大象传媒

Good Morning.聽 Yesterday in churches across the world advent candles will have been lit as part of worship on the Second Sunday of Advent. The candle on this Second Sunday traditionally represents the prophets. However it also has a secondary symbolism, it is a candle for peace.

Peace is a challenging idea, not least with a backdrop of armed conflict in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. It is a problematic ideal in a world where schools girls kidnapped by extremists eight months ago have still not been released. Peace can so easily be relegated to utopian optimism when there is racial conflict and rioting on city streets in the United States.

Any peace that is worth having is not an easy peace achieved by papering over cracks or conveniently ignoring profound disagreement. Nor is it an uneasy peace, simply the spaces punctuating seasons of conflict. Peace is certainly never the result of imposition, subjugation or suppression.

Lasting peace, meaningful peace, is indissolubly linked with justice and with human flourishing.聽 Where neither justice nor human flourishing is to be found there can be no peace.

In the season of Advent, then, we express our yearning for peace, we acknowledge that we have yet farther to travel in the pursuit of peace, but perhaps most importantly of all we pray for peace.

Almighty God,
from whom all thought of truth and peace proceed:
kindle, we pray, in the hearts of all, the true love of peace
and guide with your pure and peaceable wisdom
those who take counsel for the nations of the earth
that in tranquillity your kingdom may go forward,
till the earth be filled with the knowledge of your love;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.