By Edward Hicks - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., online collection, Public Domain, Link
Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together.” “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full to the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
The book of Isaiah is just poetry when it comes to visions of hope, isn’t it? This particular passage inspired the work of Edward Hicks, a Quaker minister, who painted at least sixty pieces like the one up there, all called Peaceable Kingdom. He was captivated by this idea of the promised peace; in fact, if you look at the background on the left side of the painting, you can see that he painted William Penn (the founder of the state of Pennsylvania and another Quaker) and Lenape chiefs establishing a peaceful treaty. In Hicks’ and Isaiah’s visions, God’s peace is two warring sides coming together, not in a violent conflict, but to live in harmony with one another.
Paul, in the letter to the Romans, has the same vision. “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another,” he says. For Paul, the two sides that he wished would come together were the Jewish people to whom he still belonged, and the non-Jews––the Gentiles––in Rome. These were two groups that generally didn’t spend time together, didn’t each together, didn’t socialize together, except around the table of the Lord to worship God through Jesus Christ. And even then, there was lingering tension. Paul longed for a universal peace and harmony, which is why he quotes Isaiah. He yearned for a day when all the people––the Gentiles and the Jews––would all be one together, worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
What might Hicks paint today? Or what might Paul envision? Democrats and Republicans coming together to establish gun control? UCP and NDP working to pass bills together? Albertans and Ontarians having compassion and sympathy for one another? Or maybe Iran and the United States reestablishing a nuclear treaty, or Brexit and EU folks coming to an agreement?
Or maybe they might envision the harmony of humans and our environment. Maybe the Peaceable Kingdom would have people working with, rather than exploiting, the land. Maybe, and I know this is a hard one to swallow in Alberta, vegans and meat-industry people side-by-side. I’ll settle for Tesla drivers and Ford Escalade drivers letting each other in at merges.
It’s a beautiful vision, isn’t it? This image of worldwide peace and harmony, between peoples, and between people and the environment. It’s the light in the darkness that we desperately need right now. It’s our hope.
My question, though, is: do you believe in it? Do you have hope?
I’m asking because these are difficult times. I mean, every era has its impending catastrophe that makes it hard to hope––Isaiah wrote when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was about to invaded by Assyria. Invasion means mass slaughter, starvation, sexual violence against women and children, disease. It means mass deportation––entire families scooped up and relocated far away from their ancestral homes. The end of the world for those experiencing it.
At different times throughout history, people have legitimately believed that their world, their way of life as they knew it, was about to be taken from them. The apostle Paul believed the end would come in his lifetime. So did Martin Luther. And so, when I say that these are difficult times, in a way, these times are no different than the rest.
And yet they are, because they affect us. They are personal. Whether the darkness looming on the horizon affects thousands, or just one, makes no difference. Elie Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor, once said that suffering expands to fill a person’s entire universe––whether that suffering is caused by a migraine or by a concentration camp, the grip of that suffering is still the same. The darkness before you might be individual––it may be the loss of someone beloved or waiting to hear whether or not you have a terminal disease. The darkness before you might affect your family or friends––there are people who are part of this church community who will be losing their jobs next year due to cuts. Or maybe the suffering you are experiencing is more global––maybe you are sensitive to the heart-rending increase in polarization and hate in this very country, or the global rise of fascism. Maybe you, like I, have read all of the ICPP scientists’ reports on the coming climate catastrophe, and despair that we seem completely unable or unwilling to respond. Big or small, when your way of life, the world as you know it, is about to end, the suffering is all equally real.
And so, I ask again, do you have hope? Because on the one hand we have these visions of hope, faithfully proclaimed throughout the centuries. And yet on the other hand, we have the actual experiences we are going through, some of which will literally change the entire world. We have hope and we have reality.
Which puts us in a tough bind. It sometimes seems as though one can only be either hopeful or realistic. Either one can hope, and deny that things are as bad as they are, or one can accept the cold, hard facts and give up hope. The first response means living in denial, while the second response means living in despair.
Sadly, neither is actually helpful, and both lead us away from following Christ. Despair, of course, means not trusting God’s promise of goodness to us. It’s easy to see how despair is neither an effective nor a faithful course of action. But neither is denial. You see, when we live only in hope, believing that God will somehow swoop in and make everything better, that our actions are besides the point, when we assert that God has a grand plan for all of us and we just keep doing what we’re doing and God will nevertheless work everything out, this is, yes, to put our hope in God as we are commanded to. When we live only in hope, we are loving the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.
But, and this is really important, when we live only in hope, we are not loving our neighbour as ourselves. You see, Christ came into the world to call us to do both, to love the Lord our God, and to love our neighbour as ourself. And Christ, in fact, spent more time on the latter than the former. Christ fed those who were hungry, he healed those who were sick, he told us to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit those in prison. He did not––actually––say, Put all your hope in the Lord, believe everything is wonderful, and just pray. Instead, what he actually said was, the poor will always be with you, feed them. Hope and face reality. When you turn your face to the light of God, don’t turn your back on the very real presence of suffering and loss.
To be realistic that there is darkness and hopeful that there is light that will not be overcome––this is the paradox of Advent. Jesus Christ said, the kingdom of heaven is coming and the poor will always be with you. And so how do we live in this paradox? How do we live in Advent? How do we live in these times?
I believe we do it by putting our hope in the Incarnation, which is to say, by putting our hope in the here and now, in the presence of God amongst and actually in people. The central message of Advent is first that God became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, that God came to bring hope to the people by becoming one of the people. God sought to change the world, to bring about the Peaceable Kingdom, by living and acting in this world. And the second half of that message is that God is not done. God’s desire to change the world by acting through and in it did not end when Jesus ascended into heaven. It wasn’t like God took a two-thousand year pause. God is still acting in the world, but through us.
And this is our hope as we face our reality. Our hope is that God works through us, that God gives us “the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord,” as Isaiah proclaims. Our hope comes from knowing that God works through us when we turn to one another, when we turn to those in need, when we spend our energy––our time, our resources, our money, our efforts––not in the belief that God will rescue us from on high, but in the belief that God has given us God’s own power to help one another. Our hope is that God works through us when we reach out to others and work to end their suffering.
We have actually seen it happen, even in our own lifetime. We have seen people, filled with hope and simultaneously facing reality, experience moments and flashes of the Peaceable Kingdom. The end of apartheid in South Africa. It happened because faithful people both accepted the reality of deep racism and trusted in the hope that God would bring peace. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Again, it happened because faithful people both accepted the reality that the people of East Germany were imprisoned in their city and were suffering and acted in the hope that God would bring harmony. I have seen it in faithful Christians who have accepted diagnoses of terminal cancer and gathered all their family and friends around them in those last weeks or days because they lived in the hope that God would unite them all in love. It was the acceptance of reality and the hope of God’s world to come that enabled all of these things to happen.
John the Baptist issued a call to repentance, to turn away from certain things. Perhaps today it is a call to repent from both denial and despair, to turn away from denying the realities of our world and from giving up hope entirely. Perhaps we are called to turn towards the Christian claim at this time of year that the light shines in the darkness because we acknowledge that there is a darkness. To know that we do not yet live in the Peaceable Kingdom and yet to continue to imagine it. We are called to be realistic and we are called to hope. We are called to act in and for the world, to know that God is in the world with us, and to see that as God calls us to turn towards one another, God works through us to turn hope into reality, so that the vision of God’s peace and harmony is made real. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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