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Now here's a Scripture with which we can all identify, especially during the holiday season. Immediately preceding the selected passage, two women are having a quarrel of some consequence in the Philippian church. The disputants are leaders in the church, which shows us that leaders are as capable of being petty as are non-leaders.

So, listen friends. Cast aside for a moment the beautiful gospel passage of sweet virgin Mary and her older cousin Elizabeth getting along fabulously together in their time of pregnancy. Put out of your mind the magi who travel like the three amigos, palatable comrades on a common quest. The lectionary lesson for today is as much a part of our season as any we have inherited. Paul is pleading with two individuals to agree with each other in the Lord. The early church, like our later church, is in as much danger of being victimized by its problems within as it is in danger from its problems with the outside world. Paul is pleading for peace!

Since it was customary for Paul's letters to be read aloud to the whole church in a worship service, the lesson apparently aims at much more than publicly embarrassing Euodia and Syntyche. Paul is speaking of rejoicing in the Lord and being guarded by a peace of God which transcends all understanding.

Perhaps many of us grew up in families where the best we could hope for during the Christmas season was an uneasy truce instead of a mysterious peace. In my family, Christmas meant a trip to Grandmother's house, three hours away. With the usual pettiness of children and the excitement over the season accompanying us, my sister and I presented quite a behavioral challenge to our parents. Usually a few stern rebukes and admonitions that we would receive no presents if we quarreled or "acted up" produced a truce among us until we returned home from Grandmother's.

In a strange way, warring cultures have historically observed uneasy truces during religious festivals. The fighting Greek city-states would hold a truce for the Olympic games held every four years in Olympia or Delphi. Preachers have for generations used to good effect in sermons historical illustrations of Confederate and Union soldiers good-naturedly tussling for a wild turkey during a Thanksgiving or Christmas truce. Even World Wars I and II held up their end of the bargain on occasions when Allied and German soldiers would sing "Silent Night" across the cold, quiet battlefronts of Europe. A truce is understandable. It is a lull between the fighting.

In our wealthy culture of diversions, would that we knew the things that make for peace. The text from Philippians was written to those who were religious. To them, preparing for the Lord's coming was a daunting task, a matter of dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in life. Philippi was a wealthy city. In many ways it was Rome in microcosm. As part of a Roman province rebuilt by Augustus and populated with Roman soldiers, Philippi was given the legal character of a Roman territory in Italy, the very highest honor ever bestowed on a provincial city.1 In many ways the Philippians were like us -- they were too wealthy to have a deep faith! Unlike in the rest of the world, women in Philippi held high civic offices and served as priestesses in society at large. Money and social status enabled women to play prominent roles in early Christian congregations in Macedonian provinces. The Philippian church was, obviously, as socially diverse as any in early Christianity since in Greek and Roman oratory it was common not to mention women by name unless they were financially notable.2 Like all good citizens then, as now, the Philippians understood truces, compromises, and appearances. But what about peace?

In our world many of us still do not understand peace as a mystery, a gift, that cannot be understood by the human mental capacity. To read Paul's letter one would think that Paul was in a happy place. Yet here was Paul chained like a criminal for his faith in Christ, waiting hour by hour for the door to open and for his persecutors to take him and execute him. How Paul could write, "Rejoice," is as much a mystery as the peace he so pointedly tried to articulate.

When I pastored a church in Texas, a man named Virgil Dunn was a member. Virgil was 93 years old when I knew him. He wore thick glasses and he spoke mainly in whispers. His body was thin and bent and his face was wrinkled. He and his wife lived in a small, white clapboard house. Virgil had been a member of that church all his life. He was kind, gentle, and radiant. He applied the love of Jesus to everyone he met.

Now, the church had a problem. Its former house of worship had not been used in over twenty years. It was falling down. The insurance companies had long since refused to insure it. Birds had built their nests in the pews and everyone was afraid to go in there. It just sat on a corner right in the middle of a major university, taking up space. It needed to be torn down. Several times people had almost come to blows in committee meetings over the issue.

One day a leader in the church came up to me. "Let's tear down the old church and make a park there in the middle of the campus," he suggested.

"Good Lord, we can't," I retorted. "Don't you know the history? One group of faculty and administrators will present a study claiming they know everything. Then another group will present a counter study showing they know everything."

"Well," he declared, "We've gone about it the wrong way. Don't claim to know anything. Just get Virgil Dunn to stand up there beside you and you report that we need to tear the church down. I'll make a motion. All Virgil has to do is nod. It'll pass if you have Virgil's presence."

A week later, we had the big vote. Virgil in his bottle thick glasses stood there beside me with a big smile on his face. When the motion was made, old Virgil nodded. It passed without a single negative vote. Not a negative word came back to us. We did not get a single ugly letter and the issue was never again discussed within the church.

It was the presence of a loving person that influenced the crowd. His presence helped effect a resolution that could not be planned for, could not be researched and anticipated, and could not be purchased. What's more, it could not even be rationally understood by anyone, including most of the faculty in the university's department of Religion and Philosophy, all Ph.D.'s, who were at the meeting.

As we look at our lives and our churches, what is it that gives us peace? If we take away the Scriptures, the logic, the talk, the manipulation, the budgets, the study groups, the music, and the sermons, all of which are great and good, is there a peaceful presence of Jesus Christ in our lives that guards our hearts and minds?

We live in a world of religious shouters and arguers. The airways are full of solitary individuals shouting "repent" to an indifferent world. The shouters are everywhere.

So are the arguers who want to evangelize by argument, smothering people with their logical scriptural traps, trying to win them over.

It seems amazing that Jesus lived on this earth for 33 years. Jesus and his disciples spent three years living together, traveling together, and working together. Yet if we were to take all the unduplicated words of Jesus in the Bible and record them, do you know how long the tape would play? Forty-two minutes! That's all. Forty-two minutes out of a three year ministry. Jesus left us 42 minutes of supposed direct quotes. He was the Son of God. Jesus influenced countless millions. But Jesus wasn't, apparently, much of a shouter and even less of an arguer. God's love is so wide, so growing, and so alive that it can't be limited or controlled by shouters and arguers. We don't have to pretend we know everything because God is always beckoning our hearts and minds to be controlled by a peace which transcends all understanding. This peace is much deeper than a truce between our arguments and shouts in God's behalf toward an indifferent world.

Sometimes we humans need to be confronted with the fact that the universals which unite the people on this planet are far greater than the particulars which we have allowed to divide us. Advent and Christmas are more than mere decoration and ornamentation on the backdrop of the ecclesiastical calendar. Advent and Christmas at their best take us into the hidden places of the human adventure where all languages and all symbols are transcended by a peace which cannot be fully understood. This peace, not a truce, makes no more human sense than did its first coming in the presence of the baby in a manger.

God certainly did not wait until the nations were at peace before sending the Christ to be born in Bethlehem's manger. God crashed the human experience when the prisoners were crying out for release and human need was great. Hearts were not pure and the world was tarnished with violence and doubt. Yet in joy, God came to live among us.

Neither can we humans wait until the world is in a human truce before we raise our songs of lasting joy.

The beauty and peace of Christmas are upon us in all their many expressions -- music, paintings, symbols, stained glass, colors. The time is upon us, not for a truce amid the competing battles for our life's temporal allegiance, but a time for a peace that controls our hearts and minds. If Paul, writing from his jail cell to the Philippians is correct, then the peace of God which was in Christ Jesus is not a gift which a few people are given, but rather it is a gift which most people throw away.

What, then, begins for us this season -- the world's way of truce or God's way of peace?

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1. Ben Witherington III, Friendship and Finances in Philippi (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 21-24.

2. A. J. Marshall, "Roman Women and the Provinces," Ancient Society 6 (1975), pp. 108-127.