Jeremiah 6, 1 Thessalonians 5

“No Counterfeit Peace”

We need to talk about Gen Z, the up-and-coming generation I like to affectionately call “Zoomers”. Zoomers have spent most, if not all of their life in the twenty-first century, being shaped by technology and social media as well as the looming threat of economic crashes and environmental destruction. They are insightful, courageous, and funny. While millennial humor has been characterized as “random” or “nonsequitur” Gen Z humor is distinctively nihilist. There’s a saying that “there’s a grain of truth in every joke”. Zoomers are twice as likely as their parents’ generation to report bad mental health, and last year one study showed that 79% of Gen Z felt lonely. What does it mean for a generation of people to bond over nihilism– the notion that everything is meaningless? And how do we as people of faith respond to the claim of meaninglessness?

First, it is helpful to borrow from the wisdom of Ecclesiastes that there really is nothing new under the sun. Claims of meaninglessness come and go along with feelings of powerlessness. As long as there is sin in the world, there will be the powerful and the powerless.  The prophet Jeremiah prophesied to the people of Judah during decades of social and political turmoil. He is sometimes called the weeping prophet because he wept for the state of his people. Yet he was rejected, as prophets often are because he had the courage to name the evil present in his society.

The book of Jeremiah records that at this time, everyone was greedy for unjust gain. Everyone dealt falsely. This wasn’t a matter of a few bad apples. It was an entire social system that had been corrupted. And to make matters worse, everyone accepted that this was simply the way things were. They couldn’t imagine another way of living. When the prophet called them to search for the ancient paths, they ignored him.

But I’m sympathetic to the people. Could they have, like so many of Gen Z, rejected the possibility that God has anything to say to them? Their entire lives had been bad news after bad news. They had been raised up in conditions of war. Jeremiah is clear: this was not a time of peace. But the people had become callous to their condition because of their oppressors. They were told peace, peace enough times that they couldn’t perceive the injustice that surrounded them every day. Injustice was the air they breathed.

Thousands of years later, little has changed. We find ourselves living in political and economic systems that rely on our indifference to injustice and exploitation. Sometimes we are the victims. Sometimes we are the perpetrators. Most often we are something in between. We are indifferent bystanders to the reality of injustice. We have heard peace, peace enough times that we don’t see the injustice that affects our everyday lives. It’s the air we are breathing.

Peace has become synonymous with complacency. We’ve defined peace as the absence of conflict. But God says that peace and injustice cannot coexist. Peace that accepts injustice is a counterfeit alternative to the peace of Christ. This counterfeit peace is a cheap knock-off. But it turns out we can be suckers for a bargain. So we embrace counterfeit peace. We hold it in high esteem. It becomes an idol. But popular wisdom tells us that the thing about idols is that they demand sacrifices. Who is being sacrificed under our current political and economic systems? 

Counterfeit peace relies on our inattention to detail. It relies on our ability to forget the truth about the unjust world we live in. And worse, it relies on our ability to accept injustice. It relies on our collective complacency.

Paul speaks out against this complacency. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, he writes, “When they say ‘there is peace and security’ then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman”. That’s the other problem with idols. They ultimately prove to be powerless. Counterfeit peace is always temporary. The people take to the streets, the economy collapses, the pandemic spreads, elections are challenged. Peace, peace… but there is no peace.

This is the human story.

But against this backdrop is the heartbeat of this strange and sacred time called the Day of the Lord that beats throughout the story. Paul tells the Thessalonians that the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. No one will know the day or the hour. If your mind immediately goes to doomsday predictors standing on street corners, that’s okay– they are a powerful cultural image. For doomsday predictors, the Day of the Lord is an apocalyptic end of the world judgment. But I don’t think that’s really what Paul has in mind.

There are two important ways we can understand the Day of the Lord. First, we can think of it not as a singular day but as Days of the Lord– liberation events in history when God brings longed-for justice to the people. Think about the story of the Exodus, when God brought the people out of slavery in Egypt. When we look to the Day of the Lord, we are looking to the possibility of God’s reign drawing near on earth as it is in heaven. We pray and work for justice in the here and now, because this life matters. And second– the Day of the Lord is also our ultimate hope in God for the promised restoration of all things.

This is our hope in Christ, our purpose in the midst of the world’s meaninglessness. And in times like these, we can all use a little extra encouragement in keeping our hope. Encourage one another and build one another up in prayer, friendship, and community.

Friends, let us not be in the darkness about the Day of the Lord. Let us not remain idle to the idols of this world. Let us not bow down to counterfeit peace. God has promised us something better. A peace that passes all understanding. A peace that doesn’t sacrifice the poor or the foreigner. A world when all will know peace. God has not destined us for wrath but salvation.

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near. Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart.