Peace in a World Without Peace

Second Sunday of Advent, Year A
Sermon for December 7, 2025

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. I’m going to jump right into it this morning, start us off with a little story. I had trouble writing this sermon this last week for a few reasons, but chief among them was that on Thursday afternoon, I went to the emergency room, not as a chaplain or as a priest visiting one of you lovely people, but as a patient. This is a surprise to almost all of you, I think maybe two or three people here know this, so I’m trying to get this out of the way early in the sermon so that I myself am not the focus by the end.

My watch had been telling me for a few weeks now that I had “possible hypertension,” which is high blood pressure, and as you may know, there are a few causes for that... diet, exercise, anxiety, children, puppies, stressful work situations, parishioners... and also genetics. I thought I could control some of those, hence the “no sugar November” I was on last month, hence my elimination of all caffeine from my diet since Lent last year. But eventually, my dad, who is a retired doctor and had high blood pressure himself, well he convinced me to take my own blood pressure this last Tuesday. It was... high... concerningly high. I called our lovely medical center here in town and they asked me a few questions about other symptoms, to which I answered, yes, I’ve experienced literally all of those in the last year. Headaches, blurred vision, shortness of breath, chest pains... yes, x4. Instead of scheduling a primary care physician, then, they immediately urged me to go straight to the emergency room with signs of a possible heart attack. This was Wednesday. After a fitful night of anxiety-packed sleep and after defeating the stubbornness you might have come to expect in your 41-year-old rector – I had work to do Thursday – after that, I did eventually go to the ER at noon. They were concerned, they kept me there for a few hours, some of which I don’t remember thanks to all the drugs they gave me. They let me go home for dinner.

Now, I’m sharing that this morning as part of this sermon, not just as a life update. I know many of you also deal with high blood pressure; I’ve had conversations with many of you over the last year about medications you’re on. If it’s not high blood pressure, it’s something else, you all, we all have health concerns. Well, now I’m just joining you in solidarity. What this week did not provide for me though was anything remotely resembling the theme of our second Sunday in Advent, the theme Mary and Ray talked about to start our service, the theme of Peace. Peace has been extremely hard to come by for me this week: I have been worried about my own health, about my family, about my ability to do this priest thing well enough this month, let alone for the next thirty years. Of course, as Henri Nouwen says, “there is a mysterious link between our brokenness and our ability to give to and care for each other.” And so today, I confess, with vulnerability, my brokenness, that peace has been difficult for me this week, this year.

Perhaps it has been for you too this year. Peace is a word with some mixed connotations these days. If you follow the news, as I talked about with some of you earlier this week, you may have seen a new “peace prize” was just presented. I promise I won’t make this sermon partisan, and I hesitate to dip into politics at all given my current state of hypertension... but yes, President Trump this week was presented with the first ever FIFA Peace Prize, given to him by perhaps the most corrupt international body there is, the one in charge of next year’s soccer World Cup. Having lost out on the Nobel he somehow thinks he deserves, our President put a shiny medal around his own neck and preened for the cameras on Friday. He also put his own name on the United States Institute of Peace building in Washington D.C., a building his administration illegally seized in February, before it began bombing civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. A nongovernmental nonprofit is now operating out of the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace Building. Peace.

Lest ye Democrats feel too high and mighty now, I should also point out that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize only three months into his first term in office, and then his administration dropped more bombs on foreign countries than the previous six administrations combined... and it oversaw 563 drone strikes across the world, ten times the number under the George W. Bush administration. International war and conflict was a hallmark of the Obama presidency, no matter how you choose to look at it. You may have reasons for that, for war; those reasons do not matter to the families of the dead. But again, this is not a partisan sermon, I am no politician, this is not about which side, red or blue, has more blood on its hands. This is a sermon about peace. This week, it is about peace. ...Feeling peaceful yet? Some of you probably want to fight me. Let’s continue.

So maybe we should not look to the Presidents for peace at all, maybe we should not look at our own lives, as unpeaceful as they often seem, as real and gritty and difficult as they are, maybe peace is not available to us often enough. Maybe, instead, we can just look to the gospel. That’s why you’re here, right? Maybe here is where we will find the Prince of Peace today. Wait... Did anyone listen to the gospel? “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near!” “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees! Every tree that does not bear fruit will be thrown into the fire.” “The winnowing fork is in his hand; the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” ...Hold on, do we have the right gospel? Surely not, surely we are not reading Matt. 3 on the week of Peace. This feels like the week of Judgment.

Thank God the gospel is not a textbook nor a rulebook. Thank God it is the story of the good news of God’s loving relationship with creation, of the coming of Jesus to earth.

Today’s gospel may feel very “fire and brimstone,” it may feel like this is a text of judgment. But judgment, friends... judgment is what we long for. This is an unpopular thing to say in the Episcopal Church, at least without some serious unpacking, because we do love radical love and radical welcome, and because judgment is what has gotten the church into so much trouble, for centuries. Judgment is what leads people to believe that if they are not white, straight, cisgendered, or Baptist now, it seems, then they are out of line with American Christian culture and values, they have no place in the kingdom of God. Judgment is what leads those in dominant classes to wrongly and sinfully say that they are the wheat and others are the chaff. Those “others,” they believe, will be burned with unquenchable fire unless they change, and soon. Judgment, judgment is what has pushed so many people away from God, from the love of Christ, from the presence of the Holy Spirit, from belonging in the church. We, here at Epiphany, we strive to be welcoming, not judgmental; we try to be loving, not judgmental. How dare we talk about judgment then, how dare I argue that judgment is what we long for, this morning?

You may have seen this turn coming, but friends, what we long for is judgment only by one who is truly fair and righteous, and there is no one more righteous than Jesus Christ. Isaiah prophesied about his coming in our Old Testament reading this morning: A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse, he shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear, like we might, but with righteousness, he shall judge. And after that judgment? The wolf shall live with the lamb, the calf and the lion and little children all together. After his judgment, we have peace, true peace. It is not ours to judge, it is God’s, and thank God for that! Just by giving up that desire, that need to judge those around us, we begin to make the world a more peaceful place. Imagine if we left the judging to God. It is an immense relief to know that judgment belongs to the all-knowing, ever-loving, creating God of the universe and not to us. That relief, too, can lead to peace.

You may also read this and say, well, Jesus came, and the world is certainly not peaceful. Not yet, no. There’s work still to do. But the judgment Jesus did bring through his life and death and resurrection, it is like the winnowing fork. The farmer takes his fork and separates the wheat from the chaff: the good part of the plant can stay and that dead husk which needs to go will go, incinerated and destroyed. Jesus – in the end, but now in our lives today too – he offers us that good and holy judgment that burns away our chaff, our faults and our mistakes, the way we hurt ourselves and one another, and helps us keep all our good, the wheat that was intended and planted and grown, that which is able and ready to love. The judgment of Jesus is a refining fire for each of us, then, and that judgment, that refinement, it is needed so that we can continue to bear good fruit. That judgment, we believe, will be there in the end as well, burning off all that isn’t needed, all that is wrong, so that what is left will be good and beautiful, as God always intended.

It was frightening, yes, to spend time sedated in the ER this week. The new medications have played with my health since then too; I’ll probably sit out on brunch today... I am struggling with stamina and breath even now. But thank God for doctors who know how to treat our illnesses; thank God for doctors who have the expertise to know which medications will make us well again. There is an easy comparison here for us this morning with the separation of wheat and chaff: Thank God for the Great Physician who knows us and loves us and can bring good and right judgment on that which needs to be cured in our own lives, cured so we can live full and long lives of health and of abundant, radical love, so that we can spend our time loving, building the kingdom of God.

If there is one opportunity we have for peace in this life, it comes not through our political leaders or even through our own good doctors, I must admit. (They are all fighting an uphill, losing battle, if you remember the sermon about death and hope from last week.) But our opportunity for peace? Peace comes through choosing to rest fully in the arms of the Prince of Peace, the one who will baptize us and transform with the Holy Spirit and with a refining fire, knowing that in his righteousness, we will be cared for well, we will be treated well, and we will be shown the way to life.

His peace, Christ’s peace is the peace we wait for, the peace we always long for, the peace I invite you to enjoy today, on this morning of the second Sunday of Advent, and every day, always with the knowledge that Christmas, and Jesus, is coming soon.

Amen.