Peace is a wonderful thing.  As I, along with millions, perhaps billions of other people across the globe, remembered September 11 over the weekend, I attended a vigil for peace at a United Church of Christ church in my community.
     Regrettably, peace was not a prime topic of conversation immediately after the events of day fifteen years ago.  For many, it was revenge.  Yes, many Westerners, Americans in particular, came together in a beautiful and largely unprecedented spirit of community, many also longed to avenge the loss of nearly 3,000 lives on home soil.
     And who can blame them?  When we are hit, our first instinct is to hit back.  Without cataloging the many conflicts that the exercise of this instinct has unleashed upon the planet, and without minimizing the deep, deep pain suffered by people who lost loved ones in tragedy of September 11, I, with no small amount of trepidation, might suggest that perhaps the little noticed at the time calls for peace had some merit.  Yes, nations need to defend themselves, and yes, justice is essential, and yes, it is a profoundly fallen world, a world to which total peace may never come.
     Yet as we at the peace vigil remembered Sunday night, when violence and evil come upon us, we do well to respond to it with not more violence and evil (properly understood), but as Romans 12 reminds us, deliberately considered and measured good.
     In the end, peace must--and one day, in the hidden and often unfathomable purpose of God, will--reign.