Advent Devotional: Disarming Violence
The wolf will romp with the lamb, the leopard sleep with the kid. Calf and lion will eat from the same trough, and a little child will tend them. Cow and bear will graze the same pasture, their calves and cubs grow up together, and the lion eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will crawl over rattlesnake dens, the toddler stick his hand down the hole of a serpent. Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill on my holy mountain. The whole earth will be brimming with knowing God-Alive, a living knowledge of God ocean-deep, ocean-wide. ISAIAH 1 1 :6-9 (THE MESSAGE)
It was Christmas Eve. I was closer to where our savior was born than I had ever been before, but I had never felt farther away from my faith. Being born into western Christianity I never questioned why my church celebrated military service or why, in my Christian family, I was a third-generation Army veteran. Never questioned until I was waking up in my tent next to the ancient city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, in the Holy Land.
War was nothing like I imagined it would be. Eyes wide open, witnessing what soldiers wearing my uniform were doing to those they said were “their enemy” tore at my conscience and traumatized my 23-year-old soul. Their actions in this land were anything but “holy”.
The violence human beings were doing to one other violated the image of God in each other, desecrated the land, and planted more seeds of Islamophobia and Zionism.
Isaiah 11 speaks of what the world will look like when it finally wraps its arms around the full knowledge of God. What the people of the world will look like when we are drenched and dripping in the knowledge of God. What animals and creation will look like when they are brimming with the full breath of God. Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill.
The night my commander gave me an order to run over an Iraqi child if necessary to keep the convoy rolling at all costs, I went back to my tent and prayed...or mostly sobbed into my pillow quietly. In the middle of the night, I heard God break into the darkness, “But I love them Diana, I love them, too.” Standing under the starry night sky, I disarmed myself. I took the bullets out of my gun and I pledged my allegiance to the Prince of Peace and the kingdom of heaven first, and to my country second.
Our savior first appeared in a small village in Palestine named Bethlehem. But he appeared again, in a darkened tent in the middle of a war, to save a weary soul from her own violence.
The Prince of Peace came to set us free from the violence in our human nature: the killing, harming, and waging of wars. He has come to give us a new life, by giving us peace as our new nature.
Jesus was born to make us peacemakers in a warring world.
The Prince of Peace calls to us from under the rubble in Palestine today. Will we hear him?
Oh God,
We pray that the whole earth will be brimming with knowing God fully Alive.
We pray that every single person will disarm themselves of violence today and arm themselves with self- sacrificial love instead.
Will you give us courage to follow our Brothers and Sisters in Palestine wherever it may lead? Whatever it may cost us? Because love never fails.
Thank you for making us peacemakers so that we can be a blessing to you and a blessing to our children and to our enemies' children.
Today, tomorrow and forever,
Amen