Christians celebrating Christmas and Jews commemorating the Festival of Lights holiday of Hanukkah both remember, at this time, the prophetic voice of Isaiah, who exhorted us to transform swords into plowshares.
In the spirit of the Christmas Truce of 1914 — when roughly a hundred thousand German and British soldiers along the World War I Western Front spontaneously stopped fighting for a night and shared food, sang Christmas carols and played soccer together — FOR-USA, CODEPINK and the National Council of Elders organized a statement calling for a 2022-2023 Christmas Truce to take place during the Roman and Orthodox Christmas times and the Hanukkah season. Around a thousand faith leaders, including Dr. Cornel West, Bishop William Barber, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Janet Wolf, Rev. Liz Theoharis, Sr. Cô Thích Nữ Chân Không, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Dr. Daisy Khan, Dr. Jim Wallis, Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, and Rev. James Lawson, signed onto the statement appealing to the U.S. “to take a leadership role in bringing the war in Ukraine to an end through supporting calls for a ceasefire and negotiated settlement, before the conflict results in a nuclear war that could devastate the world’s ecosystems and annihilate all of God’s creation.”
The way out of the war in Ukraine will not be a military solution. As the toll of death and destruction continues to mount and the potential for escalation and the use of nuclear weapons grows, the path toward peace in Ukraine requires powers of a different sort: negotiation and imagination. The 1914 Christmas Truce was a moment so shocking to our usual expectations that it continues to reverberate in our collective imaginations over a hundred years later and inspires us to believe in miracles of peace.