Advent 4: Worth the wait
Psalm 80; Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25
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As we get close to Christmas,
it’s time for a little counter-cultural protest.
And no, I’m not going to say, put Christ back into Christmas.
I’m really glad this sanctuary does not have
little red “heresy alert” buttons installed in the pews.
Because you’d all reach for them right now.
Brace yourself.
If we’re talking about our cultural celebrations of Christmas,
I say, let’s keep Christ out of it.
I think Jesus Christ,
and our typical cultural Christmas traditions are both better off
when they keep their distance from each other.
Yes, we all like to say, and it’s true:
“Jesus is the reason for the season.”
But hear me out.
Don’t push the red button . . . yet.
Christ, on the one hand,
and our cultural Christmas holiday celebrations on the other,
are both inherently good, in and of themselves.
But they both get compromised,
and lose their punch,
when they get all mixed up with each other.
And for the moment,
let’s put the whole over-commercialization of Christmas
on the sidelines.
That’s not what I’m talking about here.
Let’s not make Christmas consumerism the bad guy.
Consumerism is with us 365 days a year
in every aspect of our culture, including in the church.
It is the water we all swim in.
Even if we could take consumerism out of Christmas,
it wouldn’t go away.
That’s like attacking a tall thistle growing in our yard,
by wacking off the top two inches.
Yeah, that’ll get it!
All cultural celebrations have been commercialized.
Easter, Mothers Day, July 4, Back-to-School,
Halloween, Thanksgiving, you name it.
Even birthdays and weddings!
Whole industries depend on us buying our way into happiness,
all year long.
Christmas isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.
So . . . end of commentary on Christmas and consumerism.
Here’s my real point.
I actually like our secular cultural celebration of Christmas.
I like it a lot.
I participate in it. Happily. And without guilt.
The carols, the cheesy movies, the over-the-top decorations,
the food, the gift-giving.
Our secular Christmas produces a lot of good, positive,
emotionally-rich social capital.
Think of all the joy and beauty and wonder and whimsy and
goodwill and generosity
that get pumped into our communities at this time of year.
Nobody can attend Harrisonburg’s downtown Christmas parade,
and go away feeling pessimistic about this community.
It’s just a positive and uplifting community festival.
Our cultural Christmas is a gift and opportunity
we should all celebrate without hesitation.
“Santa Claus is coming to town!”—and we should welcome him.
There. I said it.
Push the red button.
Christians who get on a moral high horse—and I used to be one—
who object because Santa Claus is more visible than Baby Jesus
are missing something important.
Their objection is well-intended, even noble, but misguided.
Secular celebrations are good for society,
there’s no reason for us to go all Scrooge about it
for religious reasons.
I saw an article in the food section
of the Washington Post on Wednesday.
It was written by an American Jew who grew up in the Soviet Union,
and she said Christmas was her favorite holiday of the year,
even beating out Hanukkah.
Because Christmas had better food.
She mentioned that the old Soviet New Year
was basically Christmas without the religion.
She grew up with a New Years Tree,
and traditional foods and festivities,
and Grandpa Frost who went around
giving gifts to all the children.
And we have variations on that theme all over the world.
More power to them all, I say.
Two unfortunate things happen
when we force baby Jesus onto
what has become a largely secular cultural celebration.
First,
we exclude those of other religions
who are a valued part of our culture.
They start to feel this time of year is not for them.
But everyone benefits when the whole culture
celebrates joy and peace and goodwill.
We sideline religious minorities the whole rest of the year.
Why add insult to injury and
exclude them from this celebration, too?
The second reason I don’t like to impose Jesus
on what is a mostly secular holiday,
is that the only kind of Jesus the public is willing to accept—
many Christians included—
is a white-washed, sanitized, sweet and sentimental Jesus,
one that bears no resemblance to the biblical one.
So why should we committed Christians
feel like we’ve achieved some moral victory
by “putting Christ back into Christmas”
if—when it’s all said and done—
the plastic Jesus that we’ve put there
is not actually worthy of our worship?
May I say that again?
Why do we think it’s a victory for Christianity
to put Christ back into Christmas,
if after we’ve successfully done it,
the hollowed-out version of Jesus that’s there,
is not a Jesus we would lay down our lives for in worship?
So here’s what I propose instead:
Let our culture and other cultures have their Christmas,
with all the secular trappings—
the Santa Claus bits and the sentimental plastic Jesus bits.
Let’s be thankful for any generosity and goodwill,
no matter where it shows up, and why,
and let’s join in with it, not boycott it.
_____________________
But . . . and here’s the kicker . . .
let us Christians also dive deeper into our biblical story,
and let’s own that story, every beautiful and earth-shaking part of it,
Let’s shape our Christian worship and Christian formation
around this vitally important and theologically essential
season of the Advent fast
that leads to the feast of God’s Incarnation,
that we call Christmas, the “Christ Mass.”
In the world all around us I don’t mind hearing Christmas carols—
even the ones about Rudolph and Santa Claus—
even if they start before Thanksgiving.
It’s good music (well . . . mostly).
And it’s good to make music and make merry,
as long as we want, starting as early as we want.
Let’s not hold that against anyone!
But . . . here, where the church gathers in worship,
as a Christian community wanting to be formed in the way of Jesus,
this is a different sort of space.
We operate on a different calendar.
We have a different purpose in mind.
Worship is serious business.
We are here to worship the God of heaven and earth
who is bringing righteous judgment to the earth,
and who will bring the false rulers and powers to their knees.
Are we up for that?
And no, I’m not saying we hide out here in a private sanctuary.
Worship can and should be public,
we worship before a watching world.
But, while we gather here,
we are clearly and unapologetically a Christian community
shaped by Jesus, and shaped by the cross of Christ.
So here we will sing and tell stories in a different frame of mind.
The reason we sing Advent and Christmas carols here
is not because they remind us of good old days
sitting by the fireplace at Grandma’s house.
This is not an exercise in sentimentalism.
This is about the earth-shaking and fear-inducing
Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And sometimes the Gospel is hard to understand,
and hard to accept.
This is especially true on the fourth Sunday of Advent,
where we light the candle with a prayer for love to show up.
In our calendar, we are still in the fast.
The feast is three days away.
We are still waiting.
Still asking questions of God and each other.
Still wondering, “What are you waiting for?”
And today we have a story of love showing up
in a person and form outside of our control . . .
it’s a story of “Emmanuel,” God with us.
That name, Emmanuel, was given to a child awaiting birth,
in two of our scripture readings today,
in stories set in the same region, same ethnic group,
but 700 years apart.
First, in Isaiah 7,
as a sign to King Ahaz of Judah,
to his people besieged and oppressed by the Syrians.
Then in Matthew 1,
as a sign to Joseph and his people
besieged and oppressed by the Roman Empire.
Matthew’s version of the Christmas story is different than Luke.
Whereas Luke gives us lots of picturesque details,
about shepherds and stables and heavenly choirs and such,
Matthew is spare with words.
It mentions almost in passing that Mary bore a son,
and he was named Jesus.
But Matthew uses lots of ink in the verses leading up to that,
to tell us of Joseph’s fearsome dilemma.
Without going into details of first-century Jewish laws
about engagement and marriage,
suffice it to say, the news that Mary was having a baby was,
for Joseph, a moral crisis of huge proportions.
It put Joseph’s reputation at risk,
but even worse, it would cause Mary—
a vulnerable teenage woman—
to suffer an even worse fate:
public disgrace and (probably) a lifetime of poverty.
So Joseph decided to do the honorable thing,
really, a courageous thing,
since Joseph believed Mary was being unfaithful.
He planned not to shame her, but break the engagement quietly.
But an angel appears in a dream to Joseph,
and says, “Don’t be afraid.
Take Mary as your wife.
She was conceived of the Holy Spirit.”
So Joseph takes an even greater risk,
steps into the great unknown,
and completes the marriage arrangements as directed.
This is the hard and costly road of faithfulness
that Jesus would later teach his disciples about.
But here it was being modeled by his earthly father-to-be.
Joseph was willing to act,
without his questions being answered.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes,
a United Methodist pastor and poet and blogger in Massachusetts,
just posted a poem he wrote about Joseph a few days ago.
Thanks to Ken Nafziger for pointing me toward it.
Here is the poem, titled, simply, “Joseph.”
Listen to it not only as a word to Joseph.
Listen to it as words to us who are also asked to take leaps of faith
in times of darkness and dread and uncertainty.
The question is not whether you love her.
The question is whether you will marry her.
You have been given only glorious ambiguity,
darkness marbled with starlight,
possibility breathed in silence.
You seek assurance; none is given.
Your life will not be as you wish it.
Those you love will let you down.
This world is full of flaws and disappointment.
It is also full of the Mysterious One.
Give yourself without knowing.
Betrothed, beloved, to uncertainty,
pledge your loyalty to this one you cannot know.
Do not pray to understand:
pray to be present, to be faithful, to be loving
when you cannot know what will come of it.
Do not be afraid to take this life and marry it.
Maybe that, sisters and brothers, should be our new mantra.
“Do not be afraid to take this life and marry it.”
Daily, we are asked to walk forward in life—forward—into ambiguity,
as followers of Jesus:
in our life of faith,
in our families,
in our close relationships,
in our public lives,
in our professional lives,
in our political lives as members of a divided society.
Jesus directed his disciples, and directs us,
take up your cross and follow me,
into the darkness, into uncertainty, into ambiguity.
It’s just as ambiguous as the sign given King Ahaz in Isaiah 7,
and given to Joseph and his people 700 years later in Judea.
The sign of hope is a woman with child,
a vulnerable child yet to be born named “Immanuel.”
Ambiguous, yes. But still reason to hope.
God is with us in this life.
This life.
Let me repeat the last lines of the poem . . .
Give yourself without knowing.
Betrothed, beloved, to uncertainty,
pledge your loyalty to this one you cannot know.
Do not pray to understand:
pray to be present, to be faithful, to be loving
when you cannot know what will come of it.
Do not be afraid to take this life and marry it.
I am so thankful for our hymn writers over the centuries,
who were not distracted by the plastic Jesus,
but immersed themselves
in the earth-shaking and fear-inducing Gospel story,
and wrote about it in profound poetry.
These are the songs that either
never show up on pop radio stations and shopping malls,
or they do without anyone, ever,
thinking about what the songs are saying.
I’m glad we have a place like this
that is not satisfied with sentimentalism.
A place to join our voices, and our minds,
and sing this faith that not only challenges our own complacency,
but that truly threatens
the power of politicians in Washington,
and the power of Wall Street,
and every other false and temporary power our culture bows to.
Read the words sometime of
“It came upon a midnight clear” or
“Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light” or
“My soul proclaims with wonder” that we opened with today.
Or the two we’re about to sing.
Where is our hope?
Where is the source of our peace?
What brings us joy?
Where will love show up?
In a helpless and hungry child who in Mary’s lap is sleeping.
Let’s sing, as Ken directs us.
—Phil Kniss, December 22, 2019
[To leave a comment, click on "comments" link below]
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Sunday, December 8, 2019
(Advent 2) How to get in line...or not
Getting ready while we wait
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Watch the video:
...or listen to audio:
...or download a printer-friendly PDF file [click here]
...or read it online here:
The lectionary doesn’t make it easy on preachers during Advent.
The Gospel texts assigned to us during Advent,
sometimes require extra time to work through them,
so that we can get past our own resistance to them,
and then communicate them to everyone else
in a way that doesn’t trigger some negative reaction
in the congregation,
and make people pull out their phones
and check their Facebook
to find something more inspirational.
Last Sunday,
I tried to help you embrace, with maybe a little more positivity,
the Matthew 24 text about the rapture,
and being left behind.
If you weren’t here last week and are confused
how being left behind could have a positive spin,
well, the sermon is on our website.
And now today,
we have this other inspirational Gospel story,
in which a wild man eating insects
and wearing an itchy camel-hair robe,
is down by the Jordan River screaming at people
about being the “sons of snakes”
and being burned with unquenchable fire,
if they don’t repent.
_____________________
Okay . . . where to start?
Let’s start just by admitting that repentance is not a popular idea.
Especially in this polarized world we live in today.
Our political leaders—on both sides of the aisle, mind you—
are teaching us well
that strong leaders never admit they are wrong.
Once you’ve taken a side on something controversial,
once you’ve staked out a position,
you stick with it, come hell or high water.
That’s the way you win in Washington,
and Lord knows, everyone wants to have winners leading us!
Or so we’re told.
When was the last time you’ve heard a politician say clearly,
without side-stepping,
“I was wrong. And I’m sorry.”
We actually did hear those words in Washington this past week,
of all places, at the impeachment hearing.
But they were spoken by a witness.
Not by a politician, but a professor.
It is absolutely rare, almost unheard of,
for a public figure—
politician, athlete, performer, CEO, church leader,
you name it—
to come into the light,
to stand in front of a microphone and say clearly,
“I was wrong in my thinking.
I behaved badly.
I repent.
I will seek to change my ways,
and repair the damage I caused.”
More often it sounds kind[?] of like an apology, but isn’t.
“I’m sorry that what I said caused offense.”
“I’m sorry my words were taken out of context,
I should have phrased it differently.”
Our culture teaches us to aim, always, to be right.
To repent is to openly admit we aren’t.
To repent is literally, to alter our course.
To change our way of thinking.
To make a turn, and head down a different path.
Just to say sorry, and even be sincere about it, is not repentance.
It’s called remorse.
It’s not hard to be regretful or remorseful
when we make a blunder and experience a bad outcome.
But repentance is a harder pill to swallow.
It is to say, we have it wrong.
We will turn.
We will change.
_____________________
This is the understanding of repentance,
that will open us to a greater appreciation
of today’s scripture readings—
both the one about John the Baptist,
and the words of Isaiah the Prophet.
Before we come back to the screaming and locust-eating prophet John,
let’s think about Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom.
Who doesn’t love the image of the peaceable kingdom,
that Isaiah described so powerfully and poetically?
This one prophetic oracle we read from Isaiah 11
has inspired poets and preachers
and composers and painters.
I’ve mentioned before my personal favorite depiction of this text,
by the Quaker preacher and painter Edward Hicks,
who painted at least 100 different versions of this biblical scene,
and purposely dropped them off everywhere,
as he traveled the country and preached,
during a period of great conflict in this country,
and a time of great division in his own Quaker church.
His paintings visualized Isaiah’s prophecy
where animals who were natural enemies,
grazed together,
lied down together,
rubbed noses.
And in the same painting
immigrant Europeans and
native Americans were reconciled.
Well, that’s a lot like what Isaiah was doing.
Painting a picture to inspire his people.
Help them imagine possibilities.
He was prophesying to the exiles in Assyria,
who were slaves of dreaded King Sennacherib.
Isaiah pictured a peaceable kingdom,
with wolves resting beside lambs,
and leopards and goats and lions and calves,
all grazing peacefully, with children playing nearby.
It was not a picture of real life for the Israelites.
It was divine imagination.
He was seeing something in the darkness,
that others could not see.
That’s why they call prophets seers.
They see what others don’t.
But did Isaiah believe it would actually happen that way?
Did he run the odds?
Maybe Isaiah put his vision out there
to basically give people an emotional boost,
to give them an elaborate coping mechanism,
something to help them get through the next day.
Or maybe Isaiah had a plan about how his people would move out
from the oppression of slavery by Assyria,
and into their new peaceable kingdom,
where predators and prey lived in peace?
In Isaiah’s vision, it was pretty obvious
who the predators and prey were.
Did Isaiah have any bright ideas
how King Sennacherib and the brutal Assyrian forces
would one day sit down and graze, so to speak,
at the same table with their Israelite slaves?
No, this picture was not a strategic maneuver.
It was not step one in overthrowing the Empire.
Isaiah was not trying to motivate the slaves to rise up
to make some peace and justice for themselves.
And, also, no, Isaiah was not practicing slick psychology,
telling his people a comforting and imaginative bedtime story,
to give them relief from their nightmares.
Prophets did not do either one of those things.
It was not their call to give personal, psychological comfort.
It was not their call to help people fix their own problems.
So why do we often read biblical prophecy
in exactly one of those two ways?
We read it as a call to human action—
as a call to make our own peace with enemies,
as a should and ought text—
that if we’re the lion, we should learn to eat straw,
and if we’re the cow, we ought to take courage
to graze with the bear.
Or, if not that, we read it simply as a utopian vision for a future age,
to comfort us through the nightmare
that is life in this broken world,
and get us safely into the next heavenly life
where all will be peace.
_____________________
I think Isaiah would be shocked,
if he knew that 2½ thousand years later,
people would be reading his words,
and thinking he was telling
Assyrians oppressors and Israelite slaves,
to be nicer, and sit down and talk out their differences.
And he would be just as shocked to learn
that people would read his words
and take him to be only talking about some future heavenly age,
and that his prophecy had no bearing on life here on this earth.
No, Isaiah the prophet was doing here what prophets always do.
Prophets attempt to get people back on track.
They call people, in no uncertain terms, to repent—
to get in line with God.
Isaiah had a strong word here that God is on the move,
that God is working God’s purposes out.
And if we want to experience true life, as God intends,
we need to repent,
to realign ourselves with God’s purposes,
to yield to God’s wisdom and God’s judgment.
It’s that simple, and that difficult.
The peaceable kingdom comes about by divine judgment.
Yes, peace comes through judgment.
We Anabaptist-Mennonite pacifist Christians
who try our best to be nice and peaceable and non-confrontational,
and who like having a God who is the same way,
might have to swallow hard,
when we read these prophets.
But Isaiah and John the Baptist aren’t exactly pulling their punches.
They are harsh!
They are letting God’s enemies have it!
Isaiah says, with righteousness God shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
God shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips God will kill the wicked.
And dear John . . . dear locust-eating John
doesn’t know much about the principles of motivational speaking.
He probably never saw an inspirational TED-talk in his life.
Because as soon as the community leaders, the influencers,
show up for his preaching, and want to be baptized,
he turns everything up a notch.
To the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism(!), he says,
“You brood of vipers!
Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruit worthy of repentance.
Don’t brag about your ties to Abraham.
God can take these stupid stones
and make children of Abraham from them.
The ax is lying at the root of the trees;
watch out, you might just get cut down
and thrown into the fire.”
To those who most needed to change their minds
about how God wanted them to live in that dark time
of Roman oppression,
to those persons he said,
“Repent. And then get in line.
Live like someone with a changed way of thinking.
Bear fruit worthy of repentance.
Look what God is up to all around you,
and then turn,
and line yourself up with that.
You don’t have a tradition and an institution to protect.
You have a God on the move,
and you have to be moving in that same direction.”
Wow!
Does that have something to say to us 21st-century Christians,
or not?
We do so much hand-wringing about the state of the church
in our secular world.
We do so much pining for the good old days (as if they ever existed)
when people trusted the church and its leaders,
and abided by all the rules and flourished in every way.
But we are barking up the wrong tree.
Or to use John’s words, the axe is lying at the root of that tree.
We need not despair, and dream only of some peaceable kingdom
in the sky by and by.
And we need not take this burden on ourselves,
and deceive ourselves that we can make the peaceable kingdom
come to pass by trying harder,
or going back to the mythical good old days.
So how do we get in line?
Not by finding the right rules to bring us uniformity,
and all line up behind this perfect system of rules.
No, we get in line by wisely discerning God’s agenda
and lining up behind God’s movement among us.
It makes for a messier line,
but a more life-giving one.
Our calling is to look to God, great mover and righteous judge of all,
and to observe where God is on the move in our world . . . now.
We look together for signs where we can see the
saving, healing, reconciling, and truth-telling Messiah at work.
And we line up behind that.
We line up behind the Prince of Peace.
We line up behind the One
who will bring this peaceable kingdom about.
We are not the makers of the peace that will come to this world,
or to the church, or to us.
But neither are we disinterested parties,
waiting for it to be done for us.
We are duly-commissioned agents
of the God who judges for the poor and meek of the earth,
whose burning word of truth and love
breaks down the power of darkness and evil.
The implications of that should overwhelm us.
It should take our breath away,
and cause us to inhale a new Spirit-wind.
The question of the day is,
“Are we ready, by the Spirit-wind within us,
to breath with God?
to con-spire with God?
to repent, and get in line with God?”
Do we, the church of Jesus Christ,
dare step into this prophetic stream of Spirit-inspired
discerning, judging, proclaiming, and truth-telling
that will confront violent oppressors
with God’s judgment and justice?
that will confront our own sins and shortcomings
with the saving and transforming grace offered to us?
If so, we are called to repentance,
in the very same way that John the Baptist
was calling God’s people in his time.
We are called to repent.
We are called to change our way of thinking.
We are called to line up behind God’s agenda.
God has chosen me. God has chosen you.
May we have the courage and grace to do that, together.
—Phil Kniss, December 8, 2019
[To leave a comment, click on "comments" link below]
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Watch the video:
...or listen to audio:
...or download a printer-friendly PDF file [click here]
...or read it online here:
The lectionary doesn’t make it easy on preachers during Advent.
The Gospel texts assigned to us during Advent,
sometimes require extra time to work through them,
so that we can get past our own resistance to them,
and then communicate them to everyone else
in a way that doesn’t trigger some negative reaction
in the congregation,
and make people pull out their phones
and check their Facebook
to find something more inspirational.
Last Sunday,
I tried to help you embrace, with maybe a little more positivity,
the Matthew 24 text about the rapture,
and being left behind.
If you weren’t here last week and are confused
how being left behind could have a positive spin,
well, the sermon is on our website.
And now today,
we have this other inspirational Gospel story,
in which a wild man eating insects
and wearing an itchy camel-hair robe,
is down by the Jordan River screaming at people
about being the “sons of snakes”
and being burned with unquenchable fire,
if they don’t repent.
_____________________
Okay . . . where to start?
Let’s start just by admitting that repentance is not a popular idea.
Especially in this polarized world we live in today.
Our political leaders—on both sides of the aisle, mind you—
are teaching us well
that strong leaders never admit they are wrong.
Once you’ve taken a side on something controversial,
once you’ve staked out a position,
you stick with it, come hell or high water.
That’s the way you win in Washington,
and Lord knows, everyone wants to have winners leading us!
Or so we’re told.
When was the last time you’ve heard a politician say clearly,
without side-stepping,
“I was wrong. And I’m sorry.”
We actually did hear those words in Washington this past week,
of all places, at the impeachment hearing.
But they were spoken by a witness.
Not by a politician, but a professor.
It is absolutely rare, almost unheard of,
for a public figure—
politician, athlete, performer, CEO, church leader,
you name it—
to come into the light,
to stand in front of a microphone and say clearly,
“I was wrong in my thinking.
I behaved badly.
I repent.
I will seek to change my ways,
and repair the damage I caused.”
More often it sounds kind[?] of like an apology, but isn’t.
“I’m sorry that what I said caused offense.”
“I’m sorry my words were taken out of context,
I should have phrased it differently.”
Our culture teaches us to aim, always, to be right.
To repent is to openly admit we aren’t.
To repent is literally, to alter our course.
To change our way of thinking.
To make a turn, and head down a different path.
Just to say sorry, and even be sincere about it, is not repentance.
It’s called remorse.
It’s not hard to be regretful or remorseful
when we make a blunder and experience a bad outcome.
But repentance is a harder pill to swallow.
It is to say, we have it wrong.
We will turn.
We will change.
_____________________
This is the understanding of repentance,
that will open us to a greater appreciation
of today’s scripture readings—
both the one about John the Baptist,
and the words of Isaiah the Prophet.
Before we come back to the screaming and locust-eating prophet John,
let’s think about Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom.
Who doesn’t love the image of the peaceable kingdom,
that Isaiah described so powerfully and poetically?
This one prophetic oracle we read from Isaiah 11
has inspired poets and preachers
and composers and painters.
I’ve mentioned before my personal favorite depiction of this text,
by the Quaker preacher and painter Edward Hicks,
who painted at least 100 different versions of this biblical scene,
and purposely dropped them off everywhere,
as he traveled the country and preached,
during a period of great conflict in this country,
and a time of great division in his own Quaker church.
His paintings visualized Isaiah’s prophecy
where animals who were natural enemies,
grazed together,
lied down together,
rubbed noses.
And in the same painting
immigrant Europeans and
native Americans were reconciled.
Well, that’s a lot like what Isaiah was doing.
Painting a picture to inspire his people.
Help them imagine possibilities.
He was prophesying to the exiles in Assyria,
who were slaves of dreaded King Sennacherib.
Isaiah pictured a peaceable kingdom,
with wolves resting beside lambs,
and leopards and goats and lions and calves,
all grazing peacefully, with children playing nearby.
It was not a picture of real life for the Israelites.
It was divine imagination.
He was seeing something in the darkness,
that others could not see.
That’s why they call prophets seers.
They see what others don’t.
But did Isaiah believe it would actually happen that way?
Did he run the odds?
Maybe Isaiah put his vision out there
to basically give people an emotional boost,
to give them an elaborate coping mechanism,
something to help them get through the next day.
Or maybe Isaiah had a plan about how his people would move out
from the oppression of slavery by Assyria,
and into their new peaceable kingdom,
where predators and prey lived in peace?
In Isaiah’s vision, it was pretty obvious
who the predators and prey were.
Did Isaiah have any bright ideas
how King Sennacherib and the brutal Assyrian forces
would one day sit down and graze, so to speak,
at the same table with their Israelite slaves?
No, this picture was not a strategic maneuver.
It was not step one in overthrowing the Empire.
Isaiah was not trying to motivate the slaves to rise up
to make some peace and justice for themselves.
And, also, no, Isaiah was not practicing slick psychology,
telling his people a comforting and imaginative bedtime story,
to give them relief from their nightmares.
Prophets did not do either one of those things.
It was not their call to give personal, psychological comfort.
It was not their call to help people fix their own problems.
So why do we often read biblical prophecy
in exactly one of those two ways?
We read it as a call to human action—
as a call to make our own peace with enemies,
as a should and ought text—
that if we’re the lion, we should learn to eat straw,
and if we’re the cow, we ought to take courage
to graze with the bear.
Or, if not that, we read it simply as a utopian vision for a future age,
to comfort us through the nightmare
that is life in this broken world,
and get us safely into the next heavenly life
where all will be peace.
_____________________
I think Isaiah would be shocked,
if he knew that 2½ thousand years later,
people would be reading his words,
and thinking he was telling
Assyrians oppressors and Israelite slaves,
to be nicer, and sit down and talk out their differences.
And he would be just as shocked to learn
that people would read his words
and take him to be only talking about some future heavenly age,
and that his prophecy had no bearing on life here on this earth.
No, Isaiah the prophet was doing here what prophets always do.
Prophets attempt to get people back on track.
They call people, in no uncertain terms, to repent—
to get in line with God.
Isaiah had a strong word here that God is on the move,
that God is working God’s purposes out.
And if we want to experience true life, as God intends,
we need to repent,
to realign ourselves with God’s purposes,
to yield to God’s wisdom and God’s judgment.
It’s that simple, and that difficult.
The peaceable kingdom comes about by divine judgment.
Yes, peace comes through judgment.
We Anabaptist-Mennonite pacifist Christians
who try our best to be nice and peaceable and non-confrontational,
and who like having a God who is the same way,
might have to swallow hard,
when we read these prophets.
But Isaiah and John the Baptist aren’t exactly pulling their punches.
They are harsh!
They are letting God’s enemies have it!
Isaiah says, with righteousness God shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
God shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips God will kill the wicked.
And dear John . . . dear locust-eating John
doesn’t know much about the principles of motivational speaking.
He probably never saw an inspirational TED-talk in his life.
Because as soon as the community leaders, the influencers,
show up for his preaching, and want to be baptized,
he turns everything up a notch.
To the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism(!), he says,
“You brood of vipers!
Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruit worthy of repentance.
Don’t brag about your ties to Abraham.
God can take these stupid stones
and make children of Abraham from them.
The ax is lying at the root of the trees;
watch out, you might just get cut down
and thrown into the fire.”
To those who most needed to change their minds
about how God wanted them to live in that dark time
of Roman oppression,
to those persons he said,
“Repent. And then get in line.
Live like someone with a changed way of thinking.
Bear fruit worthy of repentance.
Look what God is up to all around you,
and then turn,
and line yourself up with that.
You don’t have a tradition and an institution to protect.
You have a God on the move,
and you have to be moving in that same direction.”
Wow!
Does that have something to say to us 21st-century Christians,
or not?
We do so much hand-wringing about the state of the church
in our secular world.
We do so much pining for the good old days (as if they ever existed)
when people trusted the church and its leaders,
and abided by all the rules and flourished in every way.
But we are barking up the wrong tree.
Or to use John’s words, the axe is lying at the root of that tree.
We need not despair, and dream only of some peaceable kingdom
in the sky by and by.
And we need not take this burden on ourselves,
and deceive ourselves that we can make the peaceable kingdom
come to pass by trying harder,
or going back to the mythical good old days.
So how do we get in line?
Not by finding the right rules to bring us uniformity,
and all line up behind this perfect system of rules.
No, we get in line by wisely discerning God’s agenda
and lining up behind God’s movement among us.
It makes for a messier line,
but a more life-giving one.
Our calling is to look to God, great mover and righteous judge of all,
and to observe where God is on the move in our world . . . now.
We look together for signs where we can see the
saving, healing, reconciling, and truth-telling Messiah at work.
And we line up behind that.
We line up behind the Prince of Peace.
We line up behind the One
who will bring this peaceable kingdom about.
We are not the makers of the peace that will come to this world,
or to the church, or to us.
But neither are we disinterested parties,
waiting for it to be done for us.
We are duly-commissioned agents
of the God who judges for the poor and meek of the earth,
whose burning word of truth and love
breaks down the power of darkness and evil.
The implications of that should overwhelm us.
It should take our breath away,
and cause us to inhale a new Spirit-wind.
The question of the day is,
“Are we ready, by the Spirit-wind within us,
to breath with God?
to con-spire with God?
to repent, and get in line with God?”
Do we, the church of Jesus Christ,
dare step into this prophetic stream of Spirit-inspired
discerning, judging, proclaiming, and truth-telling
that will confront violent oppressors
with God’s judgment and justice?
that will confront our own sins and shortcomings
with the saving and transforming grace offered to us?
If so, we are called to repentance,
in the very same way that John the Baptist
was calling God’s people in his time.
We are called to repent.
We are called to change our way of thinking.
We are called to line up behind God’s agenda.
God has chosen me. God has chosen you.
May we have the courage and grace to do that, together.
—Phil Kniss, December 8, 2019
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