Where is the Peace of Christmas?
By Anthony Lee

It is Christmas again and the words of the carol
“Hark the herald angels sing” are resonating in
my ears. The words “Peace on earth and mercy mild”
are troubling. Where is the peace? How quickly we
forget the Mumbai terrorist attack that claimed
173 lives. The carol goes on with
“Joyful, all ye nations rise” but where is the
joy in the worse economic downturn since the 1930s?
Our children will want the latest toys from the
big department stores but many of us will have
to invent ways to explain to them why they can’t
have their toys. Along with “Hark the herald angels sing”,
we will probably sing the same old Christmas carols
and have Christmas dinner (may be with less of our
favourites). How do we deal with all these
contradictions? Peace when there are conflicts?
Joy when all we hear are economic dooms and glooms.

The Mumbai attack was supposed to have been
perpetrated by Muslim extremists. Perhaps
John Lennon is right and we should get rid
of religion. Perhaps we should ditch
The Lord’s prayer in favour of an acknowledgement
of the ancestors of our indigenous people as the
Greens have suggested. What then do we do with
baby Jesus? What then do we do with Christmas?
Perhaps we can keep the holidays. The shopping
is always good even if we can’t afford it!
However ditching religions will not necessarily
mean that our problems will go away. The human
condition, the very thing that religions try to
solve is still there. We still have to be content
with non-religious violence and we still have the
same greed which led to the demise of the stock
market. Presumably those who objected to
religious-based solutions would argue that we
need secular solutions. Unfortunately they too have
failed. The two greatest secular ideologies,
communism and capitalism have brought us to dead ends.
Where then do we go?

The contradiction between the Christmas story
and the real world is troubling but has the
Christmas story really failed mankind or is the
problem with us? Do we even understand the
Christmas story when the Christian message
is under attack from both the popular media
and scientists? Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”
challenges the authenticity of the Christian Faith.
In “The God Delusion”, the British biologist
Richard Dawkins attacks the belief in a
supernatural creator by suggesting that the
belief in a personal god is a delusion. The
popular media is obsessed with the controversial
aspects of Christianity such as televangelists,
the Rapture, Revelations and the End Times.
E O Wilson, the two-time winner of the Pulitzer
Prize, singles out the Christian belief in the
End Times as being an obstacle to the salvation
of our planet’s fragile eco-system. But, the
Christmas story is much bigger than either
televangelists or the End Times. At the heart
of the Christmas story is God’s desire to restore
a broken relationship. God so loves us that he
willingly sends His Son into our world to experience
our deepest despair and to restore the broken
relationship. This despair came about because
of the breaking of that very first relationship
between us and God. God’s solution does not only
mend our relationship with him but it should also
mean the restoration of all human relationships –
truly there would be peace on earth just like the
words of the carol.

You say all these sound very ideal but we
still live in a broken world? And yet history
tells us that whenever men and women take
seriously the true Christmas message, not only
are relationships restored but we see social reforms.
William Wilberforce was an evangelical Christian
and a British politician who struggled for decades
(1797-1833) to end the slave trade to abolish
slavery across the British Empire. One of
Wilberforce’s influences was none other then
John Newton, the author of the hymn ”Amazing Grace”.
One cannot but be amazed by the power of the love
that can turn Newton, a former slave-ship captain
into an Evangelical Anglican clergyman and an
Abolitionist. If injustice like slavery is part
and parcel of a broken world then social reforms
should be part and parcel of a restored world
where there is true justice. Closer to our time
we have Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister
who sought to end racial segregation and
discrimination through non-violent means.
King’s legacy lives on today and who could have
imagined that within four decades of his
assassination we would see the first
black president of the United States?
In King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech,
he said that “… we will not be satisfied
until justice rolls down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty stream”.
He also said “I have a dream that one day
every valley shall be exalted, and every hill
and mountain shall be made low, the rough
places will be made plain, and the crooked
places will be made straight; ‘and the glory
of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh
shall see it together.’ ” These two passages
came from the Old Testament and they describe
God’s justice when we are in a right relationship
with him. The second passage also appears in the
Luke’s Gospel. This is the same Gospel where we
find the images of the manger, the three wise men
and baby Jesus. If these images appear as shining
lights outside our houses then surely justice
must roll down like waters for all and this
would include our indigenous Australians, our
refugees and all those disadvantaged in our
society. Now that is the true message of Christmas
and truly we can sing “Hark the herald angels sing”.