Unsettling Advent 2025, Day 19
“Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” (Luke 24:36)
Earlier this week, we woke up to the news that soldiers had returned to our streets en masse. For a few weeks there it seemed like we might have time to catch a breath before the next attack — go to our old haunts with less fear, take a minute to to hold each other, sleep longer a few mornings without setting the alarm for patrol.
But these thieves of people who never wait for the night, they are back. Only to terrorize. Only to hurt. Once again we and our neighbors are taken, forced into hiding, and called into action, to cry out to all that the kidnappers are here.
Advent is a time of waiting for miracles, and we feel the need of one. I imagine Jesus’s mother walking past soldiers on the street looking for a place to stay, and wonder what she prayed for. I remember the disciples hiding from soldiers in an Upper Room after watching them do their worst, and marvel that they could stand to hear it when Jesus told them, “Peace.”
Peace be with you. Somehow a promise that when every force of power and violence seeks to upend your peace, there is a place inside us that they can’t touch. A peace between us they have no power to break, even as they try to physically separate us from each other and from justice. This peace, I know, I know, I keep telling myself I know, is the true power, that compels us towards one another in times of crisis and is our last refuge when forced to face the principalities that seek to convince us of our own inhumanity.
This morning, it’s hard to trust that peace. The violence arrayed against it seems so much. But then again, it always has. Jesus didn’t say “peace” because the disciples were safe or because the soldiers went away, but precisely because they were waiting outside and yet peace was still possible. A world where Herod attacks babies, and yet a baby can be born and saved from harm by those who cared enough to warn him.
Peace be with you. Peace around you. Peace within you. And when it feels the hardest to find, let us hold it out to one another.
Rev. Hannah Kardon serves as pastor of United Church of Rogers Park, a United Methodist congregation in Chicago. In October, she was violently arrested during a protest outside an ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview.