Trying to find a way toward peace in our time

MICHELE MARR

One year in the late 1970s my mother gave me a Christmas mug

illustrated by the then astonishingly popular cartoonist B. Kliban,

famous for his quirky and endearing renderings of cats. I still own

the mug and every Christmas I visit it again.

Front and back, the mug portrays a rather enormous cat with a

wild, eager look gazing into an open box, which contains an equally

large pizza. A green ribbon and bow tagged “Kitty” lay on the floor

nearby.

The side of the mug bears the inscription, “Pizza on Earth.”

At the time my mother gave it to me, with the Vietnam War scarcely

behind and the Cold War still encompassing us, I thought it was a

hilarious, sardonic commentary -- like the later bumper sticker,

“Visualize whirled peas” -- about the well-proven unlikelihood of

peace on Earth.

I’m not as cynical now as I was in the 1970s, yet peace on Earth

is no more evident. Many families celebrated Christmas this year with

loved ones fighting in Iraq. In the week before Christmas newspapers’

front-page headlines spoke of hostilities, violence and death.

Days before Christmas the deadliest attack on a U.S. military base

since the war began nearly two years ago occurred in Mosul. Not quite

the marking of a merry Christmas -- or a happy new year.

“So where is this ‘peace of Earth, goodwill toward men’ stuff?

When’s it going to happen?” more than one person has wisecracked to

me. Some ask more earnestly.

Reasonable questions. After all, the prophet Isaiah, who said

there would come a day when men would “beat their swords into

plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks [and not] learn war

any more,” also said the Christ, whose birth Christmas commemorates,

would be called the Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 2:4; Isaiah 9:6)

Yet Jesus had also warned, “Do not think that I came to bring

peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have

come ‘to alienate a man from his father, a daughter from her mother,

and a daughter-in-law from her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes will

be those of his own household.... ‘“ (Matthew 10:34)

So what about this “peace of Earth, goodwill toward men” stuff?

When is it going to happen? I asked several pastors in Huntington

Beach for help.

“God implemented the supreme peace initiative of the ages in

sending his only son Jesus as the perfect peace offering,” Bill

Crouch, pastor of Fountain Spring Church, said. “Yet ... this Messiah

of peace must be received individually at a deeply personal level

before his peaceful fragrance is released in our lives.”

Alyn Loyd, associate pastor at Calvary Chapel Huntington Beach,

also spoke of peace with God through Jesus Christ as a prerequisite

to what we call “world peace.”

He quoted from 2 Corinthians 5:18: “All this is done by God, who

through Christ changed us from enemies into his friends and gave us

the task of making others his friends also.”

Peace is product of a decision, said Bill Welsh, senior pastor at

Calvary Chapel. It is “a condition of a heart that trusts God in the

midst of life’s greatest battles and storms,” something that as a

pastor, he said, he has the privilege to observe from a “ringside

seat” in men, women and children during some of the toughest moments

in their lives.

Jeff Ludington, pastor of Emerge Ministries for college students

and young adults at Christ Presbyterian Church, pointed out that

Scripture speaks of two kinds of peace. One, he said, is the sort we

typically think about, a world without hostility, war, hunger or

disease.

The other is the peace of our reconciliation with God, the peace

Jesus spoke of when he said, “Peace I leave with you,” and about

which Paul wrote: “He Himself is our peace.”

God bless you in the new year and give you peace.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.