Thanks, Irma. And thanks everyone for just uh entrusting uh the church and uh and your brothers and sisters in Christ with your prayers. Uh we love to pray for one another and uh and Holly’s so good at sending those out and we can pray during the week for the things that we’ve covered this morning. And um yeah, church is always willing to uh lift up any burdens that anyone has. So our our Advent candle and theme this morning, we’re talking about peace. We’re talking about the birth of Christ. and the peace that both is promised and delivered by Jesus. And the subject of peace, if you think about it, really it only has meaning when it’s contrasted with its antonyms with uh things like war and conflict and anxiety and unsettledness. We’re going to try to get that off the board there. They’re working on it. Our technical people are working on it. So peace really is only given meaning. You’re close. There we go. But I don’t think the clicker is working. There we go. So peace is only given meaning in the shadow and threat of war. So if Christmas brings peace, it’s not surprising that there’s a military drum beatat underneath some of the most famous Christmas prophecies. Isaiah 9, we’re told that the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. And much of biblical prophecy, if you read it, it has a near fulfillment that relates to the social and political situation that the prophet himself is in at that time and then a far fulfillment that uh takes that same prophecy and extends it off into the far into the future, sometimes into eternity itself. And the near fulfillment of Isaiah 9 is that two of these northern tribes, uh, Zebulun and Nahali, northern tribes of Israel, are these people that are walking in darkness. And the humbling of those tribes came because the Assyrian armies, uh, they rampaged into Israel. They invaded their territory. They annexed their lands. And this all happened some 700 years before Christ. And the prophecy says that their yoke of enslavement and oppression will one day be broken and the domination of foreign powers would cease. So we have these words in Isaiah 9. Every warrior’s boot used in battle, every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning uh will be fuel for the fire. And immediately following that we have the famous comforting Christmas words of for us to us a child is born to us a son is given the government will rest upon his shoulder. One of his titles will be prince of peace of the increase of his government and his peace there will be no end. So we see that the birth of Christ is prophesied alongside the ceasing of military activities with that smell of war lingering in the air. And it begs the question for us to consider this morning uh who was God so mad at? Why was God uh who was God at war against that required Jesus to come down from heaven in order to make peace? And the uncomfortable answer of course that we find throughout scripture is that uh that enemy is us. It’s not an easy concept for most people to understand. Hardly anyone feels that would sense that they’re in a in a relationship of hostility toward God. Most everyone would think I I believe that if uh if there actually is any kind of God and if that God ever thinks about me at all, the relationship would be quite amiable and it wouldn’t require the ceasing of hostilities. It wouldn’t require a military victory to repair that relationship. If there is a God and he ever thinks about me, which most people might consider unlikely, surely he wouldn’t consider me his enemy. No one suspects that their routine, ordinary, run-of-the-mill life would would meet with a deep disapproval of God. We may think I I’m not very religious, but uh but I’m surely not noticeable enough for God to be angry with me. In geographical terms, I’ I’m nice and neutral, more like Switzerland. Now, I know there are people who are more like North Korea and the Taliban, and I would certainly understand God going against them, but I’d never sense that I’d be considered an enemy of God. Not to the degree that God would have to leave heaven and come down to this planet and do battle in order to neutralize me as his enemy and uh and make me a potential friend. How did a nice person like me end up at odds with God? Well, with the birth of Christ prophesied in the context of war, the defeat of the enemies, each one of us without there’s no nuance or sliding scale of any kind, we’re all unceremoniously lumped in as God’s enemies. We have this verse in Romans 5:10. There’s no mitigating factors here. It just says that while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. How do nice ordinary people end up in that camp? How are we to understand enmity with God as our true reality that requires intervention? Romans 1 is probably the neatest, the briefest, the most elegant summary in all of scripture, detailing the subtle process by which we drift away from reality and become enemies of God. And it indicates two steps in that process. One is suppression and the other substitution. Romans 1:18 states that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Author Daniel Strange has an interesting illustration of this. uh he re he um opens it up to us as if we’re living under this great canvas or tent structure, this covering. And unknown to us, gallons and gallons and gallons of water are collecting on top of the canvas. And as the water collects, the canvas is sagging down. It’s getting heavier and heavier over us. Underneath the canvas, we still think we’re fine. We roll over. we go back to sleep not knowing that at some cosmic uh moment in the future on the day of God’s wrath the whole thing will come crashing down on us. But Romans says that God’s wrath is both to come and is also being currently revealed. And as a gracious warning to us, God, it’s like God has taken a little pen knife and cut a little slit in the canvas allowing little drops of wrath to drop uncomfortably on our heads. And we experience things like suffering and sickness, cracked cell phones, and pandemics. And they all indicate that something’s seriously wrong in the world. And it points to the time when eventually that threat level will go critical and God’s wrath will be fully revealed. But people like us, Romans says, are hard at work suppressing that truth, telling ourselves that everything’s okay. The world is generally a pretty pleasant place to be. We’re mostly sheltered from the worst of what’s going on on our planet. We’ll try not to think about death. We don’t bring that up in polite conversations. Maybe we can bluff it out and just tell ourselves that death is this natural organic process of going from one state of being to another. It’s nothing to dread or obsess over. But God says that such thinking is inexcusable. says, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. His invisible attributes, namely his eternal power, his divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that are made, so they are without excuse. So if the suffering we experience now is meant for us, it’s meant for us to interpret it as a sign of the coming of God’s wrath, a preview of God’s wrath, we’re also meant to look at the grandeur of creation and see it pointing to God’s eternal power, his divine nature. We’re to look at this world and think, well, nothing so grand as this could ever make itself. Creation is self-revely. Talks about God’s existence, his nature. And if we can’t see that or if we fail to acknowledge that, it’s like we’re all joining this enormous conspiracy of suppression to shut out the big story and keep ourselves occupied with a much much smaller origin story. A story based on some elongated, unguided, random chemical process which leaves us in the end with no accountability to anyone but ourselves. So we’re left suppressing the truth, I think, because the truth threatens us. It threatens us with a mystery and an accountability that makes us uncomfortable. We’re not prepared to come under. Dan Strange sums up our willful suppression this way. The problem is not that God’s communications ineffective. It’s that human beings are so rebelliously sinful that we’re determined not to listen to it. God speaks to us, but we end up speaking over God. So Romans 1 is all too clear that people like us are really good at truth suppression, reality avoidance, and then it shows in that passage how we migrate so easily from suppression to substitution. Here’s the substitution, this great exchange that takes place in our hearts. Although they knew God, they didn’t honor him as God or give thanks to him. They became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. They exchanged or substituted the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Picture is that once we’ve suppressed the truth, we fill that void somehow with these God substitutes in order to give our our life some artificial meaning. And of course, scripture refers to this as idolatry where we take good things and turn them into ultimate things or we take good things and make them god things in our lives. So it can be very good things, family and friends and romance and education and jobs and achievements. But we give those things primary meanings in our lives. No, no matter they’re fragile, they’re temporary. They’re not going to last. They can be all taken away from us in the blink of an eye. But for the moment, those God’s substitutes will do in our lives. And if one of those idols fails us, it runs out of steam or runs out of gas in our lives, we can quickly scramble to find another idol to take its place. And life itself is relatively short. So only so many of our idols can crash and need to be replaced before it’s over. And suppression and substitution come so easily to us. We don’t recognize our culpability that we’re willing participants in this hostility toward God. And there’s really there’s no excuse for what we’ve done. We’re all in it together. Suppression substitutions really baked into our culture. One helpful definition of culture is this. Culture is just something we create from the stories we tell ourselves to give our lives meaning. And it follows, as Dan Strange puts it, culture is religion externalized. It’s how we show on the outside what we believe on the inside. Culture is how we worship. It’s the way in which we show what is really valuable in our hearts. And because culture is just like the air we breathe and it fills all the space around us, it’s difficult for us to stay sensitive to the ways we suppress truth and substitute the worship of idols for the worship of God. hard for us to see that our our big story in our culture is made up of fragments of brokenness, of false scripts and fractured identities. We’ve all suppressed and substituted so regularly we don’t even know who we are anymore. Although scripture would tell us that it it lands us squarely in the camp of God’s enemies. And even as Christians, I mean, we we have some immunity against this. We we love God. We build up one another in Christ. We but we breathe the same cultural air as everyone else. So, we always have to work at cultural discernment and some necessary cultural disentanglement. We’re not completely immune from this uh the this lure of idols and false narratives concerning reality. In the last words of the Apostle John to his readers in the first epistle of John, John writes, “Dear children,” and he’s writing to Christians, he says, “Keep yourselves from idols.” You wouldn’t need to write that if there was just automatic um resistance. given to us when we come to Christ against these idolatrous influences. That’s why we really need things like regular Bible reading and study and prayer and fellowship and worship and church and teaching and Christian friends as we just need to keep reinforcing in one another the true and accurate story rather than just all of us uh breathing in the broken stories of our culture. And if we want to save off the idols that want prominence and dominance in our lives, and the more we can collectively together fight off truth suppression and God God substituting, that’s when God can really send us out into his world, communicating to others the very disturbing news that God holds them accountable as his enemies, yet he’s also made a way to end the war and bring them peace. In the book of 2 Corinthians chapter 5, come across a word that’s only used by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. And he uses it quite a bit, about a dozen times. 2 Corinthians 5:18 offers several uses of the word. All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sin against them. Reconciliation. It’s a word pretty pregnant with meaning. It’s simply defined as uh exchanging enmity for friendship or making an enemy into a friend. Usually, when we think about it, when a war has been won, the defeated nation has to go crawling on their knees to the more powerful nation. We have to plead to be allowed for any settlement that might be offered. But in our reconciliation with God, it’s completely opposite. God himself is the offended party and he’s the victor. He’s the one with the power. He comes after us to bring about reconciliation. He comes looking for us. We have these distorted identities and these fragmented cultures. And he knew that we were too ignorant and too damaged and too hurt and too frustrated to ever go looking for him. He says to us, “I know you can’t make it to me, but I’ve taken care of the problem of sin, the problem of your identity, and I’m bringing the solution to you in the giving of my son.” He didn’t wait for a change of heart on our part. He made the first move. He made all the moves in reconciliation. Every time that word is used, it’s God who is taking the action of doing the reconciling. And we’re the ones who are being reconciled. We’re the beneficiaries. And the only way for that reconciliation to take place was for someone who didn’t have any price on his head, who had not offended the father, no sin of his own, no identity apart from God to pay the penalty and to bear the burden. In that discussion of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul concludes with God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. doesn’t mean that Christ became a sinner on the cross in any way. It just means that he fully identified with our truths suppressing God substituting selves. And in reconciling us to God, it didn’t just bring about a conditional relationship or an uneasy truce, a trial period to see if we would hang on to faith and uh we would hang on to uh to life with God. It’s not a mere temporary ceasing of hostilities. It’s real. It’s permanent and it’s objective. So it was God’s decision to make a permanent peace with us without any difficulty. He could have defeated and annihilated us. Instead, he sent his son into the world. He signed a peace treaty with the blood of his own son, saying that he’s no longer angry with those of us who surrender to him. Because the prince of peace has come, you and I don’t have to do anything to make peace with God. The peace has been made for us. All God wants us to do is just sign the peace treaty on the line that has our name on it. Those are our terms of surrender. God is satisfied with the death of Jesus to end all hostilities. All God asks us to do is to be satisfied with the same thing that has already satisfied him, the sacrifice of his son Jesus. So if God says that apart from Christ, we’re all his enemies, we should take him at his word on that. But if he also says that at Christmas the prince of peace arrived to work reconciliation and make peace on our behalf, we should take him at his word on that as well. Then God has commissioned us as ambassadors to go out into the world and announce reconciliation to those who have suppressed and substituted all their lives. Says in 2 Corinthians 5, we are therefore God’s ambassadors. As though God were making his appeal through us, we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. There’s this autogra autobio biographical account I read many years ago, and it may not seem like it, but it’s always been a Christmas story to me, and it illustrates our human plight, and it illustrates our proclivity to suppress and substitute, and our need for peace to be declared to us. Few of you have heard this story before. Not not many. But it’s Christmas again. We repeat lots of stories at Christmas. And I think it’s a story worth telling. It’s the true story of a man named Haru Anoda. He was a Japanese soldier during World War II, stationed on the little island of Lubang in the Philippines. 24 years old. Arrived on the island in January or at the end of 1944. And he was told, “Your job is to do intelligence work, conduct guerrilla warfare, resist any Americans who might want to uh come on the island and prepare the island to be retaken by a Japanese landing party.” Well, within a short time, the war ended, but Haruota didn’t know, or at least wouldn’t accept that fact for the next 30 years. He had two young soldiers with him, also in their mid20s. When the Americans did land on the island, the three of them went into hiding on a piece of land only about 18 mi long, 6 milesi wide. At 24, Heru Anonod was the soldier in command. They dug in with their meager supplies and with a firm belief that their nation of Japan would never surrender. In time, the Americans began dropping leaflets from the air, telling Haruoda and his companions that the war was over. Japan had indeed surrendered. Three men refused to believe it, even though the leaflets were signed by the Japanese general who had sent them to the island. And several of those leaflets were dropped on the island over the course of the next couple of years. Their rice held out for a while, and then they began to sneak into local villages and steal from Filipino farmers. They changed locations every 3 to 5 days, ate lots of bananas, every now and then, used a precious bullet to take down a water buffalo. 1952. It’s now seven years after the war. Another light aircraft circles with loudspeaker calling out by all three of the soldiers names and dropping more leaflets. While with the leaflets was a letter from Haru’s brother telling him that, “Hey, the war is over. Your parents our parents are well. All of your brothers are out of the army.” Haru was certain this had to be an American trick. Currently, current Japanese newspapers were dropped. and Haru and his buddies were puzzled by all of the light entertainment news and no talk of war. They became so skilled at suppressing truth and convincing themselves of alternate stories and building an alternate reality. And while suppressing truth, it’s easy to identify the idols or the god worship, the substitute worship that they put in its place. great idol in their lives was the unremitting pursuit of personal honor and holding on to their personal honor and just their patriotic pride in their nation of Japan and that suppression and substitution continued to ensure that they drifted further and further away from reality. 1954 a Filipino uh army unit was training in the mountains and shots were exchanged and one of the Japanese soldiers who’d now been with the others for nine years was killed. 10 days later, Filipino Air Force uh plane passed over again. Haruanoda Kaz Kazuka, the war has ended, but the two soldiers stayed hidden. 1957, a search party left a picture of a Haru’s family, but he thought it was a trick cuz he noticed a neighbor in the same picture as his as his family. And his fellow soldier also had a picture of his family, but were they were standing in front of a new house that he didn’t recognize, not knowing that their old house had been bombed during the war. Large search party from Japan came in 1959. Two soldiers slipped in close by and Haru heard his brother’s voice over the loudspeaker. He saw a man on the hill who was built just like his brother. The voices were identical. Brother started singing a well-known song from their high school years. But as the brother sang, he choked up with emotion. Ku thought that must have meant it was an impersonator. So he remained hidden and his brother sadly returned to Japan. They read newspapers. They uh listened to Japanese shortwave radio that they had stolen from villagers. They learned that Japan was prosperous. There was no talk of war. So the narrative they fashioned again this is their suppression suppression of truth that the world must somehow be cooperating economically while still fighting militarily. They had so many fixed ideas they could reinterpret every bit of news. 60s became the 70s. They learned that the Americans were struggling in Vietnam and they thought that’ll only strengthen Japan’s position. They sewed and resoed their rotting clothes and year after year they slept in the rain and recovered from sickness. Had lives that were very routine and orderly and predictable. Local Filipino um islanders called the two soldiers the mountain bandits or the kings of the mountain or the mountain devils. And in October of 1972, in a clash with some farmers over an attempt to kill another water buffalo, Hizuka was shot and killed. It’d been 27 years together. Now Haru was all alone. Shortly, shortly after that, another Japanese search party came. He knew the voices of his brother and his sister. He heard them shouting things that only he would know. He read the newspaper articles about Kazuka’s death, but he remained hidden. 1973, Haru’s aged father came looking for his son, and he found a poem that his dad had written, a ha coup that mournfully stated, “Not even an echo responds to my call in the summery mountains.” Still, he stayed hidden. February of 1974, he finally came out of hiding to a most unlikely source, an amiable Japanese university dropout who had uh committed to looking for three things. the legendary Heruan, a panda bear, and the abominable snowman in that order. So he went to the island of Lubang and amazingly enough, Haru came out of cover to meet him. Refused to surrender, though, without new orders from Major Tanaguchi, who had sent him to the island 30 years earlier. So the Japanese government flew the one-time general, now an old book seller, to Lubang, where he delivered in person the orders of surrender. And in a simple ceremony, the then 53-year-old Haruoda gave up his sword to his general as a final act of surrender. So, world headlines were made when Haruanoda was flown back to Japan, reunited with his family. He wrote his book called uh No Surrender, My 30-year war. Finally became a man at peace. Later, uh one of the one of the few things that he one of the few skills he had in life was teaching survival skills. and uh he spent some time in Alberta actually scouting some backcountry regions near B for suitable locations for training Japanese youth in survival skills and he passed away not not that many years ago in 2014. Here’s why I think that’s a great Christmas story because it so poignantly illustrates how unconsciously people just settle settle into life as enemies of God. It shows the length we all go to suppressing truth and we look everywhere to confirm our bias against the existence and against the power of God. And we suppress truth and we create all these alternate stories uh to bring meaning to our lives and we’ll set up idols. God substitutes even if those idols are as thin and unstable as personal honor or national pride. The story reminds us of the great lengths that God will go to in order to convince us that the war is over. The work of the Prince of Peace is done. That through the cross, reconciliation’s now available so that God’s enemies can become his friends. Maybe we’ve maybe we’ve had uh we’ve been calling out to many of our family members and friends for years that it’s safe for them to come out of hiding and it’s safe for them to completely surrender to God. story encourages us not to lose heart as Christ’s ambassadors with God making his appeal through us imploring others on behalf to be to on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. We get to announce to everyone within listening range that the Prince of Peace has come. It’s safe to come out from hiding and it’s safe to surrender to him. And we sang about it this morning. A little line that we sang early in the service. Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn king. Peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners reconciled. Let’s just pray. Father, we