The Gift and Task of Peacemaking | Advent Devotional Day 15

Advent 2025 DevotionalCore | Peace
December 14, 2025
Written by Ben Hartley

Title: “The Gift and Task of Peacemaking”

Scripture:


My Reflection

Last week, our theme in this Advent devotional was focused on “movement for a peaceful kingdom.” It reminded me of a print by Fritz Eichenberg entitled “The Peaceable Kingdom” and reflects the vision of the lion laying down with the lamb (among other critters) in Isaiah 11: 6-7. It is one of my wife Laura’s favorite pictures and is displayed in our home today.


[Caption: “The Peaceable Kingdom” (1950) by Fritz Eichenberg]

Some years ago, a Mennonite friend of mine, Daniel Born, used a rather different image, also inspired by the Isaiah text, for an article he edited for a literary magazine. The article was about Clint Eastwood and the theme of reconciliation that emerges in his films. The print is a powerful reminder that often our work to promote the “peaceful kingdom” is harder than we imagined. Even when the lion and the lamb are brought together, the lamb may still be terrified. Peacemakers, like the image of Eastwood in this print, may also express anger and frustration more than peace and love in the urgent organizing that they care so much about. Make no mistake, the work of peacemaking is difficult. Our response to peacemakers’ imperfections – our own or others - must not be to choose mere middle-class milquetoast moderation instead.


[Illustration by Lisa Haney, The Common Review: The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation, Winter, 2009]  

This past summer, I spent two weeks in the West Bank of Palestine as part of a delegation of solidarity and advocacy with Sabeel, a Palestinian Christian organization seeking peace in their homeland. We heard from peacemakers who honestly disagreed with one another over strategy and goals. Members of our delegation, seminary professors like me from five countries, disagreed with each other too. But we persist in our hope and work for peace. 
Peacemakers – all of us – must remember that our ministry of reconciliation, as Paul reminds us, is first a gift from God. “For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” It is from that gift that our ministry of reconciliation springs even when peacemaking is so very difficult. Whatever your peacemaking, reconciling, work is today – no matter how small – remember that it is work that begins from and is inspired first by the great gift of grace we know in Christ whose incarnation among us we await with persistent, gritty, hope. 

My Prayer:

Oh God, remind us afresh of the gift of your reconciling love and forgiveness in Christ. May that gift so inspire and enable us to work for reconciliation in relationships we have that need healing. And may those peacemakers at work in places of deep conflict and violence in our world also know your deep peace, and, in the midst of trials, may they also find rest. For the sake of Christ we pray. Amen.

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