December 07, 2025
• Rev. Mindie Moore
December 7: Do You Hear What I Hear (Peace)
Isaiah 11:1-9
Advent Candle: Peace
Start with 9am Service Pep Talk
· Feb 1 is EIGHT Sundays away! In EIGHT Sundays, we will have another opportunity for people to worship here at the Midtown Campus
· The Why: you’re creating something amazing here, great growth. And we need your help to keep growing.
· The What: New service, launching 2/1 at 9am. Will run 2/1 through 5/17
· The Who: We still need 25 people who will commit to worshiping and serving at the 9am, particularly in Kids and Hospitality
PRAY
It’s our second week of our Advent Series, “Where are You Christmas?” where we are exploring the stories behind some of the songs that define the Advent and Christmas season. And today we are looking at the Christmas song “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
This song holds a certain nostalgia for me, because this is the song that was always played at the bows for the production of The Nutcracker that Hazel was in for 5 years straight. So when I hear this song, I get a little emotional and have all the feels. Because of that, this is one of my top 10 Christmas songs!
And there’s a really amazing story behind this song. It was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the world found itself waiting in anticipation, but not for something hopeful. Instead, the world was waiting to see if the unthinkable would happen—if the United States and the Soviet Union would enter into a nuclear war.
The song was written by a married couple named Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne. Regney was an immigrant to the United States from France, who had seen the horrors of war firsthand during WWII.
In 1952, he moved to New York and found jobs composing music for television shows and commercials. He met and married Gloria who was a pianist and songwriter. They spent the next decade collaborating on songs, some of which became well known. And then came the Cuban missile crisis.
To set the scene of what was going on at that time, the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the United States threatened military action if they weren’t removed. Soviet and US ships squared off near Cuba, ready to strike but no one making the first move. As negotiations dragged on, news began to get out about what could happen, and the public panic began to build. After 13 days of fear and tension, negotiations prevailed and war was averted, thanks to an amazing act of a Russian sailor which I’ll tell you about in just a bit.
As this was all going on, as the tension and anxiety built, Regney was approached to write a Christmas song, of all things. It seemed RIDICULOUS, but the record producers wanted something that spoke of peace and joy because this seemed to be what the country needed. Regney obviously didn’t feel peaceful OR joyful. All he could think about was his own experience from the war and it honestly seemed pretty frivolous to think about writing Christmas music when the world was in such a state.
But then one day, he saw something that changed his mind. While on a walk in his neighborhood, he saw two mothers with babies in their strollers. The babies were smiling at each other. They were the only ones he saw smiling, and something came over him; something that filled him with hope and inspiration and lyrics started coming to him. He raced home and shared them with his wife who started putting them to music, and what resulted was the song that you heard during our offering.
“Do You Hear What I Hear?” is a song that speaks to these ideas of hope and peace and it speaks to them in some unusual ways. You’ve got this sort of string of messengers telling the story of Christmas to each other. It starts with the night wind talking to a lamb, so we already know we’re in for something creative and unexpected. And then it moves to a lamb telling a shepherd boy, a shepherd boy telling a king, and the king sending out a message to everyone in the land: something exciting and good and hopeful is happening! Peace is here! Let’s pay attention to what God is doing.
It’s a very poetic progression and it reminds me of the poetry that we see in our Scripture today, from the book of Isaiah.
We talked about Isaiah last week as well, but just a reminder that Isaiah is a book that captures all these different prophetic messages, of incoming doom and destruction for the Israelites. The MAJORITY of this book is...hard to read. It’s sad, it’s bleak, it’s far from uplifting. But peppered throughout these prophecies of the bad that will be, are these visions of hope.
Just like last week, today we’re seeing another one of these hope visions. And this one is presented as a poetic vision of what a perfect, restored world might look like. It’s a vision of peace...and it’s a vision, that truthfully, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Listen to some of the...strange...things that Isaiah mentions as he talks about what God’s perfect, restored world will look like: (SLIDE)
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed[b] together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. (Isaiah 11:6-8)
I don’t think a single thing that Isaiah says here makes logical sense. A wolf and a lamb CAN’T coexist like this...that lamb is going to become lunch. No parent is going to let a baby come anywhere near a snake’s nest. These images are absurd and unrealistic; they push against the way things typically are.
And it’s IN that absurdity, that we learn something important about peace. Peace isn’t automatic. It isn’t natural. Peace takes work and faith and something bigger than what our human nature would normally default to. It can feel unnatural or even impossible to envision peace, to believe that hope is is possible...to see what God is capable of doing.
My family uses this book called “Shadow and Light” by Tsh Oxenreider every year for Advent. I want to share with part of the reading from this past Friday because I think this is a good illustration of WHY it’s so hard for us to do these things.
It’s easy to see the shadows of earth; our human condition wires us to see the depraved injustices, the depressing news, the distraught people around us. Because we live in a time of already-but-not-yet, our world is not as it should be. And so we wait, wondering if there is reason to hope.
Shadows imply light. Plato once told the story of a cave of shadows and people entranced by their flickering dance on the wall—yet the shadows are not reality. They merely hint at the full truth behind those gazing at the wall. We too tend to stare at the shadows in front of us, ignoring the light behind. (Tsh Oxenreider, Shadow & Light)
So often what we believe is possible is limited by what is right in front of us. It’s hard to hope in things we can’t imagine and it’s hard to envision a peace we’ve never seen or that seems unlikely and foolish. But that’s kind of the whole thing about Christmas. Everything about how God chose to bring peace to a world that needed it so desperately made no sense, it fit no preconceived notions, it took a lot of faith to believe.
Peace seemed impossible, but somehow, because of the work of God, peace was happening.
If we go back to the setting that was behind our song, the way that the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved, the act of peace that deescalated things, it seems like an impossible ending. It honestly sounds like something from a movie. The short version is that there were US and Soviet ships and submarines all around Cuba. One of the Soviet submarines, unknown to everyone else, had a nuclear torpedo ready to go. This particular submarine had lost contact with Moscow because of some technical issues and the air conditioning had failed. It was hot, the carbon dioxide levels were rising, and people were not necessarily in their sharpest state of mind.
While all of this was happening, the US ships started releasing depth charges into the sea, to try and coax the submarines to surface. As the depth charges exploded around his vessel, the captain of the submarine was convinced the war had started, and ordered the arming of the nuclear torpedo and came within minutes of launching it.
The only reason that nuclear war did not break out was because one member of the crew could envision an impossible peace. Vasily Arkhipov was the chief of staff of the flotilla, and he persuaded the captain and the rest of the crew to wait, to surface, and to refrain from a decision that would have absolutely obliterated the possibility of peace.
His actions were surprising, unimaginable, and unlikely.
I think our world today needs more of this unimaginable, surprising peace. When I read that description of what it was like for the songwriter to see people walking around heavy with anxiety, the circumstances are different but that feeling really resonated with me. There’s violence in every corner of the world. The situation in our own country feels like it’s at a breaking point. Political decisions keep us up at night and leave us feeling helpless. Some of us can hardly walk in the door of the home we grew up in because family tension is so high.
These are the things we’re holding. The darkness of the world is right in front of us. But we have to rememebr that’s not the whole story. There IS light to be seen...and light to be created. There’s peace that can begin with us.
Sarah Diaz, who is part of our congregation, shared something really powerful on her social media the other day, and I asked her if I could share about it today. She attended an event where the author Glennon Doyle was the keynote speaker. And in her speech, she talked about the idea of making peace with things. Like how there’s that saying of “make peace with your life” and it means to accept things for the way they are, to be ok with the state of things, kind of like that saying, “it is what it is.”
And there is certainly value and beauty in making peace with the reality of our lives and how things are unfolding. But what Glennon Doyle challenged the group...what if instead of simply making peace with your life, you could be really intentional about MAKING PEACE with your life?
What if we could see our lives not as just something to accept and live as they come at us, but as tools to create something that resembles peace in our world? What if we could believe that something like the absurd picture that Isaiah gives us is possible, and what if we believed that as people who follow Jesus that we had a specific and important role to play in creating that peace?
One thing that Sarah shared in her post, and that I would echo wholeheartedly, is that this idea of making peace can sound pretty high level and aspirational and it can be really hard to move from the IDEA of making peace to actually knowing what in the world we’re supposed to be doing with this idea. Jesus says, “blessed are the peacemakers” but then doesn’t give us a nice typed bulleted list about how we are to BECOME those blessed peacemakers!
But when I think about peace, a couple of distinct things come to mind.
(SLIDE) Peace is specific to the context.
A Russian submarine operator, a war-weary songwriter, an ancient Jewish prophet...these are all HIGHLY SPECIFIC contexts in which to work for peace. The peace we make? It’s probably not going to look exactly like those examples, and it doesn’t need to. Because we each are in a highly specific context of our own, where we are called to make peace as only we can. We may be positioned to have a hard but healing conversation. We may be able to use resources to create more peaceful conditions in our communities. We may be able to shovel a sidewalk for an aging neighbor. We may be someone with a lot of power and influence and choose to use that in a way that makes a difference on a really expansive scale.
As you think about making peace with your life, start here. Think about where God has put you, what your immediate sphere of influence is, and how peace can be made through you in those places.
And the other thing about peace is that (SLIDE)
Peace always takes courage.
Probably more courage than we think we have, but it’s a courage that I believe God WILL give us in abundance.
To be a peacemaker is one of the boldest, bravest things we can do. When we work for peace, it’s going to make people uncomfortable, it might push against what’s “normal” or “safe” or things that benefit people in power. To truly make peace means having an opinion, it means taking a stance, it means acting for the good of others even when it costs us something.
And it means having faith that God can do more than we can do on our own and letting ourselves believe that what seems impossible could actually come to be. It means holding on to the work of God and the promises of God that we see in Advent and the birth of Jesus. Because this is where courage springs from. We don’t need to try and manufacture it on our own. We just have to hold on to the promises that God makes, and follow the leading of God’s Spirit.
Because God’s promises, God’s Spirit...those are the things that will let us MAKE PEACE with our lives. That will let us see the light in the middle of the shadows. That will help us be part of God’s unlikely and surprising work in this world.
Let’s pray.