In the nineteenth-century, an American artist by the name of Edward Hicks painted 100 times , a tableau he titled, “the Peaceable Kingdom “
Hicks was inspired by the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable Kingdom in chapter 11 of the book of Isaiah. It is a vision of God’s creation restored: a wolf resting beside a lamb, a leopard lying down with a kid, a calf and a lion together, an infant plays over the den of a poisonous snake.
Woody Allen once observed, “On the day the lion and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up.”
There is a striking and unsettling contrast between the biblical motif of peace—peace on earth, goodwill among all people, the Prince of Peace—and the reality of the world in which we live.
For more than two thousand years, Christians have been telling the story and celebrating the birth of the one called the Prince of Peace in particularly nonpeaceful circumstances.
Currently, We have wars , destruction waging in our world today . 40% of all the wars is waging in Africa , in Somalia , Sudan , the DRC and Nigeria. The war has caused over 40 million displaced .
How do we wait for peace ? How do we make the peace of God real in our midst? My sermon addresses those questions. I argue that we could adopt a pacifism approach or the Augustinian just war theory . But above all , the advent peace in Jesus should be our mode of life in midst of darkness.