A man sat in jail. He was there for refusing—on ethical grounds—to pay taxes to his government, the United States government, for what he and others believed to be an immoral war. The president justified the conflict on a transparently bogus claim. Newspapers and churches whipped up a war fever full of racist and jingoistic rhetoric. The Congress quickly approved war with hardly any debate. There were the usual claims to quick and easy victory soon to prove hollow.

A friend came to visit that man in jail. He was also against the war, but had trouble understanding his friend’s decision to defy the government’s authority. “My dear Henry,” he said, “what are you doing in there.” The man behind bars replied, “My dear Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

If you’re heard the story before, you know that the visitor was the great nineteenth century thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The man in the cell was the no-less-gifted Henry David Thoreau. (Both happened to be Unitarian). The year was 1846. The war was with Mexico.

I believe the scene is typical of two ways of looking at the war and peace. It’s very easy to see war as an unfortunate but inevitable part of the human condition to which we can only try to adapt ourselves to. But some do persist in the stubborn, age-old dream of “on earth peace, good will toward men” (and women). Some march for peace, others work to build friendships across battle lines, some, like Thoreau, refuse to pay part or all of their taxes that go toward military spending.

The Daily Show’s host, John Stewart, a few nights ago commented about John Lennon’s famous song, “Imagine.” We have to imagine, he said, because the type of harmonious world John Lennon describes will never happen.

Consider the sobering words of German Eco-Feminist Christina Thürmer-Rohr: “Everyone speaks of peace,” she writes, “no one knows what peace is. We know at best a poisoned peace. No one has lived on an earth without weapons, without war and the threat of war on a large and small scale.”[1]

Stephen Mitchell, in the introduction to his book, The Gospel According to Jesus says that while this dream of an earthly utopia has inspired many influential people through history, it might be viewed as a type of insanity that doesn’t recognize the real world in which we live.

We have never seen a world at peace. This Christmas, there are 35 wars, give or take a few, claiming the lives of combatants and civilians, adults and children, each of them precious human beings. Much of our news is devoted to the current warfare the US, its partners, and its corporate mercenaries are conducting in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the vast majority of modern wars are not fought between countries but within them by religious, ethnic, or ideological factions. About 90 percent of casualties in modern wars are civilians. This astounding fact is due to such factors as the terrible destructive power of modern weapons, the need for factions to control the general population, and lack of respect for human rights. And, contrary to its rhetoric on human rights, the US tends to give the highest amounts of foreign aid to governments with the poorest human rights records. Columbia and Israel are two striking examples.

I’m glad our traditional reading this morning, from Luke, chapter 2, was read by Kristi, a woman. At least one biblical scholar has speculated that the real author of the Gospel According to Luke was not Luke the physician, but an anonymous woman. I like to think of this Christmas message of peace as coming from the pen of a woman. I have a hard time believing that if women ran the world, or at least their even share of it, that we would see the same type of warfare and bloodshed this world currently suffers.

Now before I comment on the miraculous nature of this passage, I caution you that the gospels were not written as objective histories. Instead, they are works of spirituality and theology, stories that dramatize the experience that people felt in the company of a radical Jewish teacher named Yeshua ben Miriam, known to us as Jesus, and his earliest followers. Mark, the first gospel to be written, contains no account of Jesus’ birth. Matthew’s account has almost nothing in common with Luke’s, except that a child named Jesus was born in Bethlehem to a couple named Mary and Joseph. What’s more, Luke apparently gets his facts mixed up, when he dates the birth, earlier in chapter two, to the reign of a governor who ruled ten or twelve years after Jesus was born.

The question here is not whether angels literally came down from heaven to proclaim Jesus birth, but rather what insight the author was trying to convey.

One thing many readers have been struck by over the years is that the angels announcing the birth didn’t go to Caesar in Rome, nor to the priests in the Temple in Jerusalem, but instead to humble working men, “shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night.” The author seems to be amplifying his or her ideas, placed in the mouth of Mary praising God in the previous chapter:

51 "He has done mighty deeds with His arm; He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart. 52 "He has brought down rulers from their thrones, And has exalted those who were humble. 53 "he has filled the hungry with good things; And sent away the rich empty-handed.

Perhaps Matthew more accurately pictured the savage world in which we live when he included in his account of Jesus’ birth a story, which may or may not have reflected an historical event, of King Herod ordering the deaths of baby boys in an attempt to snuff out the new messiah who threatened his authority. This is sometimes referred to as “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” How well the words quotes from the prophet Jeremiah capture the torment of every parent who has lost a child to violence:

In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. (2:18)

Some scholars identify the Rama mentioned in that text to the present-day Ramalah, the Palestinian town that has had its share of weeping mothers. Even as Rachel, the Jewish matriarch weeps for her slain children, so must Hagar, by tradition the mother of Moslems, weep for hers.

And they are far from alone. In a piece in The Washington Post in 1996, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu cites a report presented to the UN that over the last decade two million children had died as a result of the world’s wars. As a comparison, two million is three times the number of battlefield deaths the US military has suffered in all conflicts going back to 1776. Tutu calls on the priests of all the world’s religions to support such humane measures as stopping the shipping of arms to war zones, ending the growing practice of drafting children, and making companies that profit from the sale of land mines to pay for education for the world’s children about the 110 million landmines that desecrate our planet, all of which he considers realistic goals on the way toward greater peace.

After all, we still hope, that, one way or another, this wonderful phrase spoken by the angels to the shepherds will come true, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” It’s a very old dream. The King James Version of the Bible contains the word “peace” an impressive 400 times.

We read that when the shepherds first encounter the messenger angel, they are, in that phrase so familiar from Christmas pageants, “sore afraid.” They quickly learn that they have no need for fear, as the message is of “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”

I’m somewhat dissatisfied with the common translation of that verse. In Greek, it begins, Doxa en hupsistos Theo, literally, “Glory in the highest God.” The Greek preposition en is most often translated in the New Testament as “in,” but it can also be rendered “with” or “by,” as well as “to.” In an alternate translation, the angel says, “Glory with God in the highest heaven.” To me, this rendering implies that God is not some heavenly potentate that craves the praise of angels or people, but rather an experience of glory available even on this troubled planet, that makes the earthly night as bright as heaven. A reader of the original Greek text would recognize that the word for “heaven” in the next verse, ouranos, is also the name of Greek god of the sky. Likewise, the word for “earth,” in the phrase, “on earth peace” is ge, who is the earth goddess otherwise known as Gaia, the name adopted by contemporary science for the earth viewed as a living whole.

As the shepherds receive the message of glory in heaven and peace on earth, they also hear of “good will to men.” The Greek is eudokia en anthropois. Once again, the traditional translation is not the only one possible. The word, eudokia, means, literally, “good desire.” Luke only uses the word one other time in the gospel. In chapter 10, verse 21, we read, “In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good [eudokia] in thy sight.

Here we have the same message once again that we encountered in Mary’s words and in the angel’s visit to the shepherds: The good news of spiritual glory and peace is open to the common person before the powerful and self-important. By combining all opposites in the unity of inner peace, earth and sky, male and female, countryman and foreigner, gay and straight we discover ourselves a part of the mystic whole of creation.

All the world’s great religious traditions teach ways to peace within—prayer, meditation, chanting, sacred dance, and many more. Many times powerful moments occur quite spontaneously to people who are sensitive to them, moments when we are filled with compassion for friend and enemy, recognize beauty around us and within us.

In such moments of inward peace in heart and mind, we can touch the limitless abundance of God, the Higher Self, Spirit of Life, Goddess, as you will.

For all the warrior-god past of the ancient Hebrew Yahweh, there for millennia been people in all the great Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who have gone beyond tribal boundaries, who have been universalists in the most universal sense, and have fallen in love with the dream of greater peace within us, among us, between us.

Never has there been a time when developing such a universalist consciousness has been more vital. The awesome powers of our weaponry threaten life on earth itself. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, in our contemporary reading, a thoughtful observer of our world will discover how a stone of silence lies over the mouths of the great teachers of peace: Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse, and others. How often their persons are venerated and their words ignored!

One thing is certainly true. There will never be a peaceful world without it also being a just world. Until everyone, simply by virtue of being human, is guaranteed the basics of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine there will be no peace. In 2001, the world’s total of goods and services provided was equivalent to 32 trillion US dollars. If evenly divided between every adult and child in the world, each person would receive about $5,000 a year. The reality of the world today is that that amount is trifling to many in the richest countries, while to the two billion poorest $5,000 would seem an unbelievably huge sum. In a world in which such extremes are allowed to go largely unaddressed, there can never be peace.

The only real hope of this dream becoming a reality is a huge leap in human consciousness, as dramatic as the scientific and technological revolutions of the last century.

Till then, each of us, if we seek, can find our own peace. And after all, as many teachers have told us, if we don’t find what we need within, we’ll never find it without.

My warmest blessings to you and yours this holiday season. I wish for you glory, peace, and good will, now and in the year to come!