What does 'peace on earth' mean at Christmas in a world at war?

In a Christmas Eve speech in 1941, delivered 17 days after the Japanese killed more than 2,300 Americans in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt reflected on the appropriateness of celebrating Christmas in a time of war.

"There are many men and women in America − sincere and faithful men and women − who are asking themselves this Christmas: How can we light our trees? How can we give our gifts?" the president said. "How can we meet and worship with love and with uplifted spirit and heart in a world at war, a world of fighting and suffering and death? How can we pause, even for a day, even for Christmas Day, in our urgent labor of arming a decent humanity against the enemies which beset it? How can we put the world aside, as men and women put the world aside in peaceful years, to rejoice in the birth of Christ?"

Roosevelt’s queries ring true 82 years later in a world aflame with conflict and despair.

Theologian Fleming Rutledge wrote, “The great theme of Advent is hope, but it is not tolerable to speak of hope unless we are willing to look squarely at the overwhelming presence of evil in our world.”

Pain of loss cuts deep at Christmas

So it is. The season with all of its joy and festivity interrupts us in our trouble, almost an insult to the pain and loss so many feel. Tables around the world are a bit emptier, blank spaces claim seats where loved ones felled by a mass shooter’s bullets or an army’s rocket fire or cancer’s grip once sat.

This year, my family is mourning the loss of my mother, gone before her 70th birthday due to an aggressive form of dementia.

Even in a prosperous nation like America, so many things in the world seem askew. Our political process grows more partisan and more violent. Inflation makes basic living harder. And our college campuses are filled with students inexplicably cheering on terrorists who violently ravaged Jewish communities.

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Where is the peace, we ask?

Rutledge continued, “We can send Christmas cards about love and peace all we want, but the human race is utterly incapable of turning itself around. The children who go to see 'The Nutcracker' grow up to be victims of disappointment just like all the rest of us. There is no magical kingdom anywhere.”

Bethlehem cancels Christmas celebration this year

Even the land where the story of Christmas began is engulfed in conflict. The little town of Bethlehem is not, as the hymnwriter once observed, lying still.

The real audacity of Christmas is that it compels you to find joy even amid brokenness and sorrow. This is, in fact, what you find in the real story told in the Gospel narratives believed by Christians. Jesus came from heaven – not to the snow-covered dreamscapes of our favorite holiday movies, but to a world as besieged and broken as the one our headlines chronicle.

Again, Rutledge wrote: “In a world no better and no worse than this one, at another time and in another place, where men and women struggled against poverty and disease and disillusionment as we do, in a time when moments of hope and happiness and peace were just as delusory and fugitive as they are today, Saint Luke the Evangelist wrote a magical story.”

This magical story is one that has buoyed Christians for 2,000 years. It declares that on an otherwise ordinary night in a backwater town in a forgotten corner of the Roman empire, the baby born to a peasant Jewish couple was no ordinary child, but the Son of God.

I'm a Christian Palestinian in Bethlehem. This Christmas, we feel alone and broken.

In her prayer chronicled in the Book of Luke, Mary speaks of both the personal and cosmic significance of Jesus’ birth: "The Mighty One has done great things for me, and his name is holy. His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear him. He has done a mighty deed with his arm; he has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts; he has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly. He has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty."

We can celebrate Christmas, then, because God looked evil in the face and sent Jesus to both forgive us of our sins and to begin to set the world right again. The baby’s name, Immanuel, means “God with us.” Deity didn’t stay in heaven and condemn, but came to us at Christmas.

Angry about the Israel-Hamas war? Fine. But don't hamper Hanukkah or cancel Christmas.

But where is the peace promised to the angels outside Bethlehem? Where is the joy declared in our carols and papering our gifts under the tree? Where is the hope we’ve been promised?

It begins in each human heart as we bring our sorrows, our moral failings, our brokenness to the manger, to the cross where Jesus would be unjustly crucified, and to a borrowed tomb outside of the city where he rose triumphantly.

The late pastor Tim Keller wrote, “Christmas means that, through the grace of God and the incarnation, peace with God is available; and if you make peace with God, then you can go out and make peace with everybody else. And the more people who embrace the Gospel and do that, the better off the world is. Christmas, therefore, means the increase of peace − both with God and between people − across the face of the world.”

The Christmas story doesn’t ask us to put away our sorrow, to bury our grief, to ignore the evil and despair outside our windows. Rather it invites us to bring those to one whom we are told has “borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”

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Christmas beckons us to hope, not in our political solutions or ability to endure, but in another, better world to come.

C.S. Lewis, writing in England during World War II, spoke of the rationality of this kind of hope: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Christmas invites us to consider that perhaps this world is not that far off. Each hymn, each homily, each Scripture reading is a pinprick of light, a porthole into life as God intended it to be. That is why you hear the ache and longing of Christmas hymns. “Come,” we beg, “Thou long, expected Jesus.”

It's not fake happiness or a plastic smile nor is it naivete about the presence of evil. It’s the beautiful reality of God with us. Even in our despair.

Which is why, in that 1941 Christmas speech, President Roosevelt urged Americans to celebrate “a day of prayer, of asking forgiveness for our shortcomings of the past, of consecration to the tasks of the present, of asking God's help in days to come.”

In similarly distressing times, we too should embrace the audacity of Christmas because: “Unto us a child is born and unto us a Son is given.”

Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is author of "The Characters of Christmas."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Peace on earth? How it's possible at Christmas despite world at war