“A Vision of Peace – or Just an Illusion?”

The political situation in Jerusalem some 700 years before the birth of Jesus is bleak. The Assyrians are at the gates, the invaders are ravaging the countryside. The economy is in ruins. Corruption in government is the rule of the day; judges are routinely swayed by bribes, leaders are blinded by partisan propaganda. In short, the dynasty of King David, the son of Jesse, once considered to be the carrier of God’s goodness and faithfulness in the world, is a mere stump compared to its glorious past; the family tree has been decimated by enemies foreign and domestic. Despair and resignation reign.

            Onto this scene strides a prophet, Isaiah by name, announcing that despite all appearances, God has new plans for Jerusalem and for the world….(Isaiah 11:1-11)

            I sometimes think that we like to believe that we are the first people to pick up the Bible, read passages like this one from Isaiah, and say, “What a crock.”

            That we are the first ones to say, “Who can believe any of this stuff about a day when the lamb will lie down with the lion, when the government will really be about serving the people, not feathering its own nest, when people will no longer make war upon each other, when all people will know not fear but security.

            Because we know, and people have always known, that this vision of Isaiah’s of the peaceable kingdom is not a vision, it is an illusion, that it is just not natural, that it is against the order of nature that we learned about in science class.

            Theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann echoes this almost universal inability to believe this sort of nonsense. He writes in his book, Peace, “Unheard of and unimaginable! All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal that they are not worth reflecting on.”

But then Brueggemann reconsiders.  He goes on, “But then I look again and notice something else. The poet means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect of the poem is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.”

            Isaiah’s contemporaries look around and what they see is a stump of the Dynasty of King David, and they can imagine nothing else, nothing greater. They know what is normal, and normal is corruption, normal is the strong oppressing the weaker, normal is the rich getting richer while the poor become increasingly impoverished, normal is monarchs pursuing war abroad to distract attention from problems at home.

            Isaiah tells them that they have been promised so much more, and that if they put on the eyeglasses that God so freely provides, they can see that what they have come to accept as normal is anything but.

            In this Advent season, our challenge is to hear these powerful words of promise for us, words we are tempted to dismiss as impossible, as not a vision of what will be but as a mere illusion.

            Like Isaiah’s contemporaries, we look around and see not a flourishing tree of life, but a mere stump, we see what we are told is normal, never mind that we have been promised so much better than this.

            The new normal is a relentless death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars approaching the longest armed conflicts we have ever been involved in, wars that last week we were told will extend until at least 2014; the new normal is an ever increasing gauntlet of security measures to board an airplane, now featuring full-body scans and pat downs; the new normal is seemingly endless corruption in our system of justice, as the scandals rocking the probation and sheriffs department once again evidence; the new normal is governmental restriction on benefits to the most in need, the threatened cutting off of unemployed benefits to two million American between now and Christmas, on the grounds that we cannot afford those benefits, while perversely we can afford tax cuts for those earning in excess of $250,000 per year; the new normal is politicians of all stripes putting private agenda ahead of common good.

            I think at times we are so used to getting beat down by all this stuff that we really start to believe that this is normal, that this is the way things are supposed to be and always will be, and that resistance is not only futile, it is foolish.

            But then we take another look at Isaiah’s vision, about the promise of a new creation, when the rightly governed world will be detoxified, where the world will be safe for our children, for the meek, for the most vulnerable, where those who rule will have the most important characteristic, the trait beyond compare, that any leaders could possess – the humility to know that they are not gods, and that they owe their allegiance to, and are responsible to, the one God who never ceases to defend the widow and the orphan, the weak and the poor.

            And then in this season of Advent we remember also the one who Israel longed for, but the one who came as well, the one who was full of power and yet brought us peace, the one who though filled with divine might was humble even so, the one who was a descendant of King David, a shoot from the stock of Jesse – the one named Jesus.  We remember the one who despite having all that power chose not to take on Rome’s legions, but instead humbly took the side of the poor, the marginalized, the sick, the oppressed, bringing healing, reconciliation, and new and abundant life. And we remember that his commitment to this impossible – so we say! – peaceable kingdom was such that it got him arrested, and tortured, and nailed to a cross, and how that was to be expected, was par for the course, was what everyone considered to be normal.

            And we remember that God took that old normal and stood it on its head, rolling away the stone from the tomb, raising Jesus to new life.

            Friends, in a world which tells us that what little we have is normal, and that to dream of or even expect anything more is just a crock, this is the Good News for us today, that God wills – and will one day bring about – justice and peace for this world, and for all its creatures.