Isaiah 2:1-5
First Sunday of Advent: November 28, 2010
I suspect for many, Advent is a difficult season in the church to understand. It’s hard to know what the “theme” is, and if there’s anything in particular we should be “doing” during Advent. Should we be giving something up, spending more time in reflection, listening for some particular point or story, ignoring all together?
Add to that the fact that when we’re not in curch everything around us tells us we are smack dab in the middle of the Christmas season: music, decorations, social events. There are no cultural concessions for Advent. And to top it all off, the theological theme of Advent seems complicated: We say we are waiting for two things. First, of course, is Jesus’ birth – or rather we are waiting to celebrate Jesus’ birth on Christmas Eve. But there’s a second kind of waiting we acknowledge in Advent; we are not just waiting to celebrate a past event. We are waiting for a future event as well.
Many of the New Testament passages during Advent are what we call apocalyptic. They are about a dramatic, sometimes violent, future event that will mean the end of things as we know it and the beginning of a new world where God reigns and God’s realm is our reality…completely. The people who wrote the New Testament believed they were living in an “in between” time – in between the birth of Jesus and the time when Jesus would come again and change everything. And so, during Advent, the idea is for us to remember that we are still “in between” these two things. We both look back to the beginning of the story of Christ – the birth of Jesus – and we look forward to the end – the new heaven and new earth.
Understanding ourselves to be in this “in between” place is what I think many people find difficult. The birth of Jesus we “get” – hence the reason we often ignore Advent and slip so easily into the Christmas season right after Thanksgiving. But we just don’t relate to the idea that we are waiting for the future event as well. Many of us don’t connect with the language of apocalypse and second coming, and so we don’t connect with that longing for the end of what is and the beginning of a new world in the same way we connect with the beauty and joy of the Christmas story.
But here’s the thing: The Bible is full of this longing for the future event. In some ways it underlies everything written in our scriptures: all of them, from Genesis to Revelation. For the authors of the Hebrew Bible, the future event is the coming of the Messiah; they are longing for it. They know that when the Messiah comes, everything will change. A new world will be instituted and the pain and suffering that has been around since Adam and Eve shared the world’s first fruit salad will end. The same can be said for the Jews through history up until the modern day: They long for the day when the Messiah comes, and everything will change. In fact, you can see where people are coming from when they don’t see Jesus as the Messiah – everything hasn’t changed. Suffering still exists in the same way it always has.
For the authors of the New Testament, even though it seemed the waiting was over when Jesus was born, the story didn’t simply end with the coming of the Messiah. There were Jews that believed Jesus was the Messiah, but we see in the bible that his birth, death and resurrection didn’t end the waiting for them. There was to be more. They knew this because of that uncomfortable truth that things didn’t really change much in the world around them just because Jesus came to earth. For the authors of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament alike, in everything they write lies the assumption that something is going to happen in the future, and at that time the visions of the prophets and Jesus will come true.
Even if we don’t always feel like it, we are in the same boat. The waiting is not over just because Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem. We too have to admit that although we believe something changed because God took on human form, much of the world around us still pales in comparison to the visions of God’s Realm that the prophets described and Jesus showed us with his life. When we acknowledge that truth, we can connect with the longing found throughout our scriptures. I think we can compare the visions of God’s realm that we find in the Bible with the reality in which we live, and when we do that, when we look honestly at the world and how far it falls short of what Jesus envisioned, it’s hard not to long for God’s. realm. We want the suffering to end. We know there is still so much that needs to change.
I promise, we will, of course, celebrate the birth of Jesus this Christmas Eve. But during Advent we are going to acknowledge our reality is in many ways the same as those who were and still are waiting for the Messiah. We’re only going to be reading passages from the prophet Isaiah each week. We are going to wait in the same way Isaiah was waiting: both for the Messiah and the realm of God in fullness.
Isaiah was a prophet who knew how to speak to people in the waiting period. And he did this by painting pictures of the future for which they longed and for which they must work as the people of God. This is what prophets do. They don’t predict the future in the sense of telling someone the way, day and time they will die. They use their exceptional imaginations to paint images of what they believe is possible because of their encounter with the Divine, with Yahweh.
The picture we get this week is of swords being beaten into plowshares, and spears becoming pruning hooks – it is the picture of permanent peace. And permanent peace was as far from the world in which Isaiah lived as possible. The people had lived in a state of permanent war for as long as they could remember. Swords and spears were necessary tools of survival as well as, tragically, the instruments of their slaughter. There was no way to imagine a world without war – a world where people weren’t trying to take their land and topple their government, or where they didn’t at least try to defend themselves from those who sought to destroy them. War was a necessary evil because it was the only chance they had to survive and protect their way of life.
It’s essentially the same for us. Permanent peace is a distant fairy tale. We cannot seem to shed the need to use force and violence in order to protect ourselves, maintain what we have, and to protect others around the world. It’s true that when something goes wrong – when rogue nations and leaders act up and threaten us – we try everything else we have first – every other tool we posses to get them to change their ways: diplomacy, sanctions, shame, strengthening their opposition. But if those don’t work, we think we have no choice but to use our swords, use our spears. It’s the last resort, we say, a terrible thing, but a necessary evil to fight the evil in the world.
I’m reading a book called “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.” The author, Andrew Bacevich, lays out two components of our foreign policy that fuel war: First we have what he calls the American Credo, which in its simplest form “summons the United States – and the United States alone – to lead, save, liberate and ultimately transform the world.” And second we believe that “the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities in excess of those required for self-defense.”
These together, he says, will inevitably fuel a constant state of war. And that state has become permanent because we have not taken the time to step back and evaluate these two components; in fact there is, among the powerful – the ones making the decisions – an intractable collection of assumptions that make questioning these basic components of foreign policy virtually impossible and so we are guaranteed a state of permanent war. We will always be using violence somewhere in the world at any given time to accomplish our goals.
One of the reasons Bacevich says we can’t seriously challenge these intractable assumptions is because of a severe lack of imagination. We don’t take time to entertain other possibilities or learn from past mistakes. We don’t have the collective imagination to think of something better. Or maybe another way to say this is that we don’t have enough image makers in our country; enough painters of a possible future without the need for war. We have not had enough Isaiah’s offering the images that stir our hearts to new possibilities. Or if we do, their voices are suppressed, ignored, discredited, dismissed.
But that lack of imagination and visionaries makes sense. Isaiah’s images seem outlandish, impossible. The path from where we are now to permanent peace is not only hard to see, we get tired just thinking about thinking about it. So what good does it do to talk as if it were even possible? Don’t we just end up looking like naïve fools? Wasn’t Isaiah, in the final analysis, proved foolish and unsuccessful? Even if they had an impact at the time, certainly Isaiah’s words didn’t change things permanently. We are still waiting today just as he and the people were thousands of years ago. What difference does it make to offer visions and images of what we wish for when we know it will never come true?
This week I was talking to one of my friends. She asked me what I was going to be preaching on. She is not particularly familiar with the bible, so I quoted for her the vision of Isaiah: That the day would come when swords would be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. That nation would not lift up swords against nations and neither will they learn war anymore.” Then I confessed to her that though I think it’s a wonderful passage, it is also difficult because it feels like things haven’t changed much since then, and just saying the words doesn’t make a difference to our reality. She nodded slowly at first, but then she said, “I don’t know if this helps at all, but I can tell you that that image from Isaiah warmed my heart when I heard it.”
It is important – to offer the image. Somewhere inside my friend she believed a world of peace was possible and Isaiah’s image reminded her of that deeply held belief. It stirred the hope inside her and set her sights again on the possibility of such a world. Those experiences – those heart-warming experiences – change us. Whenever we are reminded of what’s possible and we are connected to that part of ourselves that believes things don’t have to always be the same, we become more and more able to envision such a future. We become more skilled at painting images for others. Those images change us over time and bit by bit we become peacemakers in our own way.
We need image makers – we need imagination. What are our swords and plowshares today? Maybe the swords are drone missals, and the metal we need to reshape and refashion is the technology for targeting people to kill. Instead, that technology can be used to target disease and create ways to alleviate suffering. Maybe our swords are fighter jets equipped with all the latest instruments of war and the plowshares are jets loaded with food, money and resources going all over the world to feed and empower the impoverished. What images today would warm people’s hearts? Each of us, because of our own encounters with the divine are called to be imaginative – to paint images for people that will stir their hearts and set us all on a new course to permanent peace.
This Advent we are pausing to remember that the world for which we wait – the world for which we long – is both distant and possible. And we are going to let Isaiah’s images touch our imaginations – spark that place in us that believes the impossible is possible – so that we become image makers today. “In days to come, they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” May it be so. Amen.
