With candid insights and theological depth, this episode invites us to consider: How can we embody peace in fractured relationships, hurting communities, and a broken world? And how might Advent’s promise of peace shape the way we bear witness to God’s kingdom in the here and now?
We invite you to listen to the full conversation and reflect on what it means to seek and live out true peace today.
Listener Resources:
- Read “A Blessing for Silence & Solitude” by Christine Valters Paintner, which J.P. and Charlene use to open the episode.
- Charlene ends the conversation with an excerpt from War Talk by Arundhati Roy.
- If you’re a leader seeking to transform the way you lead in the new year, we invite you to join a Leaders Circle. This transformative 12-month cohort is designed for leaders who want to deepen their social sciences knowledge and cultivate a profound self-awareness that drives impactful leadership. To learn more, visit transformingengagement.org/leaders-circles.
About Our Guests:
J. P. Kang (he/him), Ph.D., began teaching Bible courses at The Seattle School in 2014, first as an Adjunct and then as an Affiliate faculty member. J. P.’s full-time vocation is as Pastor and Head of Staff of the Japanese Presbyterian Church of Seattle (established 1907), where he gets to care for a wonderfully diverse ohana! He received his M.Div. and Th.M. (Bible) at Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Bible from Union Presbyterian Seminary (Richmond, VA) with a dissertation entitled “A Dictionary of Epigraphic Hebrew.” His dissertation contains the vocabulary found in Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions from about 40 Near Eastern sites that were roughly contemporary with the period of the composition of the Hebrew Bible and is a research tool.
The Rev. Dr. Charlene Jin Lee is Associate Pastor for Practice and Formation at First Presbyterian Dallas.
Charlene is an experienced teacher and pastor whose ministerial career path began in 1998 in the field of Education. During the next several years, while obtaining her Master of Education and Ph.D. in Christian Education degrees, Charlene served as a children and family Pastor and a Director of Christian Education. For the past ten years, Dr. Lee has served on the Advanced Pastoral Studies Faculty at the Graduate School of Theology at University of Redlands, California.
Episode Transcript:
J.P.: We’re open our time together by praying a blessing for silence and solitude by Christine Valters Painner. And we’ll leave moments of silence for reflection.
Charlene: Holy source of silence beneath the clatter and din of the every day you offer your mysteries to our hearts.
J.P.: You call us to pause, to slow down and listen to the true longing planted in each of us by you, a seed of holy desire.
Charlene: Support us in letting go of the inner and outer noise
J.P.: Open wide in us a sacred cave for stillness where we can attune to your presence,
Charlene: Enliven us with a gift of your sweet music and allow us to encounter your holy presence flaming in each of our hearts.
J.P.: Help us to catch a note of your song in the wind or in the voice of another, in times of sadness, and in the rush of our lives.
Charlene: In a world so filled with distraction, we listen for your whispers, which call us to another way of being and ask us for the courage to respond to all we discover in this tabernacle of silence.
J.P.: Amen.
Charlene: Amen.
J.P.: Well, Charlene, as we speak this morning, it has been three days since the 2024 presidential election here in the United States, which yielded a very clear, unambiguous victory for Donald Trump and the party he owns. And currently there is no shortage of analyses competing to explain his victory and Kamala Harris’s defeat, no shortage of finger pointing and blame. And the fact that many of these are in tention, if not outright contradiction, cautions at least me, against jumping to conclusions too quickly. Personally, I find the blame game poisonous and exhausting and not productive. So I am doing my best not to indulge. Similarly, the proliferation of memes has understandably been amusing but not ultimately satisfying.
What I am comfortable saying for now is that consequences, I think largely negative, are coming for everyone, even those who did not vote. And I believe that the sense of peace and stability or lack thereof are illusions and that we would do well to look deeper, to avoid being swept away by or manipulated by emotional currents. So I will be the first to confess that things do not feel peaceful. And for me it begs these questions as we approach and enter the season of advent. One question is, what is the nature of peace as the Bible envisions it? And second, how might we know this kind of peace?
Charlene: Yeah, the boundaries of peace appear more clear in times of chaos because we are all reaching for peace. If we feel peace, we have peace, its boundaries are not noticeable. It’s like all around us. This mild air. You talked about, no shortage of analysis, no shortage of commentary, this post-election. There is also no shortage of anger. Beneath anger really is a lot of grief. I’ve been sitting in that grief within myself. I’ve been practicing sitting with that grief with others, and I’m finding that once I’m able to recognize anger as an emotion and not become it, I’m able to imagine working through it as we work through grief. And I sat with some of the women in our church yesterday, very much in my mind was a conversation that you and I had from the prophet Jeremiah where people are speaking peace, peace when there is no peace.
And that’s what I heard from my friends and my congregants. Peace people are saying peace and don’t want to hear about it. And one of the things that I wrote down in my reflection this morning was we will cry and we will roll up our sleeves working towards some semblance of peace, imagining the peace that is promised to us. And we will do it in many places, but I hope we’ll often do it around the table. And in yesterday’s context, I said, we’ll do it around the table with words, some good words, some bad words with sorrow and with lasagna and with trust where we can speak our truth so that we can begin to do the work of rolling up our sleeves. And so I feel really unequipped to talk about peace because I’m not sure where or how I can draw the boundaries of peace within myself. And imagine the communal peace which requires some acts of reconciliation or maybe just really hard work to think about the relationship we have with our neighbors, the relationship we have with our nation and the world that seems so jagged and hurtful and alienating to me. How do I with integrity enter into that work that is required for a genuine peace?
J.P.: Yeah, I hear you, Charlene. I too suspect that the road to healing, recovery of balance, finding some fleeting semblance of peace goes through many tears, many screams, but time together there. I think hindsight, we will see that the wisdom of allowing that time to be in the mess with our extreme emotions and the sensations in our bodies to express those so that we can find equilibrium. Yeah. So thank you. Well, I was thinking about this topic when I was first invited and immediately thought of asking you to be in conversation. I was thinking about the fact that in English, the word peace, and its common synonyms, the source suggests tranquility or calm, solitude. Oftentimes in English they have a individualized, private internal spiritualized sense. So the word solitude, right? Very individual. And I’m not saying anything new. This is really more by way of reminder. But when we look at the words that are most commonly translated piece from our biblical tradition, Hebrew, shalom, Greek, eirene, these words are not private or abstract. Rather they are communal and relational. And so a couple of examples from both testaments from Psalm 29, verse 11, we read this blessing, ‘May the Lord give strength to his people. May the Lord bless his people with shalom…’ with peace. It is a community blessing. It doesn’t have meaning apart from that. And we think about the hosts of heaven that joined the angels in Luke chapter two, verse 14, who proclaim ‘glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth, peace among those whom he favors,’ right? It is that connecting glue among those whom he favors. So again, peace is collective. And finally, I would say you can also see the collective nature of peace in the biblical world from the places that it is understood as the opposite of the state of being at war or referring to peace as the state of public order, or finally as a synonym for friendship. And all of these ways, peace is communal and relational. And I think reflecting on that may help us recover: what does it mean to know peace?
Charlene: Yeah, I mean that really challenges I think our notion, at least I would say in my tradition or our shared tradition and the Presbyterian reformed expression of the faith, so much of it is both contemplative. And when it is contemplative, it is private. I’m reminded of moments in our worship where we practice silence and silent confession. For example, we share a common confession and we, at least in our order of worship, we offer a time to hold silence for silent confession. I always think about that. What are people praying about? What are we confessing? And then we declare the promise, the grace, promise of grace, and then we share the peace. Let us be at peace with one another. God’s love is between us. Christ’s peace is among us. And I’m curious to interrogate that silence because we do it in private. If we were to practice confessing and being confessed to not as one who can offer redemption, but as fellow confessing people, what would that look like in a particular faith community? But think about that in the world. So the biblical tradition that you have just dotted and sketched out for us that’s consistent with this communal blessing of peace. How do we collectively open ourselves to that when we’ve been so socialized to do things independently, quietly, without imposing discomfort to others, even our spirituality? So much of it is privatized for good or for bad, but it’s kind of the first thoughts I had as I was hearing you speak about the way that peace is brought to the people in the biblical traditions as we have them.
J.P.: Yeah, I mean, maybe we learn from our Jewish siblings when they sit Shiva, when they sit in silence with those who are grieving as a step towards recovering, finding consolation, finding peace. You think about Job’s friends, at least they knew well enough to sit silently for seven days before offering words of comfort or rebuke.
Charlene: That’s really powerful. I mean, the physicality, the proximity to have infleshment of care and thought, when somebody is grieving, we hardly know what to say and we’re all trying to figure out what’s the right thing to say. And maybe it’s really thinking about what is the right way to be, which is just to move your body closer to the one who is hurting.
J.P.: And I think you already point to the possibility that in worship, maybe the language can be changed to say we are sitting together in silence, you in your private thoughts, but you and your neighbors, those around you are all waiting together or confessing together.
Charlene: That is powerful.
J.P.: Well, yeah, Charlene, you already mentioned the repeated words in Jeremiah earlier, that God is condemning those who say peace, peace or as the CEB translation has ‘all is well, all is well, they insist when there is in fact no peace, when in fact nothing is well.’ And so the Bible is aware that there is a difference between what people call peace or peaceful and the peace that is defined by God. And so it makes me conscious that in our current national conversation, if that’s the right word, people use words in different ways. And we have to be aware that when somebody talks about fear or trust, kind of a word pair, they too also can mean different things to different people. One person’s piece is another person’s violence understood in different ways. So yeah, I guess I would just kind of maybe draw this section to a close by saying that we can affirm from our very quick survey of the biblical tradition that true peace is to be experienced in community and in relationship.
Charlene: Yeah.
J.P.: Well, one other sort of connection that I have been thinking about for some weeks is the season of advent and the theme of peace, thinking about the first advent and the shadow of empire, right? Jesus born in occupied territory of the Roman Empire. And for us to, when we revisit the advent and Christmas story that we know so well from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, I think it grounds us to go back to the prophet Isaiah to understand how the theme of peace functioned there so that we hear its echo more sensitively when it appears in the gospels.
And so if you’ll take that trip 700 years prior to the birth of Jesus, back to the Judean court of the late eighth century, the prophet Isaiah who lived and worked in Jerusalem was a trusted advisor to the king, was no stranger to political and military violence. And the crises of his day are indelibly stamped in the oracles, the words that he preaches over and over. Isaiah is addressing the potential of war, the military political pressure put on the kings of Judah by foreign kings. And the repeated affirmation, repeated exhortation through Isaiah’s words over and over again, is trust in the Lord rather than in human power. And might Isaiah 7, Isaiah 9 26 30 through 32, we read Oracle’s urging trust might call it the gospel of trust that alone leads to true peace that leads to deliverance. So this is important because our celebration of advent and Christmas rests heavily on the vision that Isaiah had of a son who was to be born, a child who is given, who is called among other things, the prince of peace. And so hopefully that helps us hear the affirmation of peace and the advent Christmas story, not in some vacuum of idealism, like, oh, everything’s going to be fine and no one’s going to get hurt. But the original hearers of the promise of a child and of a son, a prince of peace were hanging on with white knuckles, afraid of invasion, afraid of destruction.
Charlene: And even when that prophecy was unfolding with the birth of Jesus, peace was not apparent in the world or to most people. In fact, most people were in horror and hiding and in fear you would consider Jesus and his parents refugees escaping and under empire. And so while we know the promise of peace is coming in that birth, and the angels may have known, but the world long lay the world, it was not a time of glistening lights and a sweet manger. It was cold, I imagine hard, harsh fear. And yet God’s peace was making her way into the world.
Can we notice, will that impact us if we know the stories unfolding? Does that eternal have a chance in the temporal to show up and have an impact on those who of us who are believing it, bearing witness to it? And how does that then shape or inform how we bear witness to a world that is breaking in a world that we’re not sure how we participate in creating peace when we’re already so hurt? But that’s also the gospel, isn’t it? That the reality is we’re going to be on the wrong side of power every time we follow the way of Jesus, and we will have to love when we are cursed, and we will have to forgive when the person so unlovable is hurting you. And to trust that that is the way that Jesus went to show us how to love even to suffering, even to death.
And the good news there is that we’re not alone. And the good news there is that resurrection is possible every day, and resurrection is possible within us. Resurrection is possible in the world. So perhaps that piece in trusting in God’s presence and placing our trust in God, maybe we can only really experience that when we have no other option. And I think I live in a place of relative privilege and relative privilege and a lot of privilege where not every day do I feel there are no other options, but to trust in God alone. And maybe those moments will come when that is all we have, and that’s when we can truly encounter the peace that transcends all understanding.
J.P.: Yeah. What do you say reminds me of that image in the middle of Psalm 23, the classic Psalm of trust in which there’s that odd little detail. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies, right? There is no table that is not in the presence of my enemies. And so we never get to maybe eat in peace. We know there are people who are out to undo us, to tear us down even as we enjoy God’s provision of sustenance, of peace, a daily portion of peace. And I also think your earlier statement, the audacity of Christmas story, that we say that this is good news that Jesus and his parents had to flee to Egypt to flee the slaughter of innocents by Herod everyone to and under, which is itself an echo of, you think of Pharaoh decreeing everyone, every baby boy, to be thrown in the Nile, the slaughter of those innocents. And yet somehow Moses is born, Moses is saved, and there’s something ridiculous about calling that good news in the face of so much suffering. And yet we hold onto that hope at this season as we know the innocents continue to be slaughtered around the world.
Charlene: Yeah, hope fights in the dark. Because if you could see it all, you wouldn’t need hope.
J.P.: Yeah. Well, how rich, I want to move to a second affirmation about peace. So we talked about earlier about peace being communal and relational and connectional. The second thing again, as by way of reminder, is that peace is a gift from God. We don’t control it. It doesn’t come to us on demand. I think it comes when we are able to receive it when we’re in the right posture or place to receive it. And so I offer to you, how might we assume a good or a best posture to receive the gift of peace?
Charlene: Yeah. I think remembering that our presence is always before God, that there is no place we can flee to even if we make our bed in the depths, whether we ascend to the heaven. I love the psalmist imagery of taking flight to the farthest limits of the sea, there you are. Again, this goes back to the affirmation that you are encouraging us with is true peace is found in trusting in God, which assumes God’s presence. That God’s presence is with us. We are not forgotten in that. And it’s hard to remember that when we are doing our day-to-day in a world that values acceleration, competition, productivity to prove ourselves, I know that in my own personal spiritual practice and the spiritual practice of my faith tradition is being still and quiet, remembering that I am a beloved of God, whose presence has not left, is a place where peace can be recovered and restored and reimagined as a point of departure.
For now, then how do I live in that reality? Not away in a cave, but engaging, integrating, looking, bearing witness to a world that doesn’t offer that in its default setting. So almost, you have to pull yourself away from that for moments or for a period of time to not have that expectation that I’m going to make meaning even of the silence or make meaning to provide a good answer or insight, but to just be still and to not have to do anything or prove, provide or prove anything. And in that kind of unadorned way of being in simple silence is a mode in which we might open ourselves to the peace of God that has already come.
J.P.: Yeah. I think when we are able to make the choice to put ourself in a place where we can mute the outside noise, that’s how I make, I think that’s the best way I know to make room to hear God. I think in that posture or space, we might hear the words we most need to hear for the sake of peace: fear not, I love you, take, eat and drink, or I am. Right?
Charlene: Yeah. Come away to a quiet place and rest a while. I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
J.P.: And my faith says that that experience is not wishful thinking, that is not utopian, that is however imperfect. It is the way that we participate in receiving peace and enabling others to experience that blessing through our connections in our relationships.
Charlene: And I think when we draw towards God and we seek and turn our gaze towards God, the gospel narratives would have us hear God saying, now turn toward one another, sending us back. And that image of going towards God and says, God says, welcome and now go and turn toward one another is an invitation for me to remember what it means to live in relationship with others in the continuing work of co-creating peace imperfectly so as you’ve said, but knowing that ultimately God’s peace is coming for all the human family.
J.P.: I can’t help but think of the women who went together to the tomb and to discover it empty and in their terror marks as they ran away and said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. But that is the prelude to the tremendous good news of the resurrection. So yeah, we experienced that as part of discipleship that those moments of sheer terror and uncertainty as a prelude,
Charlene: Prelude to proclamation.
J.P.: Yeah. Yeah. Witness. Well, I want to lean a little bit into the, we’ve been talking a little bit about imperfection and things that are hard and messy and want to offer this last advent verse from Luke chapter 2, verse 11, where again, the divine messengers tell the shepherds in that memorable phrase, that: ‘born to you and the city of David today, a savior.’ And that reminds us of the purpose that Jesus came to save us from our sins to bring about reconciliation between God and between humanity. And to me that is the most uncomfortable, the cost of that for us post-election as we think about a fractured landscape, is that if we’re going to be agents of peace, then it calls us to loving our enemies, calling those who disagree with our right to exist. It’s going to be the hard and messy work of relational repair, the tentative step to build a bridge. It’s going to be practicing forbearance, turning the other chief, walking the extra mile, killing with kindness and love, because that’s the only way we know of to change hearts. And so I offer that as the cost and hope that I’m able to pay some of that. I by no means saying that will be easy, but if we’re serious about increasing the amount of true peace, some of that’s going to involve this uncomfortable and hard work.
Charlene: And in order to do that hard work, I think we need to find times and places and community and in scripture for those of us who regard holy scripture as a source of God’s presence to fortify the muscles around our soul to do that work.
It’s a lot to ask somebody who is hurting to now go and be generous. And yet that is the example Jesus showed. But Jesus was not alone. He sought friends. His disciples were there. They were imperfect followers, and Jesus was their leader. But I also see Jesus oftentimes leaning on them as companions when things got hard, he asked for them to stay. And I think those of us who care for those who will be, if not already, are victims of a new realm in our political sphere, in this country, in our world. And I think politics is intensely personal. And those of us who are on the wrong side of power as they stand now and as they look to be forming in the days and years ahead, we also need to remember to care for ourselves, care for one another so that we can be fortified to be able to do and participate in that work that is the blessed way. That is a very narrow way. It helps when you are not doing it alone.
J.P.: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s okay to say not today, I’m not ready to do this for today.
Charlene: Not today.
J.P.: Yeah. Not today. Maybe not even this week, but eventually. Eventually.
Charlene: And I think part of our role as preachers, people who are given and trusted in a place of leadership with our words, with part of it is really enlivening. And this is from the opening prayer just enlivening the imagination of that, bringing that gospel. And even for us, even if it’s temporarily believing it to be true temporarily, meaning when we’re preaching, asking the gift of belief for it to be true, we have to be convinced that this is not just a story that should inspire us to be good people, but that this is the eternal final story and that we are a part of it and we’re invited to partake in that story. And what those actions, decisions, postures look like has been laid out for us in the story of Jesus Christ. And that is the call and the charge. And so I pray that we would have the favor of belief, the favor of words, pictures, memories, visions to enliven that faithful imagination of heaven on earth of Christ coming again, being able to say, Lord Jesus, come. And it’s not just a refrain in a beautiful song in advent season, but it’s really our desperate desire and plea.
J.P.: I think adversity and suffering are the crucible or is where creativity flourishes. I think the Bible is example of that, right? So much of it came out of the experience of the exiles, the experience of coping with the death of Jesus. So I know that that will be a bright light for me in the years ahead. Well, thank you, Charlene. I want to just offer one last image as an encouragement, as a challenge for our calling. Ephesians 2:14 reads, ‘for Christ is our peace.’ It’s that communal gift of God’s peace. It’s not individual, private, ‘and in Christ, he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall that the hostility between us.’ Seems like a pipe dream. But I think that is part of what it means to live out peace, is that we do this reconciling work on behalf of God. And so yeah, invite and welcome your kind of closing gift to us.
Charlene: Yeah, the dream will be fulfilled one beautiful morning, but until that day, we hold onto this advent hope, anticipating scanning the horizon for moments and maybe in much grace gazes of that dream here. And I’m encouraged by this sentence in one of the essays in Arundhati Roy’s War Talk: ‘in a time of terror when the reality presents to you that hope has no chance, she writes, another world, is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. She is on her way.’
J.P. Go in peace.
Charlene: Amen.
