One of "Over The Rhine’s" Christmas albums is "Blood Oranges In The Snow." One of the songs on that album is "Another Christmas" part of it goes:
I hope that we can still believe
The Christ child holds a gift for us
Are we able to receive
Peace on earth this Christmas
That is not a new line. "Peace on earth" is a line most of us have been living with all our lives. I cannot remember a time in when I didn’t hear it at Christmas time.
“Peace, Mike, Peace” is what my heart keep's repeating. It is not about justice, or vengeance, it is not about proving who is right or wrong. It is not about us and them. It's not about us winning. The point of this phrase is the mission that God had in coming to earth - peace.
Not just peace for my soul. It was and is about peace on earth. Anyone following this Jesus whose birth is heralded in this angel’s song should be all about peace.
This is not a declaration of a God reaching for some Plan B or C. The Old Testament was all about this peace; shalom is the word that the Jewish people used. Shalom was and is God’s intention in the law given. It was what leader were called to achieve. It's what the prophets critiqued because of the lack of shalom.
Jeremiah 29:7 declares
...seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. [NIV]
All who claim to follow the baby born when the angels sang need to find this priority of peace. God’s people, everywhere, are to seek shalom. It is the mark of being God’s holy nation, a people set apart, different, in all the right ways, from the other nations.
We do not blend in to the world’s response of seeking to be proven right, or of controling and avenging all who would come against us.
We are to be about the ministry of reconciliation that God told us we would be about. Just as we are connected to God himself through that same ministry of his peacemaking.
On World Peace Day 2026, peace is unravelling all over the world. Graceless speeches and tweets divide us, personally and as nations. We need to invest all that we have in this Gospel priority and commit to being peacemakers with renewed courage, and hope, and love, and all the grace that is intrinsic to the incarnation, that is so lacking in our current political climate.
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