"Daring to Hope"
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Here we are, only
a few days into December, and we’re already headed into the second week of Advent.
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-- to deck the halls with boughs of holly
and wreaths and candles.
In the midst of all the busy-ness,
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 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… and 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.
Did you notice what 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 the 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… 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, we are still waiting and longing.
The
people of Palestine still 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 or are refugees in search
of a place where their families can be safe and make a new beginning.
Children
in Flint are dealing 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 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.
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.
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. We are called to live differently,
but we still live in a broken world where injustice and oppression are the
norm.
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 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 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.”[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 distorted by some. Jesus wasn’t preaching a gospel of
pie-in-the-sky, escapist hope, but a way of living into God’s dream for us and
being part of 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. The transformation Jesus talked about,
we can no longer be content to exist under the old ways of the world.
God means for all God’s people to
live in peace with one another with the whole creation. God’s dream for us is for us to live together
and to live lives of righteousness and justice.
But 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. 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 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. 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 know that we have not forgotten them.
When we buy fair trade chocolate,
children in Africa and Latin America get to go to school, because their
families earn a fair wage, and 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. 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 by
contacting our elected officials about issues that matter to us, 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 children.
In this season of waiting, God comes
to us and nudges us: “Look! Look -- there on the stump. Do you see that green
shoot growing?”
Can you see it?
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
December 4, 2016
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