December 8, 2013The Advent Gift of Peace

Preface to The Word

I can’t remember why the mountain lions were coming down out of the hills around Pocatello, ID. I just remember that they were. I was serving the UM church there in the early nineties and one winter the mountain lions were coming down out of the hills. For some reason the natural food supply for the big cats was becoming scarce. They were coming down to the neighborhood developments on the edge of town, snatching little dogs out of people’s back yards, and eating them. Needless to say there was a lot of upset about this. People feared for their pets and their children, and a time of great uneasiness hovered over the whole town as the elusive lions were being hunted down. Finally they were spotted near the town zoo. Up in the limbs of some tall trees just outside the zoo, two young cougars sprawled starving and exhausted. They were trapped and captured and attempts were made to revive them.But being too far-gone, they both died.

Although we were worried and concerned about the threat of these lions-on-the-loose, no one blamed the big cats for doing what came naturally to them. After all, they survived by eating flesh and they were created to be effective predators. The problem was, our children and our pets had become their prey and now these beautiful wild animals were a danger to be dealt with.

Keep these images in mind as you hear the scripture reading from Isaiah today!

The prophet Isaiah represented God’s word in a time of great uneasiness and threat. The little kingdom of Judah lay vulnerable to the prowling empire of Assyria, which had swept in from the east and hungered for the booty of Syria, Israel and Judah. When Isaiah’s people looked to the future what they saw was more gloomy than hopeful – war, persecution, humiliation, servitude, and death.

Isaiah wanted them to know that we humans don’t have to settle for that kind of a world. In stark contrast, he perceived another kind of world; a world only made possible by God. And it looked very different.

On this second Sunday of Advent, the Sunday we light the Candle called “Peace,” we’ll hear a part of Isaiah’s beautiful vision read to us.

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 11:1-11

SermonI.

  1. Isaiah’s poignant images of peace speak deeply to the longings of the human heart. The peace they portray is still a peace we do not fully know. Our shopping malls right now are filled with music about “peace on earth,” but current eventstell a different story – of war and terrorism, of drastic security measures, of growing poverty and food insecurity, of Christmas shoppers knocking others down and getting into fights over flatscreen TV’s!

We long for a peace we rarely see.

  1. As if to push our imaginations to their limits, the prophet’s vision uses wild animals to capture the ultimate imageof peacefulness. The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid. It’s not the world we know – where real wolves have become a battleground between sheep farmers who want to protect their flocks and naturalists who want to protect wolves from extinction.

But in Isaiah’s vision, predators are coupled with prey. Mountain lions don’t eat little doggies, but play with them in harmony. In Isaiah’s vision, they live in peace and even change their eating habits – lions eating straw like the cows!

  1. Here is where we really get to the significance of the Isaiah’s vision of peace. The only way for wolves to live with lambs, for leopard’s to lie down with kids, is for the animals (both those who hunt and those who hide) to change their very natures. In the peaceable kingdom Isaiah sees, even poisonous snakes don’t harm the little children who play around their dens. Bears and leopards lie tranquilly with cattle and kids.

This isn’t simply the peace we’ve settled for. This is an unnatural peace. This is God’s peace, the peace God’s messiah will bring, where harmony prevails and creatures no longer hurt or destroy others.

What could possibly bring about this miraculous vision? It comes, Isaiah says, when “the earth is as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

II.

  1. The problem with all of this is that we know better. We know that wild animals are always going to be wild animals. No lion is going to prefer straw to a hunk of fresh meat. They are made to be carnivores and predators. Their very existence depends on it.
  2. But this fantastic image of harmony and peace ultimately depends on just one of God’s created animals – an animal whose bestial nature can change and must change. I’m referring, of course, to the human animal.

Can human nature change?

As far as we know only humans have been blessed with memory and reason, and from these capacities comes our will. We humans, unlike other animals, can make reasoned choices. We do make choices. We must make choices. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t make choices.

Isaiah’s prediction is that it’s when our nature is literally flooded by God’s Spirit, when the knowledge of the Lord fills us as the waters cover the sea, that our choices flow from God’s nature and move us, with all of creation, toward the peaceable kingdom.

  1. Now Isaiah knew that his people needed a good, strong leader to get them there. He anticipated a king filled with God’s Spirit and endowed by God with special gifts that make peace happen – wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, the knowledge and the fear of the Lord. The judgment of this messiah-king shall be with “righteousness” and “equity” for the poor and meek of the earth.
  2. I personally don’t believe that Isaiah had Jesus of Nazareth specifically in mind when he announced his vision 700 years before Jesus’ birth. But I can certainly see why the early Christians saw in Jesus the fulfillment of the hope Isaiah dreamed. When Luke told the story of Jesus’ birth, didn’t he have the angels proclaim to the poor shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, goodwill among people”?

And later, with the story of Jesus as a young boy amazing the teachers in the temple, Luke concluded, “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” Taken right out of Isaiah!

Here is the anticipated leader, the expected messiah,the long-awaited One whose life, teachings, death, resurrection, continuing presence and power make possible the miraculous peace Isaiah foretold.

III.

  1. But the wisdom of Jesus was “unnatural” and the peace he promised went far beyond that which can be enforced by law, military might, fear, or the threat of punishment. He promised a peace that the world cannot give, the peace that radiates from a changed heart and a transformed mind. In spite of what the world typically models for us, the peace of Christ is rooted in repentance, it grows in the soil of humility, it flourishes where justice reigns, it prevails where the Holy Spirit is stronger than sin.
  2. The Hebrew word for this is shalom. Usually we use the word “peace” as a translation for shalom. But shalom is so much more than the absence of hostility. It is about right relationships, about harmony in creation, about well-being, and about justice. Its potential is woven all through the Bible and it is always connected with knowing God and walking in God’s path.

Walking with Jesus leads us towards shalom. Through him we are filled with a knowledge of God, “as the waters cover the sea.”Through him we are captured by a Spirit that changes our very nature as human beings and plants in us a vision of a world where peace isn’t simply an option, but the overarchinggoal of our existence.

  1. This vision of the peaceable kingdom anticipates a time when the peoples of the earth lay aside their predatory ways and take on a new nature as human beings… human beings who live out the peace of God in creation. Our Christian faith isthat the little child we celebrate at Christmas, the babe born in such humble conditions in a manger Bethlehem, really will lead us to new life, and that by his leading and through his Spirit we will become a signal to all peoples that the way of shalomreally is possible.

It’s no small thing that today, with Isaiah’s vision set before us, we light a candle called Peace and sing the song: “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.”

Shalom.

IV.

  1. Friends, we can’t leave here today and let these words just roll right over us. We can’t leave worship today thinking that when it comes to peace on earth, there is little we can do about it, that it’s all up to the leaders of nations to stop their predatory ways, that it’s only people with real power can that create the world pictured by Isaiah.
  2. In fact, just the opposite may be true.

When Jesus came with his message of change, it was not addressed to the leaders of the nations anymore than it was to every single individual who heard his voice. The beginnings of God’s peaceable world were small…

-as small as twelve everyday,common disciples who chose to leave their old ways and follow the messiah of peace, God’s Christ who had come into our helplessness as a baby in a manger!

-even as small as a smile to a tired clerk who serves us this season, or perhaps even to the one who cuts in front of us in the line of traffic!

-or as small as the choice we make not to purchase this year a gift that was likely made in a sweatshop somewhere or, by other lifestyle choices we make, not to devour the hopes and resources of the innocent.

  1. In this dog-eat-dog world, where we play cat-and-mouse games in the concrete jungle out there, we choose not to play the game but to follow the Lamb of God into his kingdom of peace.
  2. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.