Advent 1
30 November 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
THE PEACE IN WILD THINGS
Isaiah 40:1-11. Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13. Philippians 4.4-7. John 14.27
When you hear the word “Peace” what images enter your mind? Do you hear the voice of a contestant at the Miss America pageant telling us what she wants more than anything else is “world peace”? Maybe you envision a weekend in your house . . . without small children. Or you see children playing safely in the neighborhood without fear of harm. Do you imagine a world without war? Or a country without blue and red states? A country where civility and kindness trumps chaos and cruelty?
Many of our thoughts regarding peace likely have to do with absence – the absence of conflict, the absence of noise, the absence of violence, the absence of war, the absence of political animosity.
The Bible, as it often does, opens our eyes to a vision larger than our provincial understandings. It is no different with the biblical vision of peace. Instead of absence, the Bible says peace is fullness. You know the Hebrew word: Shalom. It means wholeness, salvation, healing, righteousness, peace. The biblical vision of peace is certainly one without war and violence and conflict. But the biblical vision fills the void with joy and love, justice and forgiveness and all kinds of human flourishing.
The poet of today’s psalm called us into worship singing: God will speak peace to God’s faithful people and will give what is good. Forgiving our iniquity and pardoning our sin. Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet. Righteousness and peace will kiss each other. God’s peace comes with a faith strong enough to trust that God has come to live among us, and a heart courageous enough to believe that the kingdom of God is breaking into our world.
You and I are not going to find a peace that solves all of our problems. We are not going to have perfect friends or a perfect family or a perfect church. The peace God offers is a different understanding of peace – not peace as a warm fuzzy feeling, but peace as something deeper – the kind of peace that feels like grace, like being held in the everlasting arms.
You may hear someone who’s going through a hard time say, or we may say it ourselves: “You know, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas.” If you’ve experienced a major loss this year – the death of a loved one, a broken relationship, the end of a job, the dashing of a dream – then Christmas may just seem like another source of sorrow. If so, I hope you will join us in this room Wednesday evening for a Blue Christmas service where we can sit in the presence of a God who knows our deepest sorrow, a God who became a human being acquainted with great sorrow.
It’s strange that we’ve turned Christmas into such a party where we feel sorrow has no place. But from the start, Christmas has not been parties and lights. Christmas has been for hurting people. Christmas is not about pretending to be happy. Christmas is God bringing the presence of Christ into the midst of our pain.
A shaky legend has it that in the 16th century, after Martin Luther had inadvertently begun
the Reformation, been found guilty of heresy, been excommunicated from the church, and learned that his enemies were trying to kill him, he understandably went through a struggle with depression. One Christmas Eve Luther went for a walk to talk with God about his life. Luther was in the middle of the forest and a long list of complaints when he saw a small evergreen. Through the pine needles, the stars twinkling in the dark night made it appear that the tree was decorated with lights. The scene reminded Luther of the stars above Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth. According to this questionable yet teachable legend, Luther was so taken by this sign of God’s peace that he cut the small fir tree down and set it up in his living room for his children to see. He put tiny candles on the tree making it an incredible fire hazard! but a wonderful symbol of God’s peace that comes in the midst of darkness.
God comes to spend Christmas with us and to offer the gift of healing peace. When we gather for Christmas dinner and there is an empty chair at the table, God comes among us and whispers peace. When we experience an emptiness that cannot be fully explained, God comes among us and wraps us in arms of peace. When life hasn’t turned out like we thought it would, God comes among us and speaks peace.
Paul wrote about this peace from a prison cell of all places! He said to the Philippians: Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone for the Lord is near – near Paul, near those Christians in their little church, near us all. And then he says the words which are themselves the gift of peace: Do not get tied in anxious knots about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.
Perhaps our requests today are about our fears, our anxieties, our worries – about ourselves, about those we love, about our lost and beloved nation. Give them voice in the presence of God. Then experience the blessing: The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds, will stand guard over your anxious soul, in Christ Jesus.
Sometimes our hearts and minds need guarding. Paul says the peace of God that passes all understanding will stand guard. It is the peace deeper than those haunting feelings that take over our anxious hearts, deeper than the racing thoughts of our scattered minds. Anne Lamott says her mind is often a bad neighborhood she doesn’t want to enter alone. We know what she means, don’t we?
The good news of Christmas is that you don’t enter anywhere alone. Christ goes there with you. Christ sits there beside you at the table. Christ walks with you along the streets. And the word he offers is “Peace”. Peace that is the divine presence.
It is the peace Jesus was talking about in those last words to his disciples: Peace I leave with you, he said, my peace I give to you; not as the world gives but as I give. Let not your hearts be troubled. Neither let them be afraid.
The world around you will offer forms of peace that are fleeting and superficial, and sell them to you for a price! But Jesus offers a deeper peace – the peace of His presence to hold us amidst the sorrow in our lives. I pray this day that you may experience some measure of that peace. He is with us, you know, and he will bring peace, he will not desert us.
Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry found the gift of God’s peace outdoors. In one of his most beloved poems, “The Peace of Wild Things” he writes:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where
the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and
the great heron feeds.
I come into the presence of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.1
This active prayerful path to peace begins where the wild things are: inside our own skin, with your real self not your idealized self.
The marvelous writer Ann Voskamp writes of this courageous path inside asking: Who isn’t haunted by all kinds of inner thoughts that you don’t want anyone to know? Who isn’t undone by all kinds of failures that you’d never want on display? And then she says (get this please!): The pieces of us that we try to keep burying is what keeps burying our peace . . . Whatever you can’t stand about yourself Jesus stands closest to kiss that place with grace, and you can feel it come over you – that peace that passes all understanding.2
The Christ of Bethlehem who knows everything about you – all the inner thoughts that haunt you, all the failures that embarrass you and threaten to undo you, all the pieces you try to keep buried – Christ is here in this very room waiting to be born anew in your heart, seeking to unearth the peace that is yours: the peace of forgiveness, the peace of a fresh start, the peace of His presence. In the beautiful words of Isaiah: Like a shepherd he will feed you. He will gather you like a lamb in his arms. He will carry you and gently lead you in the ways of peace.
It is his free gift to you this day. You can see its light on the Advent Wreath where, in Voskamp’s words: “the Peace candle burns with a red hot love, (a love) that brands (you) as God’s very own, and all that doesn’t matter burns away.”3
Would you rest in the silence of God’s peace and let the Spirit begin to melt away your fear and bring calm into the wildest places of your heart?
May the incomprehensible peace of Christ be with you this Advent season.
______________________________
1. Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”, Collected Poems, North Point Press, 1985, 69
2. Ann Voskamp Instagram, 13 December 2018
3. Ann Voskamp blog, 28 December 2019