Peace: God's Peace is Not What We Have Come to Expect

Christmas reveals a deeper peace than temporary calm or absence of conflict. Biblical shalom means wholeness, harmony, and restored relationships with God, others, yourself, and creation. While the Roman Empire enforced peace through military dominance, God offers transformative peace that works from the inside out. Jesus was born into chaos to bring true reconciliation, not just surface-level tranquility. This peace requires honesty, courage, and active pursuit of healing in our broken relationships and areas where we lack wholeness.

Transcript

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All right, Church, I'm going to invite you this morning, if you have your Bibles, to open up to the book of Micah. It is in the Old Testament. It is a prophetic book. We're going to start with Micah, chapter five. We're going to read verses two through five.

And if you don't have your Bibles this morning, it's absolutely okay. You can find the Scriptures on the screen. But I want to remind you the best way to get into Scripture is in your own Bible. Underline stuff, highlight stuff, make notes in the margins. It always helps me, and I know it will help you hear now the word of the Lord for us today.

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from. Of old, from ancient times. Therefore, Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor bears a son and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God, and they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth, and he will be our peace.

So, Church, last week we began Advent, and we started talking last week with the theme of hope. We talked about a hope that defies despair, hope that's born in the margins of society. But today we're going to turn to peace. And I want to be clear with you this morning. Peace in Scripture is not the same kind of shallow peace of simple silence.

It's not the fragile peace of avoidance. It's not the false peace that the empire provides. Peace in scripture means something deeper. It means reconciliation. Peace is justice.

Peace is God's kingdom breaking into our fractured world. The peace that God wants for us isn't the absence of violence or war, but instead, God wants us to experience what our ancient Jewish brothers and sisters would call shalom. Everybody say shalom. Shalom is a Hebrew word that means more than simply just peace as we've understood it. It doesn't just mean an absence of conflict.

It describes a state of wholeness, harmony, restoration of relationships with God, with others, with yourself, with creation. Shalom is more than just subsisting. Shalom is flourishing. It means completeness where nothing is broken and nothing is missing in our lives. In Scripture, it is the peace that God promises us through Jesus Christ.

It's the same kind of healing of all divisions. It's the same kind of making of all Things new that God is expecting to be fulfilled and in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And I want to be very clear with you this morning. Peace is not the same thing as calmness.

At the beginning of one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time, the movie home alone, the McAllister household is in chaos. If you've ever seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. Relatives are everywhere, kids are fighting, parents are stressed. And the family is frantically preparing to fly out of the country to go to Paris for Christmas. In the life of the family, it's loud, it's messy, it's overwhelming.

And there they are, sitting down to eat $122 worth of pizza in the McAllister home. All 15 people gathered around the table, eating their last meal together before they fly out of town. And it's in the midst of this moment that chaos that we've been talking about needs to be brought into peace.

So I want to show you guys a bit of that video. We're going to set the scene as to what that looks like. Grab yourself a napkin. And you're going to have to pour your own drink.

Early. We're leaving the house at 8am on the button. I hope you're all drinking milk. I want to get rid of that. The Pizza Boy needs $122.50, plus tip.

For pizza. 10 pizzas times 12 bucks. Frank, you've got the money, don't you? Come on. Traveler's checks.

Forget it, Frank. We have cash. You probably get the kind of traveler's check that don't work in France. Did anyone order me a plain cheese? Oh, yeah, we did.

Buffy, want any? Somebody's gonna have to barf it all up. Cause it's gone. Fuller, go easy on the Pepsi.

Get a plate.

You, come here. Come on. You all right? What is the matter with you? He started it.

He ate my pizza on purpose. He knows I ate sausage and olives. And look what you did, you little jerk.

Kevin, get upstairs right now. Why? Kevin, you're such a disease. Shut up. Kevin, upstairs.

Say goodnight, Kevin. Good night, Kevin. Now. It's for brother. Like we don't know.

Get upstairs. I am upstairs, dummy. Third floor. Go. It's scary up there.

Don't be silly. Fuller will be up in a little while. I don't want a Superflow. You know about him? He wets the bed.

He'll pee all over me. I know it. Fine. We'll put him somewhere else. I'm sorry.

It's too late. Get upstairs.

Everyone in this family Hates me. Then maybe you should ask Santa for a new family. I don't want a new family. I don't want any family. Families suck.

Just stay up there. I don't want to see you again for the rest of the night. I didn't want to see you again for the rest of my whole life. And I didn't want to see anybody else either. I hope you don't mean that.

You'd feel pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and you didn't have a family. No, I wouldn't. Then say it again. Maybe it'll happen. I hope I never see any jerks again.

Brad, you come and answer.

Best movie of all time right there. I don't know if that looks like any of your families around Christmas time, but when I was growing up, there were seven of us, and that was like, every day. So in the middle of the noise, young Kevin McAllister, the young boy who is the central character in the movie, he gets into a fight with his older brother Bruz. Older brother Buzz. Because he isn't able to control his anger, his mom removes him from the kitchen, takes him upstairs and says, you're sleeping in the third floor with your cousin who pees the be Fuller.

Who go easy on the Pepsi. Fuller. Yeah. There's a reason for that. And as we saw here in the clip at the top of the stairs, Kevin wishes for peace and quiet in the most painful way possible.

Right? Could you imagine being that young boy's family and him saying, I don't ever want to see you again in my whole life? For any of you who've raised teenagers, that's probably a phrase you've heard, right?

Because he is so mad at the way that he's being treated, he says his family should just disappear. To him, peace looks like silence. Peace looks like calm, like just being left alone. But throughout the movie, he's soon going to come to realize that the type of peace that he wanted in that heated moment is not the kind of peace that he truly needs. And I would say the kind of peace that he wishes for is not the same kind of peace that any of us need.

The misunderstanding about what peace is is something that has been a problem for humanity since the beginning of time. The human desire for peace, while it's nice, is not the perfect kind of peace that God wants for us. Often for us, peace is just simply the absence of struggle. It's not having to fight with brothers and sisters. It's looking around the world and saying, huh, There is no war.

There's no conflict. Everything is at peace. That for us, I is the extent of what peace looks like. Peace is a thought, it's a feeling of calm or serenity. But there is so much more to what peace is than that.

But it's always been important for us to have peace. As a matter of fact, in the time of Jesus, Rome, the great oppressive empire of the time, thought that they could enforce peace throughout their empire through what they called Pax Romana. Have you ever heard that phrase before? Pax Romana means the peace of Rome. And throughout this period of relative stability in the Roman Empire there were minimal large scale conflicts.

And that period of peace lasted for almost 200 years. It began with the reign of Emperor Augustus in the year 27 BCE and continued on to about 180 CE. This time was marked by strong centralized control in the Roman Empire. They were expanding infrastructure such as Roman roads and aqueducts that brought people the ability to communicate quicker. It brought them to be able to transport troops faster to any part of the empire that was maybe in rebellion.

This was an era marked a flourishing trade and the cultural development of Rome was at its height. However, this version of forced peace was maintained through military dominance. It was maintained through suppression of dissent and the power of Rome's armies. Rather than genuine reconciliation or genuine justice. Outward calm and prosperity within the empire masked the reality of what true peace really could look like.

God's shalom, God's wholeness.

That kind of peace was absent since many lived under oppression and fear rather than the restored relationship that God wanted for them. This faux Roman peace was a peace enforced by armies, by fear, by domination. It was calm without reconciliation. It was silence without any sort of healing. And it was into that world, a world where peace was maintained at the edge of a sword.

That a child was born in a forgotten village called Bethlehem. He wasn't born in a palace, he wasn't born under marble columns, but in a manger. He wasn't announced to emperors or queens, but to a young, poor, unwed, virgin teenager. One of the things that we have to remember about our loving God is that the world sometimes tries to enforce peace, but our God breathes peace. God's desire for us as human people is to have peace once and for all.

And that peace was announced to Mary through the angel Gabriel. Let's read how God tells Mary about how peace is going to change the world. If you have your Bibles, you can open up to the book of Luke, chapter one and we're going to read 2638 it says this. In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary.

The angel went to her and said, greetings, you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you. Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God.

You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob's descendants forever. His kingdom will never end. How will this be, Mary asked the angel.

Since I'm a virgin, the angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to have a child in her old age. And she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.

I am the Lord's servant, Mary answered. May your word to me be fulfilled. Then the angel left her an unlikely girl, not a woman. An unlikely girl was chosen by God to bear his son. And as we've talked about before, a young woman who was unwed in this time would have been or could have been put to death for her pregnancy that came outside of wedlock.

And the angel's promise to her was that her son would sit on David's throne forever. This is a big time promise. But for Mary, she would have understood that there was absolutely no way that this could have happened. You know why? Because from as far back as the 8th century BCE, the Assyrian Empire that controlled Israel suffered from numerous assassination attempts of their emperor.

A king at this period of time was probably one of the least safe roles to play in a kingdom. To hold power in ancient times meant that you and your family were never, ever safe. Emperor after emperor, governor after governor, were killed by their own people or by their, you know, people they had put in their government. They entrusted most with their leadership. Mary would have heard these words from the angel with a bit of skepticism.

She knew that the throne was one of the least secure places in all the world. She knew the stories of those who've been killed so that others could take power and control from them. Right, Mary would have known that the Assyrian emperor Shalmaneser V, his reign ended abruptly in 722 BCE in a way that scholars absolutely agree that somebody murdered the man. In 681 BCE, the Assyrian king Sennacherib was killed by his own sons while he was in the temple worshiping because they wanted to take over control. Several Babylonian kings were also killed through Hungary.

Sorry, control hungry officials. Labashi Marduk was killed in 556bce and this paved a way for a whole new empire to come over and take control. The Babylonian empire came in. Persian kings like Cambyses II were killed because of conspiratorial plots. In 522, Xerxes I was assassinated by the commander of his own bodyguard.

The people that were supposed to protect them rebelled against them. Darius III was betrayed and assassinated by his own Satrap Bezos in 330. This allowed the conqueror Alexander the Great to come in. And then the Assyrians were conquered by the Greeks. Ruler after ruler suffered the fate of assassination.

Proving that it's really, really hard to maintain rule over people. No matter what kind of king you are, you may be the best king of all kinds of somebody thinks they're a better king than you.

Mary would have thought that peace and ruling a kingdom would have been mutually exclusive. Peace in empires was fragile, enforced by violence and constantly threatened by assassination and betrayal of those who you think you can trust. And it's in this backdrop that the angel's announcement to Mary that her child would bring true peace is a radical statement. God's peace is not maintained by swords or palace intrigue, but by reconciliation. In the shalom that we talked about when a new king's life was most at risk during the first year of his reign, Jesus reign was promised to be eternal.

How could there ever be peace in a world that is this power hungry? How could Mary's son ever rule eternally when assassination attempts and plots against life were all that empirical rulers ever knew? What Mary probably didn't understand, and that it's really hard for us to even understand in this time, is that God's promised peace that was supposed to come through Jesus wasn't a reprieve from war or power struggles. God was promising a different kind of peace. And what scripture calls that shalom, the world's peace often just looks like silence.

It's an absence of battle. But God's peace brings wholeness again. Peace doesn't just mean everything is calm. It means everything is being made right.

So now we got to jump back into the world of Home Alone. Because again, Best Christmas movie outside of Die Hard Ever.

Back and get ready. Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I thought you were our Santa Claus. Your Santa Claus is intoxicating. Oh, no.

Yes. It's disgraceful. How can you alarm me?

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bell. What do you mean by drinking? You know it's not allowed. Got to do something to keep war. I'll warn you.

I ought to take this ca. And I ought to. Somebody. Julian. Get some black coffee.

Plenty of black with a little cream. Mom? Hello?

Mom?

Dad? Bull. Buzz.

Buzz.

Hello? Rod? Uncle frank? Uncle frank. He's just a joke, megan.

Lenny, is this a joke?

The cars are still here. They didn't go to the airport.

I made my family disappear.

I made my family disappear.

All right, so we see that he wakes up and he sees for the first time, silence, right? Nobody is there to bother him. He doesn't have to report to anybody. Peace and quiet finally come to Kevin McAllister.

But not knowing the reality behind the answer to his wish, he begins to celebrate. Right? You see him run around. He's excited. If you've seen the whole movie Home Alone, you will know that this feeling of peace for Kevin is very short lived.

As burglars try to break into McAllister's home while they think the family's in Paris, Kevin has to defend his house against the forces of evil during Christmas time. In a way that when I was a kid I dreamed about, his personal peace would come to an end quite quickly. Kevin celebrated too soon.

When the baby Jesus was born and placed in the manger as recorded In Luke, chapter 2, verse 14, the angels celebrated a different kind of peace. God's peace with a song. Verse 14 says, Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests. This piece of the angels sang about wasn't Rome's version of forced peace. This wasn't just a feeling of calm.

This peace was God's peace shalom. God was made manifest in Jesus and brought wholeness. Jesus wholeness perfected the relationship between God and humanity that was broken. God's Son was coming to reconcile us to God once and for all. Rome's peace controlled people from the outside.

God's peace transforms people from the inside. And as we read last week in the prophetic book of Isaiah, Isaiah prophesied about the peace that God would send through Jesus. He said this in verses 6 and 7 in chapter 9. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given and the government will be on his shoulders and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, of the greatness, his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness.

From that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. God's promised Prince of Peace here isn't a manager of our calm. He's the restorer of God's creation. Justice and righteousness are promised as a result of God working to bring us reconciliation through Jesus.

And no matter how broken the world has become, God chooses to enter into it so that all of us can be made whole. When Jesus is born, our brokenness, our division, our separation from God is brought into a state of restoration. So, Church, I have a random question. Have you ever celebrated brokenness before?

No. Right? That's a weird thing to celebrate. But there's a reason that I ask. Did you know that there is a museum of broken relationships in the country of Croatia?

Did you know this? I didn't either. Seems like a really weird thing to celebrate, but it's true. There's a museum in Croatia that is dedicated entirely to nothing but broken relationships. The museum is called, strangely enough, the Museum of Broken Relationships.

Who knew? It's a very small museum, but it's become pretty popular as it is the 11th most visited museum in all of the country. In this museum are housed letters, gifts, all kinds of random items that tell of fractured stories of relationships, stories of brokenness. The museum started when a very artistic couple, which makes sense, one was a film producer, the other was a sculptor. They went through a pretty tragic breakup at the time.

They jokingly talked about creating a place to display the items that they thought were special to the surrounding situation of their brokenness. Out of that joke conversation, the idea became a reality three years later. This museum has since gone on a world tour. I don't know that I would pay to go see this, but it's interesting. It's visited 68 cities including Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris and Shanghai.

It's been all over the world. The museum is filled with objects donated by jilted lovers and brokenhearted people who seek to find recourse for the pain that they felt during their breakups. People from all around the world send in items to museums not just because they want to forget, but because they want a cathartic type of healing. One woman sent in an axe that she used to cut up the furniture of her ex boyfriend.

The museum is proof that the brokenness of past relationships keeps our hearts from experiencing peace. When our hearts are broken and we try to muddle through the pain, we don't recognize what God is trying to do to bring us shalom. The same isn't just true with our relationships. The same is true in every area of our lives. We often try to build a life that looks peaceful on the outside, but it's full of broken pieces on the inside.

Christ doesn't show up as a way to just hide the broken pieces of ourselves. Christ comes so that we can have true restoration. The announcement to Mary that the birth of her firstborn son was coming. Jesus in that moment when God is experiencing this with her together through the angel Gabriel, God is saying the world's brokenness is not the end of our story. Now to be clear, God doesn't immediately fix every single thing that's wrong with the world.

When Jesus was born, as a matter of fact, remember how we talked about being a king would cause problems for you if you remember that Jesus was still an infant when King Herod was threatened by the news that a king of the Jews had been born. And so he asked that all 2 year old baby boys and younger were murdered as a way to thwart someone stealing his reign.

That night in Bethlehem, Jesus was born into chaos. The chaos of a world that it would take the preaching and teaching of Jesus to remind us how broken we really are in the mess of the world. Humanity reveled in this kind of brokenness that we still don't fully understand. Many of us think we've got it all together. We think that because we know who God is and we come to church on Sunday mornings that we don't have to worry about it.

We've got that peace. Friends. It's deeper than just showing up on Sunday mornings for an hour. The story of God's peace doesn't end in the manger, it begins there. And it's worked out in the world through us.

So we gotta catch back up with Kevin McAllister here in home Alone. There's a powerful moment when he realizes that the piece that he thought he wanted, a quiet house with no one to pick on him. He could eat all the cheese pizza that he wants. It wasn't really the peace that he wanted at all. At first that silence felt like calm.

But over time, he discovered that silence was loneliness. It was emptiness. It was a constant reminder that the last words out of his mouth to his mother were hateful. So one night he goes to Santa's helper to ask for something a little bit deeper. He wants his family back.

Kevin's longing shifts from quiet to connection, from calm to reconciliation.

Excuse me. Yeah, Is he still here? It's really important that I see him. He's getting in his car. I guess if you hurry, you can catch him.

Damn. How long can you get giving Kris Kringle a parking ticket on Christmas Eve? What's next, rabies shots for the Easter Bunny? Yeah, hold on.

Can I talk to you for a minute? Hey, if you make it quick, Santa's got a little get together he's late for. Okay. I know you're not the real Santa Claus. What makes you say that?

Just out of curiosity. I'm old enough to know how it works. All right. But I also know that you worked for him. I'd like you to give him a message.

Shoot. I'm Kevin McAllister, 671 Lincoln Boulevard. Do you need the phone number? That's right. Okay.

This is extremely important. Would you please tell him that instead of presents this year, I just want my family back. No toys. Nothing but Peter, Kate, Buzz, Megan, Minnie and Jeff. And my aunt, my cousins.

And if he has time, my Uncle Frank. Okay. Okay. See what I can do. Thanks.

But hold on a second. My ultimate bless the candy canes homeward boyfriend. That's okay. No, no, no. Don't be silly.

Everybody sees. Santa's got to get something. Here, we'll add your little pl. There'll spoil your dinner. I won't.

Moments like this remind us that we don't fully understand what's best for us. Like Kevin, we may think that peace means escape or silence or getting our own way. But for God, peace means shalom. It's not about giving us what we think we want. It's about giving us what it is that we truly need.

Restored relationships with God, wholeness in our daily lives, and reconciliation with others. God's peace is bigger than our desires. And so when the angel announces that peace had come in the birth of Jesus, it wasn't the promise of quiet nights and easy living. It was the promise that eventually things would be restored. Heaven and earth would be brought together.

Humanity was becoming God's people again. Just as Kevin discovered that being alone and fighting off bad guys was not peaceful, but being reunited with families was peace. In the same way, we discovered that true peace is not the absence of noise, but the presence of Christ.

You think you know, but you don't always know what's best. God does. And in Christ, God gives us the Peace that we need, peace that brings wholeness. The manger sings about what will be completed through the work of the cross. The manger points us forward.

The child that we know is born, and Jesus will grow. He will teach, heal, and ultimately reconcile humanity to God through the cross. In the book of colossians, in chapter one, verse 19 through 20, it says this. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven. By making peace through his blood shed on the cross, the peace that is announced at his birth is fulfilled through his death and his resurrection.

Shalom begins with a newborn cry in the city of Bethlehem, and then it crescendos to an empty tomb in Jerusalem. There's another great scripture that Paul writes about to the church in Ephesus that reminds us of this connection between the peace of the manger at Advent and the reconciliation at the cross. Ephesians 2, 11, 18 says this. Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, which is done in the body by human hands, remember that at the time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, and you were foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away have been brought near to the blood of Christ.

For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its command and its regulations. His purpose was to create in Himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

God's peace came in the form of a perfect baby and then was fulfilled through the cross and the resurrection of Jesus.

As the story of Advent continues in the coming weeks, the story of Home Alone also connects us to the theme of Advent peace. Just as God longed to restore to Himself us, Kevin longed for healed relationships as well, the reconciliation of being with his family again. And the great news is that the movie ends with that restored connection.

Merry Christmas, sweetheart.

Oh, kevin, I'm so sorry.

Where's everybody else? Baby? They couldn't come. They wanted to someone. No, I didn't fall asleep.

In fact, I haven't fooled all of you, did I? You do.

Ah, you're all right. I love you.

Wake up.

It's pretty cool that you didn't burn the place down.

Thanks, Buzz.

It's pretty cool that you didn't burn the place down. Brotherly love, if you've ever heard it right.

The world says that peace is quiet. It's control or escape. God's shalom is reconciliation, restored relationships and wholeness. Just as Kevin's story only finds resolution when his family returns and all things are restored. Our story only finds true peace when God comes to us in Christ reconciling heaven and Earth Church.

No matter what you've heard, peace is not neat. It's not tidy. But it is healing. And healing takes honesty and courage. It takes repentance and recognition that we have a responsibility to work on righting wrongs.

If our true peace lies in reconciliation, then Advent invites us to ask, where do I need to be made whole? Where are places that I can work to make others whole?

Where do you need peace this Advent season? Do you need peace with God? Maybe you've carried guilt or shame that Christ is ready to take away from you. Do you need peace with others? Maybe a relationship that you've dealt with for years has been strained by silence, distance or old wounds.

Do you need peace with yourself? Maybe you feel restless, pulled apart, or you yourself are longing for wholeness. Friends, the birth of Jesus Christ during Advent is God's invitation for us. Come home, be reconciled, receive peace, and then live Shalom. This Advent and always.

May we be people who don't settle for calm. May each of us receive Christ Shalom, the peace that restores us, that reunites us and makes all things new. Church let's pray.