Every year, on the fourth Thursday in November, Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. While we Australia don’t celebrate this day itself, I find that we do join in with some of the other aspects of the holiday namely the shopping festivals known as “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday”. Last week I think that every shop I have ever bought anything from in my life had emailed me to let me know all the wonderful sales they had on over the weekend. It seems my life is rather incomplete when I surveyed all the things that I was told were essential to enhance my life in some area. Happiness was simply a mouse click away. In among all the struggles I face in my life, can I find peace through shopping?
Peace is the theme we are focussing on in our second week of Advent. We are looking at the passage in Isaiah where God speaks of the need to comfort God’s people and the need for them to get ready for God’s arrival among them. Isaiah goes on to point out the effect of God coming to the world which involves the wilderness being transformed from a place of struggle and difficulty into a place of peace where life becomes easy. Instead of being apart from God and unable to reach God, we find all the obstacles that lie between ourselves and God are removed. We can now come to God and be with God. The effect of this is that we find peace with God, peace with others and peace with ourselves as we have finally arrived home.
As Christians, we believe we were made to serve God and reflect God’s glory into the world. As humans, while we are separated from God, we know that something important is missing in our lives. We try and fill this gap with other things, be it shopping, be it money or status, be it drugs or alcohol. The problem is, these things cannot satisfy us and so we spend our lives at war with ourselves knowing we are not happy and striving to get more and more of the very thing that we know does not fulfil us. We become miserable, we become self-destructive and we hurt ourselves in the process. Yet once we find the presence of God as a reality in our lives, we find peace. The coming of God to us allows us to enter into God’s presence and know this peace for ourselves. As Saint Augustine said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in God”. This is part of the peace we wish for at Christmas. The coming of God to us at Christmas makes this possible. May we know this peace in our hearts and share it with those we meet.