Peace Making Presents

This is Session 4 of the Prince of Peace: Jesus and Peacebuilding from the Election to the Holidays webinar series.

Advent celebrates the central fact that God began building peace with us by giving a Gift. Following this example, gifts are a powerful tool for peacebuilding in our lives, relationships, and organizations. We’ll explore how gifts — of empathy, time, attention, and material things — can transform situations and hearts.

In this session: Giving Across Someone’s Story: how a simple secret about unexpected gifts can be used to open up space for peace and transformation. The surprising context of Jesus’ Luke 16 advice to use wealth to build relationships and its connection to his advice about living stress-free. A mini-workshop on gift ideas for those we want to impact with peace. Plus a special gift from Camp to you.

Session Notes

Here’s some of the things mentioned in this session that you can explore on your own. Please remember that Camp offers these links and resources as explanatory documents as part of a conversation that includes some hard questions worth asking and sharing them here does not imply an endorsement or official position of Camp, it’s board, staff, or constituents. We are a diverse community whose position is peace and work is love!

Giving Across Someone’s Story

A person is meant to connect Heaven to Earth. But how do humans connect Heaven and Earth? They do this by the two key elements of their story: aspiration and situation. Every person is reaching for something in life — reaching for Heaven in some way. They want to be a better person, they want to get somewhere better than this, they want to do something higher: this is their aspiration. They are also firmly planted in the reality of their Earthly here-and-now: this is their situation. If we develop skills to listen and hold the tension between these two parts of people’s stories, we open up space for God to do something. I’ve seen him do it so many times before — dozens and dozens literally. That’s why I can’t wait to share the story of how we — people who want to be faithful friends on other’s spiritual journeys — can start that journey with those around us.

In the third session, Pain and Need Aren’t Partisan, we shared how essential it is to recognize these two components of story to build belonging with people. Kevin King shared stories of how recognizing the aspiration of people in a bad situation led to deeper and more meaningful relationship. Gifts can also help make this connection.

Let me give you an example. Suzy and I have made it a practice to invest in young adults. But we do this in a specific way. Many of the young adults come to us with significant problems and struggles in their life. Beginning adulthood was always tough. In this day and age, it’s even harder. So we really feel its important to engage young adults meaningfully in their situation. But if that’s all we do, people don’t feel seen. They feel like their just a problem and we’re only involved because its our job or because that raises money. So we’ve made it a habit of giving gifts that connect to a person’s aspiration and not just their situation. We find out someone who is working as a laborer at Camp used to love art back in the day. So we buy them an art set and some canvases. We see the competitive spirit in a construction intern, so we give them a mountain bike for racing.

Conversely, we also connect to people around their aspiration. They are doing something amazing and that brings them into our circle. But the problem with doing something amazing is that people relate to you based on your performance, and they may not see your underlying situation: what it costs you to do what you do, or the everyday realities you face. When we’ve given gifts to these people related to their situation: money to help with costs; time and support to make their work easier; or something for their self-care, they also feel seen and like they belong in a special way.

This is what we mean by giving across someone’s story. When we give a gift that acknowledges the part of their story that is the hardest to be vulnerable about, it shows we see and we care and that we can be trusted because we will respond with grace in the area of their fear and possibly shame.

A Trinity of Gifts

Gifts is a really important theme theologically. First, we must see that God always intended to give himself as a gift:

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.”

Genesis 15:1

Most certainly, even after humanity rejected God in many ways, he still gave us his Son:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

John 3:16

Interestingly, the Father and the Son together give the Holy Spirit as a gift:

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth.

John 14:16-17a (see also Acts 2:38)

We can take away two main ideas from this. First, the idea of grace and gift are very related. When we say the Christianity is a grace-based religion, it is an acknowledgment that everything in life is a gift from God and the practice of our faith — being like the Father, Son, and Spirit — means giving ourselves as gifts to others. Second, giving ourselves as a gift is the most important giving. Time, attention, and care are always the best and most life-giving gifts.

Jesus Says to Buy Friends?

Jesus told his disciples a story about a business manager who was about to be fired, so he discounted the debts of his owner so he could survive on favors after he got the boot. The moral of the story:

I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

Luke 16:9

To apply the story to ourselves, we have to realize we haven’t managed the world God has given us very well. That means for all of humanity and for each of us individually, the pink slip is coming. Jesus’ advice is to use our temporary, earthly wealth to build relationships with eternal impact, so when we get led to the door by security for the last time in this life, we will have something to live on in the next.

Mini Gift Ideas Workshop

[We’ll add ideas after the session here]

A Gift from Camp

It doesn’t seem right to talk about gifts and not give on to you, our loyal participants in this series. A good gift is a piece of yourself, so I humbly offer the book below that I wrote as a young missionary in NYC. The book in the first in a 12 book series that follows the life of Jesus in a year. This first book is intended to start with the Advent of Jesus and apply it to our own lives. See if it blesses you. If it does, there are 11 more in the series.