Isaiah 2: The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. 2 In days to come

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1 Rev. Chandler Stokes Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 13:11-14 The First Sunday of Advent November 27, 2016 Introduction to the Advent Series: Returning to the Lectionary The lectionary is a three-year cycle of Bible readings compiled by an ecumenical committee for use in Christian churches. Four readings are offered for each Sunday, ordinarily two Old Testament readings and two New. The first year of that cycle begins today. I preached lectionary texts almost exclusively for twenty-five years. Then, for a couple of reasons an interest in preaching series of sermons more coherently and recognizing that Paul was not a lectionary preacher I started using my own choice of texts for Sunday morning. Now, I would like to return to the lectionary. I have felt that we are mostly listening to our own news feeds. The polarization, division, and sense of distance between us in our nation has led me to think, Let s make the lectionary one common news feed, or at least one source of input that we ll have in common with many Christians across the country, even across the globe. And it will be our common input these texts from the lectionary. Scripture Introduction This Advent series is built around the Old Testament text and the Epistle text for each week, which means for this Advent an Isaiah text and one from the letters attributed to Paul. And quite amazingly, each Isaiah text offers a promise, and each Pauline text says, If that s what God promises, then we should live like this. Isaiah 2:1-5 2 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. 2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. 3 Many peoples shall come and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

2 5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord! Romans 13: Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; 13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. * * * Isaiah sees Jerusalem on the highest mountain, and all the peoples of the earth streaming to it, seeking to be taught God s ways and to walk in God s paths. He sees that, when they come, they will hear instruction (the Hebrew word is Torah), and this will happen: They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. That is Isaiah s vision: peace genuine, lasting, equitable peace will come. Isaiah describes the process: swords beaten into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks. The details are instructive. This was the iron age. Iron was expensive and in limited supply. The swords of that time, the tips of plows, the tips of spears, and pruning devices were all made of iron. If you used your rare iron for swords and spears, you really did not have it available for plowing and pruning. And vice versa. Isaiah s vision is about taking something that is already there and repurposing it. What s needed is already there. Rare iron is simply taken from its misuse in war, and put to peaceful, productive use. It s repurposed: from harm to husbandry, from destruction to development, from aggression to agronomy. It s shaped to new purposes. It s not only no war. It s life turned to productive activity and strong, just, life-giving relationships; it s all that not just an end to war. The Hebrew word is shalom. In 1953, President Eisenhower was reflecting on the eight years that had gone by since the end of the Second World War and the build-up of Cold War military armaments by the Americans and the Soviets. He said: The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 2 of 6 November 27, 2016

3 This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. 1 Eisenhower knew that a military buildup would not create true peace. It would mean loss of life in less direct ways than in war. Isaiah had in mind an end to that kind of violence as well. Isaiah s promise of the transformation of societies and economies is an extravagant peace. Heavens, his is an outrageous promise, given that today we are armed to the teeth with handguns and a massive military! The promise is to end war, to not learn war anymore, but also to turn arsenals into agriculture; tanks into tractors; handguns into harvesters, into a productive peace, a true shalom. And the biblical promise of shalom is in fact even bigger than that. It includes our making peace in personal ways, too, even by transforming the violence in our language. The peace prophesied here includes even the disarming, the re-purposing of our speech, turning our verbal grenades into granters of peace. It s another way that we are armed to the teeth in our speech. Methodist preacher Steve Garnaas-Holmes wrote recently: I bear them into conversations, my swords. I hide them in my dark. I launch them at the news, these spears. Find them among me, God of Peace. Take them: my bitterness, my defensiveness, my need to win. Find the hidden swords, the secret spears I cling to. Make them red hot in the furnace of your forgiveness. Hold them in the tongs of your truth. Beat them with the hammer of your love. Take the hurt I mean to project, the defeat I wish others. Free me of the swagger of hurtfulness. Bend my righteous little swords into tools of life. Let me stand before enemies with pure love, prepared to break soil, to prune branches, to do the hard work of growing peace. For I will need stout tools to work this rough land well, to bring fruits of justice out of this rocky earth, to tend the muscular trees of mercy. 2 God s vision of peace is not just Eisenhower s prophecy undone and Isaiah s fulfilled; it is our participation in shalom with every word we speak. Shalom is the way God wills for all life to be Steve Garnaas-Holmes, Unfolding Light, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 3 of 6 November 27, 2016

4 But the question is, When? When is this going to happen? Isaiah says, In the days to come. Well, that may not be specific, but it does imply that such transformation will come within history. 3 So, again, when is that? When are the days to come? Paul has an answer. He says: You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Now is the time. The day is near. When? Now and near. Now and near. Now, because Christ has come. Near, because Christ will come. We live between the first Advent of Christ s birth, life, death, and resurrection and the second Advent of Christ s coming in the fullness of time. For Paul that means it s time to wake up: time to slough off the sleep of attachment to the old age, to wake up and adjust to the reality of the new day (or new age) about to dawn. 4 One scholar puts it this way: The new age has dawned and made fundamental claim upon the lives of believers. The one who believes allows that new reality to shape the pattern of one s life, 5 to be shaped to new purposes. Paul says, Let us then lay aside the works of darkness [Right? The night is passed.] and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy [those things that more typically go on at night, when people are out of control]. Instead, [wake up, get up, and] put on the Lord Jesus Christ. It s the morning of the New Day, when the dewdrops of mercy shine bright., as we will soon sing. Paul believes that the New Day is dawning and that it will be ultimately fulfilled in shalom, just as Isaiah prophesied. Would Paul believe it now? After all this time? It is audacious to believe that the new age has dawned. It s audacious of Paul to claim that now is the time. How would he believe it now, after all this time? But how could he believe anything else? Paul believes that Christ has come, and lived, and died, and been resurrected from the dead. That is the faith. It s just that, well, Paul believed it and talked and tried to act like the promises were true. The question then is not would Paul believe it today, but do I believe it? Can I believe it myself? When I preached for the youth and their families at the Confirmation Feast, I remembered once driving Jeremy to school. We had just moved to Oakland, and the murder rate had dropped in one year from 158 to 87. And the new police chief announced that the goal for the coming year would be to reduce the number to 50. I remember that I was excited that they d almost cut the murder rate in half. While I was thinking that, 3 Stacey Simpson Duke, Pastoral Perspective on Isaiah 2:1 5, in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 4. 4 Brendan Byrne, Romans, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, Sacra Pagina Series, vol. 6 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1996), Byrne, Romans, 134. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 4 of 6 November 27, 2016

5 Jeremy said, The goal is fifty? Why not none? He believed the promise of beating handguns into harvesters. Help my unbelief! Do I really believe this outrageous promise? If I did, what would I do? What would I do if I trusted this to be true? Paul would say, Chandler, it s time to wake up to what s true and real and to get dressed in the armor of Light, to put on Christ. One of the ideas behind putting on these clothes comes from Greek drama, where the garment put on by actors portraying a particular character was customarily so all-enveloping that they could rightly be said to have abandoned their individual identity to put on completely that of the character portrayed. 6 Put on Christ, he d say. We wake up and put our clothes on every day. And in that habit, there is the opportunity to believe and live into this truth every day. We believe. Help our unbelief. Wake up and get dressed. Paul and Isaiah are offering essentially the very same thing: not only a vision of global transformation, but an invitation to live toward that day. The passage from Isaiah ends, O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord! 7 It s like this. A young man tells the story about his grandmother and himself when he was a boy. They lived up in the Pacific Northwest, a Native American family. The tribe had an annual celebration, a picnic out in a sacred grove of trees in a park in their town. The celebration was in the fall, at the end of the summer the last outdoor picnic before it got too cold and rainy. Their celebration was interrupted one year by three white teenagers from part of the town down the hill. The three teens came in and knocked over the picnic tables and chairs and knocked down this young man s grandmother. It shocked him and angered him to see her knocked down in the dirt. She got up. They knocked her down again. The grandson ran over to protect his grandmother, and they pushed him to the ground as well. Then they tore their shoes off their feet and ran off with them down the hill. When the boys left, the families went, violated and grieving, back to their homes. The young man watched his grandmother very closely. When she got home, she took off her soiled clothes and patted herself down with cool, clear, fresh water. After she had washed herself in this special way, she got dressed again, she brought out some fine deerskin, and that day she began to make moccasins. She began to make three pairs. They were very beautiful, with beads all over them, even on the bottom, on the soles of the moccasin. They weren t just for wearing; these were for ceremonial purposes. The boy asked his grandmother what she was doing. She said, I m making Christmas presents. When she finished the moccasins, she wrapped them in paper and set them above the fireplace on the mantle. On Christmas Day his grandmother took him down the hill to where the three white boys lived. His heart raced. All the way through the park and down the slope, he held onto his 6 Byrne, Romans, Duke, Pastoral Perspective on Isaiah 2:1 5, 6. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 5 of 6 November 27, 2016

6 grandmother s shawl. On the way, they went through the grove of trees where the picnic had been. She touched each of the trees to receive their blessing. He kept holding her shawl. They went down the hill all the way to the house, where the boys lived. The boys father opened the door. After a moment of looking, he stepped aside and let them go past him to where the boys were in the back. She came up to each boy, her hands full, and handed each one of the pairs of moccasins wrapped in paper and said, Merry Christmas. Then, they went home. When her grandson told this story later he said two things. First he said, The walk back up the hill was much easier than the walk down the hill. Then he added, I wondered why their father let us go past him into the house. I believe it was because, when he saw us, he didn t see an old Indian woman and her grandson. I believe he saw the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit standing at his door. 8 I believe they were clothed in Christ and shalom came. And inasmuch as you have been baptized into Christ, you have put on Christ. His grandmother believed it and put on the armor of light, the actor s garment We believe. Help our unbelief. We wake up and put our clothes on every day. And in that habit, there is the opportunity to believe and live into this truth every day. I offer a discipline to reaffirm our baptism, to help our unbelief. Sometimes priests kiss their stole before they put it on the stole is a symbol of putting on Christ s way of service, putting on Christ. When we wake up and get dressed, what if we were to kiss our shirts before we put them on, to remind ourselves that we are putting on Christ? Since our teeth are so close to our lips, we might also remember to disarm our speech and repurpose our language for peace. We believe. Help our unbelief. This is our mountain where we hear instruction go forth. Worship is our Jerusalem, where the law, and the story, and the promises are told. We are here to listen, to see what Isaiah saw. He still promises that, when we are instructed: They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah promises that in the days to come everybody will wake up and come to Jerusalem and be changed in the hearing of this promise. They will fulfill it. Every weapon, every word, everyone will be repurposed. Everything we have for a life of peace is there already. We believe. Help our unbelief. Someday everybody will wake up. Don t wait for then, says Paul. Now is the time. Get up and get dressed. It s now. Time to walk in the light. 8 This is a story I heard many years ago. It came to me by way of southwest Native Americans, though it is a story of the northwest Indians up by Seattle. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 6 of 6 November 27, 2016