Isaiah 11: 1-9

Romans 15: 4-13

Second Sunday in Advent

Elizabeth Macaulay

I meet weekly with a group of clergy to discuss the texts for the upcoming Sunday. We compare notes and understandings and share our questions and curiosities about the texts as we compare notes and understandings and share our questions and curiosities about our lives. I am blessed to learn with these folk.

Sometimes I learn by what niggles at my belly. I learn from the times I do not agree with what I am hearing someone say. I learn by listening to that unease and speaking about it with people who are the kinds of colleagues you can disagree with – the best kind.

One of the pastors was talking about the text from Isaiah. He wanted to play around with Isaiah’s vision of peace. He wanted to unpack it and ask his folk how well they thought that lamb slept while the wolf was lying down next to it – things like that.

I found myself getting, well, not angry really, but darn irritated. I wanted to stop him from dissecting the text. I wanted him to keep his preacher’s curiosity out of the scene. I wanted him to leave the vision of Isaiah – that of a Peaceful Kingdom – I wanted him to leave that vision alone.

So I told him something very true.

I explained (with some passion) that I WANT and NEED that vision. I don’t care if it is realistic or possible and I don’t care about the logistical disconnects in it.

I need that vision. A time when the knowledge of the Lord will be so much a part of the air that we breathe that none will hurt or destroy. Children will be safe. Creatures who have been taught by long lessons of life to fear each other will know instead the ways of peace. Wolves and lambs and Palestinians and Israelis and the rich and the poor. They will not hurt or destroy or turn on each other or use the claws and teeth worn sharp through so many years of fighting.

I don’t want anyone mucking about with the vision of what is possible. God’s vision of peace made flesh in the person and teachings and ongoing presence of Christ Jesus.

I need hope too badly.

Maybe you do, too.

The book we know as Isaiah is actually the work of three different voices. This first portion was written before the nation of Israel endured the pain and fear of exile. The first portion is a wake-up call. The prophet speaks of the imperative for the people of God to live in God’s ways. God’s ways and teachings are a largely ignored part of every day life; certainly as it is lived as a nation. The poor and the vulnerable are not receiving justice. The glory of a nation that once flourished is reduced to the image of a stump with only a shoot to proclaim that it is not totally dead.

And yet the shoot IS. A branch will grow out of that which seems dead. A Messiah will come. A Messiah upon whom rests the spirit of wisdom and understanding and whose delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

Some seven hundred years later the Apostle Paul speaks of that hope and that Messiah. A hope made flesh in the person of Jesus and held out to all the world – Gentile and Jew and rich and poor, woman and man, slave and free. All are called to hear the promise. There is a vision for a peaceable world.

Listen. In order for us to be the people we are called to be right now, this moment, we must hold to a vision of what can be. We must allow it to guide us. We must hold onto it with all of the passion we can muster. Because we will need it when we are tired and hope-less and overcome by the immensity of the morning papers and the evening news.

Without a vision, we will perish. And the greater the vision, the richer our lives. We who are breathed into life by God and called to love life through the teachings of Jesus: we have not been created for small things (Meister Eckhart).

We will gather at table and share communion this morning. We gather knowing that the vision of peace is still a “not yet”. We know that the ways of brokenness are real. The Body of Christ which is this world we tend knows yet the ripping of war and want, poverty and passivity.

And yet, we gather. In this place we gather and across this land we gather and across the world we gather at the table of Jesus through which we proclaim a vision greater than the ripping and wrench of the “not yet”.

We proclaim the vision of a world grown green from the stump of despair. And we, we will join in giving birth to the creation of this green world, this peaceable kingdom. We are a people of hope.