The Rev. Ann R. Lougee
December 2, 2007
Hoping for peace
Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:8-14
 

Today’s beautiful passage from Isaiah, written hundreds of years before Jesus’ life, reminds me of the “I have a dream” speech of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in our own time. But our reality is a long way from either Isaiah’s or Dr. King’s vision of peace, justice, and healing, isn’t it?

For this year we read this text aware of the conflicts and struggles that are taking place all over the world, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Darfur, as well as in our cities and neighborhoods, our homes and workplaces, our relationships with one another, perhaps even within the walls of our congregation.

We’ve come to know too, some less obvious disturbances of our peace, such as the threat of terrorism that can make even “peaceful” days feel ominous. We also sense the growing anger of the dispossessed that threatens to explode, and we are recognizing the damage to the earth that we will leave as a tragic legacy to our grandchildren and to theirs as well.

Imagine, then, how the people of Israel must have felt after centuries of threat, destruction, and exile by one empire after another. They looked at their beautiful city, Jerusalem, burned and battered by powers that must have appeared unstoppable.

But Isaiah believed that there was one power stronger than any empire and any destructive force, and today’s reading shows Isaiah’s vision of the Kingdom of God, a future very different from what was just then visible. “...they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Isaiah’s words are so graceful, so haunting, so expressive of our deepest yearnings that they are frequently used in our public life as a vision for all of God’s children. In fact, these words are engraved on a wall near the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City, where they inspire the work of many nations, many different peoples who yearn to live together in justice and peace.

We hear this text now not only in a time of conflict and war but in a new season, at the beginning of a new church year which starts today with the beginning of the Advent season.

While the world around us wraps up another year hoping for increased consumer spending and waiting for annual reports on profits, the church already steps into a new time, to begin a season of hoping and waiting for much more than material prosperity.

Advent invites us to awaken from our numbed endurance and our domesticated expectations, to consider our life afresh in light of new gifts that God is about to give, if only we will receive them. So, in this new season and new year, may we dare to hope for something much better than the news may report?

As beautiful as Isaiah’s words are, they paint a very clear picture: God is the One who brings this dream to reality. But there’s work for us to do, too, in re-shaping the instruments of war, violence, and destruction into instruments of peace and provision for all, as we allow the Spirit of God move us.

So, there are words of comfort and promise about what God is going to do, but between the lines, there’s also a call to participate in the dream. Isaiah wants us to loosen our grip, our reliance, on instruments of war and to take up the things of peace, to “walk in the light of the Lord.”
It sounds really, really nice, but there’s a catch: God wills for the world a justice and righteousness of the kind that will get our minds off of our own petty agendas and our penchant to protect our own little investments. I, and probably most of us find that vision a little overwhelming – and a bit threatening because we are reluctant to lose or risk the things we value most and are even reluctant to share.

The things of war between nations are also ideas that we struggle with as individuals. Many of us claim that the nations, alas, can’t beat their swords and spears into the things of peace just yet, much as they might like to, because there are still so many situations in which those weapons are needed. After all, that’s how we settle conflicts.

Many may doubt that seeking peace through justice will ever turn back the dogs of war. But even skeptics have to admit that justice, safety, and widespread prosperity have a better chance of resulting in peace than injustice, danger, and disparity of wealth.

Isaiah looks toward a day when all the nations will not only delight in God’s presence, they will be engaged in God’s purposes. Isaiah looks, in other words, toward the Kingdom of God, a time when God’s ways will fully shape how we live, not just some of us, but every single person: “all the nations…many peoples” streaming toward the bright light of peace, and enough, for all. Things may not look like that right now, but Advent is about taking the long view of things. It’s about preparing ourselves to be the birthing place of the Christ Spirit, to help bring about that realm of God. In Advent, we’re invited to get this marvelous picture of peacemaking out of the realm of our imaginations and into the realities of our everyday lives.

The Apostle Paul picks up the theme here, in his advice to the Christian community in 1st century Rome, summing up all the commandments as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Don’t allow your actions to be driven by your selfish, base desires, he tells them. These days, he might phrase it as “Get over yourself.”

It’s likely that people in his time weren’t by nature any more gracious or magnanimous or generous than we are, but Paul, like Isaiah, holds forth hope for individuals to be remade, transformed, to take on the Christ-nature. “Clothe yourselves with Christ,” he tells them.

Isn’t that very much what the act of Communion is about? In eating and drinking bread and juice, symbols of Jesus’ body and blood, we take into ourselves the essence of Jesus, whom we call Christ.

Taking into ourselves the symbols of his body and blood, we are symbolically taking into ourselves the characteristics, the nature, of Jesus. So we, in essence, “put on” Christ.

In his 40-day wilderness sojourn after his baptism, Jesus decided that his role was to allow his life — his time and his energy — to allow his life to be taken and blessed for the work of sharing God’s love with those who desperately needed it. As Jesus allowed his life to be given out for others, like bread broken to be shared, so are we to allow ourselves to be taken and blessed and broken open to give of our time, our care, our compassion, our love.

Jesus identified a new covenant between God and human beings, one that is to be full of our life’s blood, as his relationship with God was. We are to enact our vision of the coming of the Kingdom of God, to be, as Ghandi said, the change we want to see.

And so as we take the cup, we are reminded to “put on Christ,” to enjoy and share abundance of life. This is both our gift from and our relationship with God. It is our bond with our fellow human beings and the rest of Creation. This is our hope for the coming of the Kingdom of God. May it be so. Amen.