A Sermon preached at St David’s Uniting Church, Treforest on the Second Sunday of Advent 2025

“Peace on earth” is not a distant dream that we pray for – it is something we can make here now.
Perhaps the first step is to stop blaming. It’s easy to say there would be peace if Netanyahu or Putin or Trump came to their senses. But that isn’t true. The causes of war and terrorism are much more complex than that.
After this morning’s service we are going to take part in the Red Line for Gaza. This is a campaign organised by many organisations as well as Christian Aid. Today we are following Christian Aid’s suggestion of making a red line. If we are standing outside, anyone passing by will see us, but even if we are inside it will be photographed and widely publicised. People will know which side we are on.
Some people may ask: is it right for a Christian church to be taking sides on a political issue? Thinking of that well-known passage in Ecclesiastes 3, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”, we could add that there is a time for balance and compromise and there is a time for taking sides. The consistent teaching of the Bible is that God is on the side of the oppressed against those who oppress them. Although God said the Jews were his chosen people, there were times when he was with them and there were times when he was against them. It depended on the situation at the time. The appalling situation in Gaza today is one in which we are called to take sides with the oppressed against those who oppress them, and that means with the Palestinians against the state of Israel.
The reason given for what Israel is doing in Gaza is that two years ago Hamas, without warning, attacked Israel and killed about 1200 people and took about 250 hostages, including innocent children. Of course, Israel couldn’t just let this happen. The declared aim of Hamas is to completely do away with Israel as a state, and the Israelis had to defend themselves. But their reaction has turned out to be out of all proportion. Rather than seek out the culprits and bring them to justice, they have devastated the whole region of Gaza. They have cut off essential services, killed many thousands of men, women and children, and inflicted mass starvation and disease on the population. There may be arguments as to whether this should be defined as genocide, but there have certainly been many war crimes, and we have to say “enough is enough”. This must stop.
There has been a long history leading up to this. Israel, the Palestinians and Egypt have been fighting over the Gaza Strip for decades. It has become a prison, enclosed by barriers so that the people were living in poverty with no chance of escape. At the same time, Israel has never ceased to expand its borders at the expense of the Palestinian inhabitants. On the other side of Israel there is the West Bank, which Israel occupied illegally in 1977 and has been taking over bit by bit ever since.
In 2018 some of us from this church made a journey to the Holy Land and saw the situation for ourselves. We visited refugee camps where Palestinians still nurse a grievance over the way they lost their homes in 1949. We also visited the Tent of Nations, a farm belonging to a Christian family, and we saw and heard the pressure they have suffered over the years. Though they have owned the land for generations, the Israeli lawyers have persistently refused to recognise them as the legal owners, and the neighbouring settlements have put them under constant pressure. Their driveway has been blocked off with heavy rocks. We had to get off our coach and walk the rest of the way. This was possible for us, but of course impossible for the farm to bring in supplies and bring out their produce to market. For this they have to take a roundabout trip adding miles to the journey.
The neighbouring settlers, with the support of the Israeli Government, have destroyed their crops and prevented them from building, so that they live virtually underground. Through it all they keep their contact with the outside world and have support and visitors from many countries. They are determined to live at peace with their neighbours and keep saying, “we refuse to be enemies”.
This kind of thing happens all over the West Bank, and since the start of the war with Gaza it has increased. Palestinians are driven from their land, often violently, and their crops and homes are destroyed – all with the support of the Israeli Government. The Hamas attack two years ago was a reaction to all this.
But who is to blame? The history goes further back. After the terrible Nazi Holocaust there was a huge wave of sympathy for the Jewish people and a strong feeling around the world that they must have a home of their own where they can feel safe. That was the reason for United Nations recognising the State of Israel in 1949. The Nazi regime in Germany and the people who supported it must surely bear a portion of the blame for what has happened since.
But where does blaming stop? Before the First World War, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled over a vast area of the Middle and Near East for more than 500 years. The First World War brought it to an end, and during that war the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, issued a statement saying: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. It included the clause: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
When the war ended, Britain was given the responsibility for Palestine. But after the Second World War, in their eagerness to get a Jewish state established, the British government wasn’t particularly careful about making sure that the rights of the inhabitants were recognised. They kept one part of their promise but neglected the other. This resulted in a violent conflict in which many of the Arab communities were destroyed and the people lost their land and homes. Generations have grown up with a bitter feeling against Israel as an occupying invader. So the British people are not quite innocent in this situation.
And it goes back further still. A few weeks ago I happened to see on television the film Fiddler on the Roof, one of the most popular musicals ever produced. It gave us characters and songs that we still remember today. It portrays the life of a Jewish village in Russia in the early 1900s, a close knit community with rich traditions. Its main character is a man who struggles with maintaining the tradition but has to adapt his attitudes to a world that is changing, even within his own family. In many ways it is a charming and humorous film. But the end is tragic. All the little struggles going in the community become insignificant when local government officials decide the village must be demolished and the inhabitants are given three days’ notice to pack their bags and leave. Those people had built the village themselves. It had lasted for at least three generations, so for most of them it was the only home they had known. But within three days they were all scattered. Some went to other parts of Russia, some to Poland, Germany and America, and the community with all its memories and its rich traditions was no more. The last scene of the film shows them pulling their carts, loaded with as many possessions as they can carry, out into the unknown.
This brought home to me the fact that for centuries Jews in Europe have had a precarious existence, sometimes tolerated, often hated and persecuted, and never secure. And this goes back to the early days of Christianity. Jesus preached a message that could have renewed the Jewish community. His first disciples were Jews, but before long their ways had separated and there was Christianity, an all-powerful religion that persecuted Jews. I’m sure that’s not what Jesus intended, but it was one example of the way human beings have a constant capacity to mess things up.
Who is to blame? I don’t believe in “original sin” in the sense that we are all born under the wrath of God because of the sin of Adam and Eve in eating the forbidden fruit. But it is obvious that there is such a thing as universal sin: no human being is innocent. We are born into a world of wrong, and we are part of it. Noe of us can ever be innocent. We have the potential to do good things that make it a beautiful world, but we also have the capacity to mess things up. And that gives us the potential of doing really atrocious and wicked things and making the world a hell.
This is why we believe that Jesus came into the world not to rescue the Jewish people from their enemies but to rescue the whole human race from itself. Sometimes we have to stand up for those who are suffering, and condemn the actions and attitudes that cause the suffering. But at the same time we must recognise that we can never simply divide the world into the innocent and the guilty, much less assume that we are the innocent! There are no pure saints and no pure villains. No matter how good or how bad people are, they are all human beings.
War isn’t created by a few nasty people. It’s something we all have a part in. Some years ago when I was travelling in China, I was impressed by the way ordinary Chinese people welcomed visitors. I went on a trip down the famous river Li with its spectacular scenery. Every time we passed a village, people were standing on the riverbank waving to us, and every time we stopped, children would come up and practise their English on us. They were delighted to meet us.
I found myself thinking, “Ordinary people everywhere want to be friendly: then why is there war?” I think the answer is that we all want peace but we also want the things that can only be achieved by aggression and competition and war. We want a more comfortable standard of living. We want more things and more money to buy things, and we care more about having things for ourselves and our families than about the welfare of other people. We are afraid of immigrants because we may have to take a smaller share while they take a bigger one. We know people are starving in other parts of the world, but we don’t want to sacrifice our hard-earned wealth for them. Idealism makes us want peace, but materialism makes us want things that can only be obtained by competition and conflict.
Surely the most important question we have to be asking as Christian believers is not what the politicians should do or what the rich and powerful should do, but what can we do to open the world for the kingdom of God to come in.
What are the practical things we can do every day to create peace? We can:
• work for justice not just by campaigning but by starting where we are: by being just
• start trying to see things from other people’s point of view
• make friends with people of different communities and cultures: we’re already doing it in this church by making contact with refugees and asylum seekers and reaching out to people of other faiths and cultures. But we can do more – how well do we know our neighbours?
• make friends not just with people who are different from ourselves in interesting ways, but people we profoundly disagree with (including other Christians!)
• listen to people instead of just telling them they are wrong: try to understand why they feel as they do.
It’s easy to make conflict. It’s harder to make peace, but that is what we are called to do, and the world needs it more than ever.