The Long Pause (sermon, 3rd Sunday of Advent, Dec. 12, 2010)

Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13

Imagine a Christmas pageant put on by kindergartners. There they are, a group of five and six year-olds, fidgeting on risers, pulling at their Christmas collars, but with beaming faces belting out the words to their song, words from Isaiah: “You be the lion strong and wild, I’ll be the lamb, meek and mild; we’ll live together happily, ‘cause that’s how it ought to be.”

Children aren’t the only ones whose eyes light up when they imagine a world at peace. Peace is something human beings have always longed for -- peace in our families, communities, nations, world. The Quaker preacher and artist Edward Hicks was so captivated by the vision of peace described by Isaiah that he painted more than one hundred versions of it. He put all the animals together: the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and kid, the calf and the lion, and a child among them. All of the animals have wide-open eyes that look almost human. They also look somewhat startled, as if this change in their reality from relationships of predator and prey to mutuality and respect has surprised them as much as anyone.

This vision of peace is certainly surprising, but no more so than the prediction that begins this passage -- that from a devastated wasteland of tree stumps, new life will grow: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots.” Just before this passage, at the end of chapter 10, Isaiah describes a devastated battlefield, one that God has taken an ax to and cut down all the powers of the day which are depicted as towering trees. Nothing is left of Israel or its enemies except a mass of decaying stumps.

And yet, from one of those stumps, the stump that represents God’s people, Isaiah sees something: a tiny, fragile green shoot, a sign of new life. This is no ordinary crocus, improbably poking up through the late winter snow; this tiny sign of life is rooted in the lineage of Jesse, the father of David, Israel’s greatest king. Out of all the suffering and devastation God’s people have known, Isaiah declares there will be a new day, a new ruler, one greater than the people have yet seen.

“He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” In other words, this new ruler will do what God’s people have failed to do: he will look out for the least and the lost, he will not judge as we human beings inevitably judge -- by the way people look or the way people talk -- instead he will see the suffering of the poor and he will be their protector, bringing them into the family of God.

This week I had a training session with the new elders and deacons and as we talked about our faith journeys some of us answered the question, “What do you love about Jesus?” Here are some of the answers: “I love how Jesus turned everything upside-down.” “I love how Jesus doesn’t judge people the way we do but loves even those we find hard to love.” “I love how Jesus challenges authority.” All of these answers speak to who we believe Jesus to be: God here on earth, reaching out to the least and the lost, protecting the poor and the downtrodden, reminding all people of their status as beloved children of the one true God.

It’s probably hard to say what’s harder for us to imagine: a truly righteous ruler who looks out for those who cannot fend for themselves, or peace in the animal kingdom. A woman watching that kindergarten Christmas pageant was moved to tears as those children sang with passion and idealism about the lion and the lamb peacefully coexisting. She cried, not because of the beauty of what they described, but because she could sense her own resistance to believing that such a thing could possibly happen: “As I watched that throng of kindergartners singing,” she wrote later, “something immensely powerful washed over me; it was like a monsoon of hope and sadness, all these children so certain the world ought to be this way, and me so certain of all the ways it isn’t. It moved me to tears, really; a jumbled mix of bittersweet tears — Advent tears — for that long pause between what is and what should be, what is and what we Jesus-followers believe will be.” (1)

In his book Peace, Walter Brueggemann expresses the same kind of skepticism about the picture Isaiah describes: “Unheard of and unimaginable!” he writes, “All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal they are not worth reflecting on. But then I look again and notice something else. [Isaiah] means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect...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.” (2)

Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our knowledge tells us that the peace Isaiah describes in this text is impossible. But in this season of Advent -- this long pause during which we wait on tiptoe for the promises of God to be revealed again -- God calls us to let go of what we think we know and use our imaginations to envision a whole new normal, to look around and see that the things we take for granted don’t have to be that way.

In our passages from Isaiah from Romans, we receive two images of what this new normal might look like. And, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues, if we really want to change ourselves or the world, acquiring the right image is far more important than diligently exercising our willpower. (3) In addition to Isaiah’s images of a righteous ruler and the peaceable kingdom, the apostle Paul offers us another image of a new normal in the passage we heard today from Romans. “May God...grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How do we do that, you ask? Paul answers: “Welcome one another...just as Christ has welcomed you...”

It may sound like Paul is asking us to do the impossible -- live in harmony with one another, not just those who mildly irritate us, but those who deeply offend us by the ways their views and beliefs and lifestyles clash with ours. It may sound impossible, but the reason Paul calls us to extend that kind of radical hospitality and acceptance is because that is precisely what Jesus did...he was born into the devastated remnant of God’s chosen people and broke God’s promises wide open so that they included, not just the Jews, but everyone, all the children of the earth, the poor, the rich, the righteous, the sinner, you, me, everyone.

That God could extend God’s love and mercy and grace to all people was once as impossible for people to imagine as a wolf snuggling up to a lamb or a small child playing safely by the den of a poisonous snake. In this long pause of Advent while we wait, God calls us to use our imaginations to envision how what seems so impossible could become possible, that we could coexist with our worst enemies, in peace.

Peter Storey was the former Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and President of the South African Council of Churches. He tells of a land where the impossible eventually become possible, where sworn enemies imagined themselves to a place of peace.

Storey writes: “One of our important tasks in South Africa’s long struggle for liberation was to help people imagine what they found unimaginable: a South Africa where black and white lived together hand in hand and at peace. It was crucial for the church to incarnate that dream in the life of the Christian community so we could say to an unwilling nation, “There! That is what we mean when we talk about God’s future for South Africa! That is the new South Africa!”

He then tells this story: Some of the most powerful moments in my life have been of Communion in places where people have been divided from one another. I once received a phone call in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my black clergy in a very racist town . . . had been arrested by the secret police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister, and then went looking for him. When we found the prison where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by a large white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. He had been pulled out of bed in the early hours of a freezing winter morning and dragged off like that.

I said to the guard, “We are going to have Communion,” and I took out of my pocket a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of Communion wine and some bread in a plastic sachet. I spread my pocket handkerchief on the bench between us and made the table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the Invitation, I said to the guard, “This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.” This must have touched some place in his religious self, because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike because one always gives the Sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers or sisters—the ones that are hurting the most—and Ike ate and drank.

Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips touch a cup from which a black person had just drunk. The guard was in crisis: he would either have to overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took the cup and sipped from it, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took something of a liberty with the truth and said, “In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,” and very stiffly, the ward reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.”
 . . . From that moment the power equation between that guard and Ike was changed forever. God’s shalom had broken through at that makeshift Table. (4)

Advent is God’s gift to us, a long pause during which we wait and anticipate and imagine and participate in the impossible being made possible: righteousness and justice for all, harmony among enemies, peace on earth, good will toward all. May you know God’s peace as you wait and may you find ways, no matter how small they may seem, to extend that peace to one of God’s children you could not imagine living in harmony with. When you do, you will satisfy Paul’s command that we welcome one another as Christ has welcomed even us. You will glorify God and bring God’s presence here on earth again, as surely as it arrived in the manger that very first Christmas night, a night when all creation paused and knew peace. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Danielle Shroyer, online here.
2. Quoted by Kate Huey in her reflections on the lectionary passages online here.
3. Eugene Peterson summarizes Hauerwas’ argument in his book Under the Unpredictable Planet, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994, p. 6.
4. Calum McLeod relates this story in his sermon “The Teachable Kingdom,” at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL, November 28, 2010. The story is quoted from Peter Storey’s article “Table Manners for Peacebuilders” in Conflict and Communion, pp. 61-62.