Prince of Peace

While booze has, for thousands of years now, been the most socially acceptable form of self-medication, its many health detriments have pushed some to seek alternatives: shrooms, weed, pharmaceuticals, kratom, or some other wellness industry offering.

But why not just skip the drugs? What’s so bad about sobriety? In an article in Vox, Rebecca Jennings notes: “The world is really tough. The world has only gotten more anxiety-inducing and more challenging over the past decade or so. People are looking to numb out, they want to medicate their anxiety.”

But Jennings concludes with some startling observations about the movement, ones that point well beyond alcohol replacements:

There’s a dream that basically everyone in the world shares. It’s the dream of an alcohol that isn’t quite alcohol but almost is — a substance that will make you feel free and happy and sexy and chatty but also won’t get you addicted, won’t shave years off your life, won’t make you groggy and achy and anxious the next day. It’s the dream of a substance from which taking an entire month off as part of an annual challenge would be laughably absurd because why would anyone ever need a break from it?

Possible Preaching Angle:

If this sounds like the search for utopia, you’d be right. For her part, Jennings is deeply skeptical this utopia is ever possible: “Such a substance could never be more than fantasy because of course human beings would find a way to render it destructive.” But for Christians there is the always available, always effective promises of God (Psa. 23:1-3; Phil. 4:6-7).

In an article in The Atlantic, Ross Andersen raises the question: "Did Humans Ever Live in Peace?"

Archeologists have long had evidence of conflict between small rival groups. And the earliest signs of war have been dated to the dawn of civilization (with the Sumerians and Egyptians). But recent discoveries at Laguardia, Spain pushes proof of our warring inclination to the dawn of agriculture. So how far does war go back in our history?

Because war is, by definition, organized violence. Hieroglyphic inscriptions tell us that more than 5,000 years ago, the first pharaoh conquered chiefdoms up and down the Nile delta to consolidate his power over Egypt. A Sumerian poem suggests that some centuries later, King Gilgamesh fended off a siege at Uruk, the world’s first city. But new findings, at Laguardia and other sites across the planet, now indicate that wars were also occurring at small-scale farming settlements all the way back to the dawn of agriculture, if not before.

For nearly a century, anthropologists have wanted to know how long people have been engaged in organized group violence. It’s not some idle antiquarian inquiry. For many, the question bears on human nature itself, and with ruinous wars ongoing in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, it has become more resonant. If warring among humans began only recently, then we might be able to blame it on changeable circumstances. If, however, some amount of war has been with us since our species’ origins, or earlier in our evolutionary history, it may be difficult to excise it from the human condition.

But Andersen closes his piece with a view of what he thinks is hope:

What separates us most from other species is our cultural plasticity: We are always changing, sometimes even for the better. We have found ways to end blood feuds that implicated hundreds of millions. War may be a long-standing mainstay of human life, an inheritance from our deepest past. But each generation gets to decide whether to keep passing it down.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Andersen's view is common today. It sees humanity as though in constant progress towards perfection. We currently rest at the zenith. His "hope" is for this progress to continue. But a survey of our history reveals that this view is no hope at all. It is simply doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. That is not hope, it is insanity. There is no hope for lasting peace until the Prince of Peace appears (Isa. 9:6-7).

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) wanted to promote happiness and world peace. The brilliant business guru took over Zappos soon after it was founded. Under his leadership, he propelled it from a company on the verge of collapse to a successful online retail enterprise that sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009.

After the publication of his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, he became a workplace-happiness guru. Thousands of business leaders, government officials, and Wall Street analysts flocked to Zappos’s downtown Las Vegas headquarters each year to take tours of its fun-filled offices and learn from Mr. Hsieh.

When Hsieh stepped down as CEO of Zappos in August of 2020, he thought he could achieve world peace. He moved to Park City, Utah, and wanted to attract intellectuals and artists with outsize salaries to create a sort of utopia. The blueprint for this model town could then be applied to other cities across the world.

But behind his swift success, Mr. Hsieh had for years struggled privately with social anxiety, autism, and alcohol abuse. Five months before his death, he suffered a breakdown after abusing drugs, in particular a drug that some describe as “spiritual.” He had also developed a fascination with fire. He liked fooling around with it and performing magic tricks. Candles were sometimes perched dangerously on his bedspread, and Mr. Hsieh kept a small fire ring in his bedroom that shot flames into the air without any barrier. Sadly, he died at 46 in November 2020, from injuries sustained in a house fire that was ruled an accident by local authorities.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This tragic tale shows what happens when we work for “happiness” or “world peace” or making a difference in the world without first dealing with our own sin and brokenness.

At a United Nations gathering, delegates from both Ukraine and Russia disagreed fiercely on how the meeting should proceed. But the gathering was not simply about how or when the war should end, but how it should be fought.

Specifically, global delegates were in attendance to work on a treaty regarding Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. More than smart guns or unmanned aerial vehicles, such systems are complex algorithms that use artificial intelligence to identify, select and kill human targets without specific human intervention. The Kargu-2 flying quad-copter is such a weapon, made by Turkish firm STM. Industry analysts believe that similar systems are already in development in China, Russia, and the US.

Proponents of such systems say that they are essential in reducing the body count of conventional warfare, but detractors say that the systems are error-prone, and the efficiency of its operational protocol has the potential for disastrous outcomes. Many antiwar demonstrators call them “killer robots” or “slaughterbots.” The U.N. requires a convention on Certain Conventional Weapons every five years or so to govern the technology of war, but analysts say that the pace of innovation is outracing the body’s ability to keep such technology in check.

Daan Kayser leads the autonomous weapons project for a Dutch group called Pax for Peace. He said, “I believe it’s just a matter of policy at this point, not technology. Any one of a number of countries could have computers killing without a single human anywhere near it. And that should frighten everyone.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Technology is constantly being used to enhance the ability of armies to kill and maim one another and innocent civilians. We desperately need to pray for the coming of the kingdom of the Prince of Peace who will cause weapons of war to be molded into farming implements (Isa. 2:4, Isa. 9:6-7).

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, later set to music. It was written over the Christmas of either 1863 or 1864, in the middle of the bloodiest war in American history.

The carol’s first verse is familiar and peaceful:

I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play;

In music sweet the tones repeat,

“There’s peace on earth, good will to men.”

But the carol is not cotton candy; it is a beating heart, laid bare. It’s a carol that still rings true today. By the third stanza we sing:

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Longfellow wrote to his friend Henry Ingersoll Bowditch in 1866, “The death of the young men in the war . . . makes my heart bleed whenever I think of it. How much I have felt for you. Particularly on that cold December night when I came back with my son, and saw you at the station and knew that yours would come back to you no more.”

This is the landscape in which Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells.” We aren’t currently entrenched in a literal civil war, but the cracks in our country’s foundation are splitting wider. People with power abuse it; people without it suffer. Day after day, the news cycles through horrors. Many days, it feels a little bit like the end of the world—like an apocalypse.

But then Longfellow brings the gospel to bear in the final triumphant stanza:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing his kingdom to us. The last thing we see in the Bible is an image of “a new heaven and a new earth,” with “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev. 21:1, 4). The world is always ending, but one day, it will end. Justice is never done, but one day, it will roll down like a river.

In the depths of World War II, Swedish authorities decided their citizens needed to know what to do if the fighting finally arrived on their doorstep. Though they maintained neutrality, it was hard to believe they could continue to do so—especially as their Nordic neighbors got caught in the tides of violence. So, they decided on a handy pamphlet, delivered to households across Sweden. Roughly translated to "If War Comes," the pamphlets offered tips for how to interpret sirens and what to take along in the case of evacuation.

The pamphlets didn't end with the war. For more than four decades, Sweden distributed these little bits of instruction on catastrophe—until the end of the Cold War seemed to diminish their usefulness and they were discontinued. Now, Sweden is bringing them back.

The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency is organizing a reboot of the pamphlet, this time augmenting its advice on conventional warfare with tips on how to grapple with threats of this era: terrorism and cyberattacks, pandemics, misinformation campaigns, and crises related to climate change.

The agency expects to deliver these pamphlets to 4.7 million Swedish households. A spokesman for the agency said, “Back then the focus was only on war; today society looks totally different. There are considerably more complex threats. People need to learn more and know more about how to handle … their own and their nearest relatives’ fundamental needs for a while.”

The Italians have a legend about a woman named Befana who lived along the dusty road that led to Bethlehem. She was her village’s best housekeeper. Meticulous. Which was no small task with all that dust. Late one night there was a knock at the door and she opened it to find three kings in search of the baby born to be King of the Jews, the Prince of Peace. Frankly, what she also saw was all the dust that blew in and the dirt on their boots and clothes.

They asked to rest awhile and invited her to join them on their journey. And she said she’d love to do that but she had to get the house back in order after they left, and there was a load of laundry to be done. “Let me finish up,” she said, “then I’ll be right behind you.” And they told her all she had to do was follow the star.

She worked all night and finally, near dawn, she put on her heavy cloak. She took a little straw doll she wanted to give to the baby, and left her house—spic and span. But the sky had clouded over and she couldn’t see the star. It began to rain and her little doll was ruined. Finally, she gave up and went home. “I’m a foolish old woman,” she said to herself. “I missed my chance to worship the newborn Prince of Peace. Perhaps I will find him someday.”

So the legend is that each year she sets out with a bag of toys, leaving some at every house where there is a child, in hopes one of them might be the Child she missed.

According to the New York Times, Americans are among the most anxious people on earth. One study found that Americans were significantly more anxious than residents of nations like Nigeria, Lebanon, and Ukraine. We spend billions of dollars every year on antianxiety medications and additional millions to fund research into the causes and cures for anxiety disorders.

Time magazine recently devoted its cover story to teenage anxiety, and the headline was: "The Kids Are Not All Right: American teens are anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed." The article claimed that today's adolescents "are the post-9/11 generation, raised in an era of economic and national insecurity. They've never known a time when terrorism and school shootings weren't the norm. They grew up watching their parents weather a severe recession, and, perhaps most importantly, they hit puberty at a time when technology and social media were transforming society."

One expert said, "If you wanted to create an environment to churn out angsty people, we've done it." One teenager explained, "We're the first generation that cannot escape our problems at all. We're all like little volcanoes. We're getting this constant pressure, from our phones, from our relationships, from the way things are today."

Our trouble is we want the peace without the Prince.