Second Advent Sunday

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Today is the second Sunday of Advent; the Sunday to reflect on Peace. I thought about how little peace I actually feel during the Advent/Christmas season. In the ministry, December is anything but peaceful: there are special services to plan, the Lottie Moon Christmas offering (for the CP of the SBC), the increased awareness of other people's needs, shopping lists (one stressor I would love to eliminate from my life altogether!), Christmas parties, and all manner of special celebrations to mark the holiday season, and to add fuel to the fire, our congregation will begin the process of searching for new staff replacements. To be sure, this Advent has been anything but peaceful for me.

I also thought about how little peace there is in the world as a whole. I say "little" because I don't think the world is completely void of peace. After all, there are those moments when one sees the sun set and watches the horizon crack with all the colors of nature's pallet; those moments seem to hold the rawest seeds of peace. But there is only a "little" peace. We are living twenty-one centuries after Christ, yet we still blow each other up, gun each other down, stab one another, rape one another, victimize one another, and dehumanize one another. There is little peace in the world.

So if there is such little peace in the lightening quick pace of my life, and so little peace in the lives of the human collective, then why reflect on the whole notion at all? Wouldn't that depress us more?

But then I think about the world prior to the first Advent of the Christ. Perhaps it was much like it is now, seemingly void of peace, chaos and war breaking out among quasi-civilized people, anger and wrath boiling over the cups of the righteous. They had little peace to reflect on but so much peace to hope for in the future. Maybe that's it. Perhaps rather than reflecting on the lack of peace in my life and this world, maybe this second Sunday of Advent is meant to call my attention forward, into the flickering flame of the future, that I may realize that peace, perfect peace, rests ahead of me in the unfulfilled, in the ever-coming Christ.
CPT

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