“Daring to Hope”
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Last weekend I saw “Catching Fire”
at the movies. It’s the film adaptation
of the second book in The Hunger Games
trilogy.[1] The Hunger Games tells the story of Katniss
Everdeen and her struggle to survive in the post-apocalyptic and totalitarian
country of Panem, which is a fictionalized North America of the future. According to the story, war and environmental disaster destroyed the
United States, and out of the remnants grew the new country of Panem.
This country consists of a wealthy
Capitol city—the center of totalitarian power--with twelve destitute districts
surrounding it. The Capitol asserts complete
control over the districts, forcing the people there to abide by strict rules
and work in industries that supply the needs of the Capitol.
The annual Hunger Games are a
nationally-televised spectacle in which 2 teenagers from each district are
randomly chosen to be tributes and forced to fight to the
death in a huge arena. The games are an
instrument of oppression, designed to remind the people in the districts how
powerless they are. They reminded me of
the way the Roman Empire used the cross as an instrument of torture and to make
a spectacle of the punishment of those who resisted their occupation.
The Hunger Games trilogy is part of
the dystopian
fiction genre that has grown in popularity over the past 100 years, but
especially in the past several decades.
Younger people, in particular, have been resonating with the themes of
systemic evil—including imperialism, totalitarianism, devastation of the
environment, growing inequality between the rich and poor, and the search for
meaning and hope.
The themes we find in our scripture
texts in Advent are struggling with some of these same themes.
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…
That’s what the prophet
Isaiah said 700 years before the birth of Jesus. He 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.
As
Woody Allen put it: “The lion will lay
down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” Another time, Allen said, "On the day the lion
and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up."
Or
as someone else said, to have the wolf lie down with the lamb, we would need an
inexhaustible supply of lambs.
And yet—we are still longing for a time of
righteousness and justice and peace. The
vision of harmony in these verses from Isaiah are often referred to as “the
peaceable kingdom.” For a long time, I’ve
been drawn to the images painted by Edward Hicks, a Quaker preacher-artist, who
was so inspired by the vision in Isaiah 11 that he painted at least 66
“peaceable kingdom” paintings.
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/610/The_Peaceable_Kingdom
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/610/The_Peaceable_Kingdom
Can you imagine it?
A time when God’s reign is finally consummated, when the Messiah—the
anointed one—brings it in, when broken creation becomes the completely
harmonious creation God intended? Wolf,
leopard, lion, and bear 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.”
What a vision!
It’s hard to wait. It’s hard to hope.
Now fast forward
from Isaiah 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,” John says.
“Prepare the way of the LORD. Make
his paths straight.” The people were desperately in need of hope, so crowds were
going out to him, confessing their sins.
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.
Today, more than 2,000 years later, we are still
waiting and longing. Look at the headlines. The City of Detroit is going through a bankruptcy,
and people who worked their whole career in Detroit are worried about their
pensions. A lot of us haven’t recovered
from the hardships of the recent financial and real estate crisis. The gap between the very rich and the poor
keeps widening, and the people in the middle keep losing ground.
Jesus has come to live among us,
full of grace and truth, and called us to follow him, living God’s way of
love. We are called to live differently,
but we still live in a broken world where injustice and oppression are the
norm.
In some parts of the world, children
are kidnapped and forced into sex slavery and girls risk having acid thrown in
their face every time they dare to show up at schoo or challenge the patriarchy
in the culture.
The people of Palestine live under
occupation in a conflict that looks hopeless to a lot of people. Syrians who were forced from their homes are
living in terrible conditions in refugee camps in neighboring countries or are
internally displaced.
In our own communities, a parent can
work 40 hours a week and still not be able to afford nutritious food or other
basic necessities for her children.
In our own nation, consumerism and
individualism rule, and for many people, having the latest toys (for children
or grownups), instant gratification, fashionable clothes… our chocolate and
coffee at the cheapest possible prices are more important to some of us than
the lives of the people who labor to supply them. Our
political process is stuck-- an ineffective system, in which protecting political ideologies and hoarding and
accumulating personal wealth are higher priorities than feeding the hungry. The list could go on and on.
So… how are we to live? Do we give in to hopelessness and
despair?
How are we to live as a community of faith? Do we dare to live in hope, and practice
trusting in God to provide what we need to carry out the mission to which we
are called? Or do we surrender to fear…
and circle the wagons and just try to survive
for a while? These are all matters of faith.
The struggle to end oppression and
build a better world is complicated…hard… messy… and scary.
How do we live in the time between
the vision and the final fulfillment?
Do we dare to believe in the vision?
Can we imagine a better world? Can we believe in the possibility that
injustice and oppression can be overcome, with God’s help? Do we dare to trust
in God’s promises?
John the Baptizer came proclaiming
that the kingdom of heaven is near, calling people to repent, and to prepare
the way of the LORD. He pointed toward
God’s anointed One and said that he will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.
Jesus came and “proclaimed the reign
of God: preaching the 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 sinner, and
calling all to repent and believe the gospel.”[2]
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.
Jesus proclaimed a
message of hope that has been
spiritualized and distorted by some. The
gospel isn’t about a pie-in-the-sky, escapist hope, but a way of living into God’s dream for us and participating
in God’s will being done on earth as in heaven—in the day-to-day reality of
life.
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. We can no longer be content to exist under the
old ways of the world.
I believe that God means for all
God’s people to live in peace with one another and with the whole
creation. God’s dream is for us to live in
the way of righteousness and justice and peace.
But there is still a gap between the vision and reality.
And so we wait. We wait for the time when God will fully
bring in the Kingdom. But 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 we look around and all we see are dead-looking
stumps, and we have a hard time
believing in new life. It’s hard to see
how things can be different… or how the little things we do can make a
difference. We
The past few days we’ve been
remembering Nelson Mandela’s life. As I
reflected on today’s scripture texts, I thought: back in the 1970’s, as Mandela was serving
his 27-year-prison sentence and apartheid was the law of the land in South
Africa, how hard it was to see the hope
in the situation? And yet by 1990 Mandela
was released from prison and working toward reconciliation and a democratic
government in South Africa.
As Jim Wallis wrote, “Nelson Mandela combined justice and reconciliation like no
other political leader of his time, shaped by the spiritual formation of 27
years in prison. Mandela’s life has blessed the world with courage and hope.”[3]
When I was
in the Holy Land in 2009, we met with some Ecumenical Accompaniment workers
from the World Council of Churches program, one of whom was South African. I learned from him that South Africans have a
significant commitment to the Ecumenical Accompaniment program, because they
believe it’s important for them to walk with Palestinians as they work for a
just peace, because, in the midst of a situation that looks hopeless, they embody hope.
Sometimes new life emerges from the
most unlikely places, emerging as a tiny green tendril out of a stump that looked
dead.
Do we believe this? Can we live into this hope?
We live into hope in a variety of
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. We help schools and clinics in Palestine when
we buy crafts from PalCraft Aid or fair trade Palestinian olive oil, and we let
the people there know that we have not forgotten them. It helps them to hope.
When we buy fair trade chocolate,
children in Africa and Latin America get to go to school because their families
earn a fair wage. Our purchase of fair
trade coffee changes the lives of families.
Shopping ethically and buying
locally as much as possible makes a different to peoples’ lives and the
environment. When we make choices to
care for the environment and support global and domestic humanitarian causes, we make a difference. These are some of the ways we dare to hope
and live hopefully.
We wait, living in hope, not only
because God became incarnate in the Christ child, not just because Christ
promises to come again. We live into
hope because the Christ’s reign is among us now as we live by God’s
Spirit. As we live into God’s dream for
us, working for justice and peace for all of God’s beloved children, we are
daring to hope.
A shoot shall come out
from the stump of Jesse...
What if we believe this fragile sign
is God’s new beginning in this time and place? Will we tend the seedling in our hearts and
nurture it?
In this season of waiting, God comes
to us and nudges us: “Look! There on
that old dead stump. Do you see that green shoot growing?”
Do you see it?
Rev. Fran
Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield
Presbyterian Church / Dearborn, Michigan
December 8,
2013
[1]
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
trilogy.
[2] “Brief
Statement of Faith of the Presbyterian Church” (USA), 1990.
[3]
Jim Wallis, “The Most Important Political Leader in the 20th
Century: Jim Wallis on the Life of Nelson Mandela.” http://sojo.net/blogs/2013/12/05/most-important-political-leader-20th-century-jim-wallis-life-nelson-mandela
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