IMAGINING PEACE

December 4, 2022
2^nd Sunday of Advent
Isa. 11:1-10; Rom.15:4-13; Matt. 3:1-12
Rev. Denise Clark-Jones

Our two daughters have always had an affinity for certain Christmas movies. One of the must-see movies was Muppet’s Christmas Carol, with all the parts, except for Mr. Scrooge, played by the beloved Muppet puppets. Like several major characters in the bible, Scrooge’s life was dramatically altered by a dream during which a spirit visits him in the night. This spirit in Charles Dickens’s famous novel is named the Spirit of Christmas Past. The miserly Scrooge is first shown vignettes of his past, with the choices he made which have led to his present lonely and bitter state. The second segment, the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the present hardships of his employee, Bob Cratchit, and his family, to which Scrooge has, in no small way, contributed with his demanding expectations and meager wages. Finally, the Spirit of Christmas Future delivers a warning to Scrooge that could have been taken from the pages of the Hebrew bible’s prophetic writings. As the Hebrew prophets delivered warnings to the people about what would happen if their leaders continued to stray from God in their greed, power-lust, and exploitation of the poor and other marginalized people, Scrooge is shown what will happen in the future to himself and Bob Cratchit if he continues in his disregard and contempt for others.

Though the charming Muppets soften the message with humor, Dicken’s morality tale still resonates with its audience, young and not so young. Like Israel, Scrooge is given a second chance to live differently in the future. On Christmas morning, Scrooge awakens from his dreams, transformed. He looks upon his life with joy and revels in his opportunity to make the lives of the less fortunate better. It is no surprise that the assigned readings for the Advent season interweave the past, present, and future, as we do at the end of one year and the beginning of a new one. At this point in our Christian church calendar, we too enter a season of anticipation and reminiscence. Our Old Testament readings look to the future with longing and hope. Our New Testament readings observe the present in the knowledge of the past and recognize God’s past saving actions and promises for the future.

Amid the ashes of the once great nation of Israel, the prophet Isaiah saw a shoot, new growth, breaking through the surface of a tree stump felled by the Assyrians’ ax. For Isaiah, this unexpected shoot was a symbol of God’s promise to restore Israel. As Christians, we interpret God’s promise of restoration, as being fulfilled by God’s visitation on earth in the life of Jesus. Isaiah describes his vision of a king, who rules the reconstituted nation-state of Israel, with wisdom, righteousness, and justice. Matthew and the Apostle Paul describe a king above and beyond political and military leaders. Could it be that we are looking to the wrong people to lead us into a better future?

Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann has said: “Peace, when it comes, wherever it comes, requires odd action from unexpected sources. Without odd action from unexpected sources, the world will continue to go its uneasy, self-destructive way.” (Walter Brueggemann: Collected Sermons, vol.2, p.262) Isaiah gave his people an odd vision of the future. Yes, there would be peace and justice for which the people hoped, but it would not come in the expected ways – no powerful king with a mighty army to subdue Israel’s enemies. The new king would not engage in battles but achieve reconciliation with peaceful dialogue and mutual respect rather than divisive and dehumanizing words or destructive weapons.

Employing imagery invoking the Creation story of Genesis, the prophet Isaiah, using poetic license, envisions a time in which even predatory animals live in harmony with their prey. Although we Christians look at Isaiah’s hope for a righteous and peace-loving king as foretelling the birth of Jesus, at the time the hopeful vision was the enthronement of a model king, who would live and rule as God intended a good shepherd of the people to rule. Isaiah was speaking of a future king that lived in Isaiah’s present. That king was still a child, the offspring of a man in the royal line, which was how all kings gained the throne. What Isaiah foretold was prophetic in that it was a future that could scarcely be imagined in Israel’s present circumstances. Isaiah’s new king would follow the present model of kingship, but without the foibles of their present and past predecessors. We can be so mired in the consequences the past has generated; we lose sight of God’s promise to empower us when we work toward God’s peaceable kingdom. In our failure to trust in God, we reduce our hope to a return to an imagined past glory perceived through rose-colored glasses. And for those who live in fear, a sanitized view of the past looks like a blueprint for solving current problems, when in fact these past failures to live in mutual love and obedience to God become more destructive when repeated in a new time.

Like Scrooge, we are in danger of making the same mistakes or even worse mistakes by not looking realistically at the past. The psalmist warns against putting political power above God, writing: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.⁴When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish. ⁵Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God…” By trusting in God, we will be empowered by the Holy Spirit and can boldly demand our leaders follow in God’s ways of peace, justice, wisdom, and love rather than be led by their unrestrained temptations to submit to the ways of the world or as Paul refers to the “temptations of the flesh.”

Many centuries later, early Christians looked back at Isaiah’s prophecy of a new king and saw Jesus as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision. In Christ, God gave us a different kind of king who would restore God’s people in an unimaginable way – a poor Palestinian carpenter who preached a message of peace and love, a message of justice for the oppressed, a message of hope for a hopeless humanity. This new king did not wear a golden crown, but one made of thorns. This new king was crucified, the cruelest and most humiliating death, but would be resurrected to the glory of God forever.

The Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, had already provided a pattern of God using unlikely people to do unexpected things to bring salvation to a wayward humanity. For Mark, the first gospel writer from whom the writers of Matthew and Luke took much of their material, John the Baptist was a great prophet in the mold of Elijah, the prophet the Jews believed would return to earth to announce the Coming of the Messiah and the day of judgment. Mark described John the Baptist’s appearance in the same way his Jewish audience had read about Elijah in 2 Kings. The description the Hebrew Scriptures gave of the great prophet Elijah was that when he came out of exile in the wilderness, he was ‘hairy and dressed in animal skins with a leather belt around his waist.’ Matthew used this same description in order to draw a direct line from the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, to Jesus, thereby demonstrating that Jesus was the king Isaiah prophesied.

What Isaiah prophesied, was the truth of how we are to live as a people who love and serve God and one another as neighbors, sisters, and brothers even. No matter how hard we try to create God in our own image, God’s ways are not our ways. The future that God envisions for humankind follows God’s original design – human beings living in peace with one another, experiencing the joy of being and loving one another as sisters and brothers. It sounds like pie-in-the-sky idealism if we look at the world through only our own eyes, shaded by worldly values, rather than through God’s eyes as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Whenever we encounter the Word of God and say, “Yes, but that’s not the way the world operates,” we are giving in to either temptation or despair.

John the Baptist had his own way of stating the choice we make when faced with the decision of doing what we know God desires and what we want for ourselves. John’s intentions were good, but his method was not that of Jesus. Many Biblical scholars believe John was an Essene, a sect of Judaism that believed in order to live a more Godly life, they needed to separate themselves from society’s evils by removing themselves from society, much like the Amish today. To those of Roman culture, both gentiles and Jews, the Essenes were suspiciously non-conforming. People don’t tend to respond positively with people who they see as “not like me.” If an Essene walked into a nice traditional Jewish neighborhood there might have been fear. “Those Essenes live in communes; suppose he wants us to share like they do? He doesn’t dress like us. He probably doesn’t have a job. What if he wants to move into the neighborhood? What about our property values?”

John spoke truth: ‘The world just isn’t the way it’s supposed to be’ he cried out. Sometimes those unexpected people, who are different from us, have the perspective needed to set things right. John the Baptist told the people they weren’t following God, they needed to change and if they didn’t, things would get worse for everybody.

John saw his role as preparing his people for the Messiah who would set the world aright with harsh judgment and separating the righteous from the unrighteous. John’s tool of persuasion was invoking the fear of eternal punishment. But Jesus was not even what John expected. Jesus urged repentance, but not due to fear, but with a vision of the kingdom of God, more in line with Isaiah’s prophesy than John’s. John had his own disciples and never became one of Jesus’ disciples. Perhaps he would have, had not King Herod put a quick and untimely end to John’s life.

John the Baptist told all who would listen that being reconciled with God begins with repentance. It is as true for us as it was the children of Israel. Repentance is necessary to prepare for Christ’s coming into our lives. The Greek word translated as “repentance” is “metanoia.” The options for translation from the Greek are: “turn, fresh start, reorientation, metamorphosis, change, or renewal.” Repentance is all of these. But we resist change, don’t we? The winnowing fork, which separates the chaff within us that needs to be destroyed for repentance to occur, is often painful, seeming more like a sacrifice than a gift. We prefer to wrap ourselves in comfortable routines and unexamined lives. Maybe we’re afraid of all the things that might change if our assumptions and prejudices about “others,” were challenged. Advent is a time for re-examining those things that you thought to be true, but when the light of Christ shines, you see they are false images of our own self-deceptions.

In this time of great division in our country, our Christian faith challenges us about our assumptions that have bred fear of the “other.” The Apostle Paul encouraged Christians to “Welcome one another… just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” We are called to be peacemakers. We are called to be healers. We are called to seek justice for those that are denied justice. We are called to help the poor and welcome the foreigner. We are called to be what Brueggemann called the “unexpected sources” who take “odd actions,” which bring the kingdom of God to earth.

The kingdom of God began when Christ came into the world, but like Isaiah’s war-ravaged Israel, it is in the process of becoming fully realized in the world. We see glimpses of God’s kingdom whenever and wherever we accept and treat one another as God’s beloved children. When we build bridges instead of walls. When we nurture and tend the earth rather than exploit and destroy.

John the Baptist’s cry for repentance is a cry for peace – peace with each other, peace within us, and peace with God. Peace is the fruit of repentance. Jesus demonstrated what God’s peace looks like. It looks like people from all over the world sitting down together to a feast prepared by Christ, our Savior. May the peace of Christ be rekindled within you at his table today and throughout this Advent season.

Amen. May it be so

© Rev. Denise Clark-Jones, 2022, All Rights Reserved
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“Why am I a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church?  Two words keep  floating up in a rather persistent way  –  “home” and  “family” – and I realized that it is an inescapable fact that is what this church means to me. During my 40 years here, so many life events have happened and Westminster has been there for me through all those times – good and bad.    It has been my home and family.  They say “home is where the heart is” and I’ve found the heart of Westminster to be as open and warm as a family’s!”