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| "Peaceable Kingdom," by Edward Hicks. |
"Daring to Hope"
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Here we are, in the second week of Advent.
For a lot of people, there’s so much to do, at home, at church and
everywhere else. There are gifts to be purchased and wrapped...cards to
be addressed...cooking and baking to do...the house to clean... and decorating
to do.
In the
background, we have the news feed of our lives.
Mass shootings. Another child accidentally shooting himself with a gun
he found in the house. Thousands of migrant children separated from their families
and housed in cages. A migrant teenager dying from the flu. Impeachment
hearings. Environmental degradation. Huge economic disparities between the
uber-rich and those who struggle to provide food and basic shelter for
themselves and their families. The list could go on….
In the midst of all of this, Advent invites us to turn our thoughts to what it
means that God came and lived as one of us in our world to show us God’s
way? Advent invites us to wait… to pay attention… to prepare the
way of the Lord… and to live in hope.
In the Hebrew scripture lesson, we heard the prophet Isaiah singing a song of
hope 700 years before the birth of Jesus, in a time when things seemed hopeless. His message must have
sounded as unrealistic then as it does now.
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie with down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. . . .
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain…
the leopard shall lie with down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. . . .
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain…
The prophet Isaiah was probably writing in the period of the Syro-Ephramite
war, when the dynasty of David seemed like a mere dead stump, compared to its
enemies. The nation had been defeated and humiliated by another national
power. Their government was weak and ineffective, and the people were
dejected and demoralized. In the midst of all that, how do you live
in hope? Isaiah’s words
must have seemed terribly unrealistic—as
unrealistic as Isaiah’s words seem to a lot of people today.
Enter the Spirit of the Lord; a new shoot is coming out of the dead stump of
the monarchy. That’s what the Spirit of the Lord does—it brings life where things have been dead. The Spirit brings forth new green shoots of life.
Isaiah sings of a new kind of king—a
king upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests. God’s Messiah will use his
gifts to serve the people with equity and righteousness. What will the reign of
the Messiah will be like? The enmity that dominates the world is transformed
into peace.
A great theologian of the last century, Reinhold Niebuhr, once wrote: “Do you
want peace in this world? Then
work for justice.” Until there
is justice for everyone, there will
be no peace. For even a defeated enemy remains an enemy. The only
hope for peace is not the building up of more power to defeat and control—but
power to make our enemies our friends.
Advent invites us-- dares us-- to wait in hope for the coming of a different kind of King, who will use his
power to “rule the world with truth and grace” and transform creation into a
world in which every creature can live without fear.
Can you imagine a world without fear? No fear in Syria or Iraq or
Afghanistan or Yemen… no fear in Bethlehem or Jerusalem… no fear in
South Sudan. No fear in homes from an abusive parent or spouse. No fear
in our neighborhoods where innocent children have died to gun violence.
“They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be
full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” This is the promise and hope of Advent.
But hope is a fragile and fleeting thing.
Fast forward seven hundred years or so. Two
hundred years had gone by since the people of Israel had had a prophet in their midst.
They’re living under occupation, with
the Roman army enforcing the oppression of the Empire.
Suddenly, John shows up in the
wilderness, looking and sounding a lot like Elijah, who was expected to return to prepare the way for God’s coming
Messiah. “Repent, for the
kingdom of heaven has come near,” he
says. “Prepare the way of the LORD. Make his paths straight.”
John’s call to repentance and preparing the way is a call to turn around and
look for and hope in God’s future, which is breaking in on them. It’s a
call to commit to see our world as God’s
world and our future as God’s
future, because that’s what repentance is about.
And yet, more than 2,000
years later, amid the moral, religious, and political crises our nation and
world are facing, we are still waiting and longing.
Every
Advent John the Baptist shows up, because God loves us enough to hold us
accountable to be who and whose we. We are living in a
broken, hurting world. The people of Palestine
still live under occupation in a conflict that looks hopeless to a lot of us. Children in Flint and their families continue
to deal with the long-term
effects of lead poisoning. In our own communities and communities around
our nation, a parent can work 40 hours a week and still not be able to afford
nutritious food and other basic necessities for their children. In our nation,
consumerism and individualism rule. Our political system is broken. The
gap between the very rich and the poor continues to widen.
And so, we still long for a time of righteousness and justice and peace.
For a long time, I’ve felt drawn to the images painted by Edward Hicks, a
Quaker preacher and artist, who was so inspired by the vision in Isaiah 11 that
he painted at least 66 “peaceable kingdom” paintings.
A “peaceable kingdom.” Can you imagine it?
A time when broken creation becomes the completely harmonious creation God
intended. Predators-- wolves, leopards, lions, and bears will live in
harmony with the domestic animals like lambs, calves, goats, and cows.
Lions will eat straw like oxen, and a little child will play over the holes of
poisonous snakes. The earth will be filled with the “knowledge of the LORD.”
Jesus has come to live among us, full of grace and truth, and called us to follow
him, living God’s way of love.
So… how are we to live? How are we to live as a community of faith? Do we give in to
hopelessness and despair?
Do we dare to hope? Can we
trust in God’s promises? Can we
imagine a better world? Can we
believe in the possibility that injustice and oppression can be overcome, with
God’s help?
Jesus came and “proclaimed the reign of God: preaching good news to the poor
and release to the captives, teaching by word and deed and blessing the
children, healing the sick and binding up the brokenhearted, eating with
outcasts, forgiving sinners, and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.”[1]
To those living under the oppressive regime of the Roman Empire, Jesus taught
and embodied a different way of being in the world that allowed even the
marginalized and the poor to reclaim their identity as children of God. To people whose identities
had been shaped by centuries of living under exile and oppression of conquering
empires, Jesus demonstrated that the empire doesn’t have the power to
define who you are.
What Jesus proclaimed as a transforming message of hope has been spiritualized and
individualized and distorted. Jesus didn’t come to be a personal savior
for individuals, but to be the way, the truth and the life, to show us all a way
to live into God’s dream for all of
God’s people. He taught us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven.
When we repent—when we turn away from the ways of the world and the empire-- and
turn toward God’s way of
righteousness and justice and peace, we find our lives changing. As our lives are being transformed, we
can no longer be content to exist under the old ways of the world.
Our faith teaches us that God’s intention is for us to live in Beloved
Community together, in righteousness and justice. But we look around, and
we see there is still a gap between
the vision and reality.
We wait and hope for the time when God will fully bring in the Kingdom… the kin-dom. In the meantime, we live
into
the Kingdom of heaven—the kingdom of justice and peace, as we work for
a better world that more fully embodies God’s dreams.
Sometimes it’s hard to see how things can be different… or how the little
things we do can make a difference. But sometimes new life emerges
from the most unlikely places, emerging as a tiny green tendril out of a stump
that looked dead.
We live into hope in big and small ways when we change the life of a family by
providing them with a goat or a flock of chickens with a gift to the Heifer
Project. When we shop ethically and buying locally as much as
possible and stop using single-use plastics, we make a difference in peoples’
lives and the environment. Making choices to care for the environment and
giving to aid global and domestic causes all make a difference, and they witness to our hope.
When we engage the powers and principalities by contacting our elected
officials about issues that matter, we are daring to hope that we can make a difference.
When we volunteer in our local schools, when we tutor a child or teach an adult
how to read, we are living into hope.
We live into hope because the Christ’s reign is among us now as we live into
God’s dream for us, working for justice and peace for all of God’s beloved people.
In this season of waiting, God comes to us and nudges us: “Look! Look -- there
on that dead-looking stump. Do you see that green shoot growing?”
Can you see
it?
Rev. Fran Hayes
December 8, 2019
[1] “A
Brief Statement of Faith” of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/oga/pdf/boc2014.pdf
