distributed for Christmas dinners. We know that in the grand scheme this does not do much to rectify the world, but Micah and Mary tell us that it is the outpouring from us of him who is himself  peace.

Perhaps the most important thing to notice about the verse saying, “He will be peace,” is the personal nature of this peace. It does not say he will bring peace, or make peace, but that he will be peace. That clinches what I have been trying to say, that peace is an inward, personal quality, and those who are peace are the real presence of peace on earth. There will always be shooting and killing, soldiers and guns, on the one hand, and there will always be people who embody peace simply by their being, on the other. At this point we remember another important way our church is being peace on earth. Kathie Namphy, one of our members has been in Bagdad for two months now, with the Mennonite, Christian Peacemaker Team. She and her colleagues are peace there, personal incarnations of peace. We hold her constantly in our prayers and ask God to fulfill the promise of peace through her every day. The remembrance of her is a blessing to us, and another instance of how our congregation at this time is being peace to the world.  

Do you recall the closing scenes of Casablanca?  Humphrey Bogart says to Claude Rains, “Louis, two individuals like us don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” This after he has just given his own precious passport away so that someone else more important than he could carry on the struggle against the Nazis. I wonder if that is the origin of the idiom, “hill of beans”? In any case the irony is well taken. Those two individuals were at that moment high mountains, far taller than several hills of beans, and so have we been this Christmas and will continue to be, because Mary’s son is peace in us, and that makes us living instances of peace on earth.

In closing, let us join imaginatively in Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, if only because it is a song and we want to include the music we offer to the world among the ways God’s peace and presence is working through us to create a haven of peace on earth.  Mary marvels at the privilege of being God’s servant in this intimate way, and praises His mercy and condescension in making a humble young woman so central to his saving work. We may do the same, not claiming to be pivotal like her but aware that the divine peace is present in our personal depths. Then Mary glimpses the revolution: “He has pulled down princes…and exalted the lowly, he has filled the hungry and sent the full away empty.” These lines are threatening to us who are full if not princes, and they do remind us that God cares especially for the poor and lowly. We acknowledge that, of course, as we share our fullness with the poor at this time. Let us pray that Christ’s coming in us this year will strengthen our resolve always to be sharers of our fullness.

So Mary is a symbol of the promise that God will be our peace, there where it matters most, in the depths of our personal being. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” the angel answered, “and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called the Son of God (Luke 1:35).” That of course describes the unique experience of Mary, but symbolically it also describes what can happen to us if we let it. God’s peace can be born in us and from us, and we can be incarnations of the divine love, joy, and peace in the midst of a chaotic and violent world, where the reign of violence will not end before the Second Coming of Christ.