Shall We Follow a Star?

Text: Matthew 2:1-23

If you were going to meet a king, how would you greet him? For most of us we would realize that there are certain rules of etiquette or customs that must be followed and we would try to abide by those rules as a matter of respect for the office provided they were not too archaic. I don’t think many of us today would go as far as to kneel and kiss a king’s ring unless it meant we otherwise would be imprisoned or impaled or something. But I do think most would, say, bow or curtsy if such were the custom. I think that if bringing the king a gift was the custom we would be glad to do so. I know we would definitely shake the king’s hand and express pleasure at meeting him. I think that most of us would try to express the respect due to those in positions of public authority.

But on the other hand, there always seems to be those who will not give respect where respect is due and this causes a bit of trouble to say the least. Sometimes this lack of respect is justly due especially when a person of high office has proven to be utterly despicable. For example, I would not speak kind words to or shake the hand of someone of the stature of Hitler, Pinochet, or Pol Pot. These were leaders who used their power to keep themselves and their evil ideologies in power. Those are cases when not displaying the proper etiquette of respect would be appropriate. Yet, there are also those who are of the more rebellious nature who will not extend respect to those who deserve it because it interferes with their own sense of inflated self-importance.

Well, the point here is that there are proper ways to greet people such as kings, queens, presidents, people of professional position, neighbours, parents, siblings, friends, and so one. Proper ways which demonstrate respect for the position they are in and the authority inherit in that position and even for the person. And I think this is part of the reason which Matthew goes about showing us how the three wise men and Herod and the chief priests and scribes all react to Jesus, the king of the Jews, how they greet him or refuse to do so.

Looking at the sitting king of the Jews, Herod the Great. He was the greatest builder of the Jewish nation outside of Solomon. He was also insanely jealous about his power and killed several of his children and many rabbi's because he perceived them to be a threat. Well, of course there’s a whole lot of disrespect in Herod's behaviour concerning Jesus. His jealousy leads him to slaughter innocent children in hopes of destroying the competition who may in fact be the Messiah. That’s some obvious disrespect and I don’t think we need to go into too much detail on Herod other than to say his reaction to Jesus is what we the church can expect when we push up against the powers that be with the truth even when its a fine, fair, just, and equitable Western democracy.

Moving on, concentrating too much on Herod here would keep us from paying due attention to some of the folks in this story who deserve it and who, in many respects, are a lot like us good church going people. Matthew has a message that he wanted his original audience to get and it is one to which we must also pay careful attention. His point is that three star-gazing Persians can long for, search for, and recognize Jesus the Lord and pay the respect due to the Messiah who would be the saviour of the world while the people to whom this king Jesus was sent, the ones who knew what the Scriptures said, the ones who should have been expectantly awaiting this king – these people, the religious authorities appear to be willing to conspire and betray their saviour into the hands of those who would just as soon see him dead.

This story does not come as welcome news to those who claim to be experts at the rituals of religion and at knowing the Scriptures. You would think that in Matthew’s day the Chief priests and scribes of the people, the experts, that they would welcome the news of the birth of the Messiah as good news and be excited and awed about it and want to go and see him themselves and worship him. You’d think that they would what to pay him the proper respect. But these folks are rather ambivalent. They don’t care. They are content to simply be the experts. And they in turn use their gifts of knowing the scriptures and the rituals of the faith of their fathers to, in the end, betray the one who had come to save them. The king asked them a question and they answered it with their expert opinion; no more, no less.

This was difficult news in Matthew's day and should be for the church today as well. For we the Christian church and particularly the evangelical church make the claim to the world that Jesus is the world's one and only true Lord and Saviour and that we are the experts in the way that he should be received, worshipped, and served. We claim to have scholars with expertise on the subject of what it says in the Bible. We Presbyterians especially with the emphasis that we place on having educated clergy and me one of those educated clergy, we need to perk up and listen here. We need to be a little bit worried that our attempts to conserve and preserve the faith of our fathers and our decent and in order ways of doing things just might be making us out to be those who are ambivalent towards our risen and living Lord and we may in fact be among those who are actually betraying him to the powers that be. Our heads are often in the right place, our bodies are at least once a week situated in the right place. But, what about our hearts? What about our devotedness to Jesus himself, Jesus the Christ and to living faithfully to him according to the way of the cross. I would like to say we have a more head-felt than a heart-felt religion. We do indeed like to have ideas about some nebulous thing we call “God”. Yet for the most part it is not a love of the Truth that we espouse. 

 Quite a few studies show us that we do not read and study our Bibles and theology with any regularity and when we do, because we don't find it meaningful. We confess to not understanding the faith and what it says in the Bible and so we consign our reading and study of things Christian to the experts, the clergy and popularist writers, who themselves consign their reading and study of things Christian to experts, PhD's and popularist writers. We really have no concern that the people in the pews have no idea what it says in the Bible and lack the tools and the vocabulary to read and study it for themselves. We love Nana-like Lanseer ministers who feed us pablum mixed with drivel about how to overcome the mountains we've likely made of our own mole hills. But, when a minister comes feeding us the solid food of the faith, proclaiming who Jesus is and inviting us to come and follow him in his cross-formed way of life, we say the are too academic and out of touch with reality and complain about how they dress and how much they cost. We should be more than a little bit concerned about about all this for the end result does indeed lead to the death of the church rather than its continued existence.

This is where the three wise men come in for they show us the proper way to greet our King. They were nothing more than three stargazers from Persia, but they knew the right way to greet a king. And so it is that we should be more like them in our devotion to Christ. We should make it a point to compare ourselves to these three wise men, they did something as odd as follow a star that would lead to this king. If I were a Nana-like Lanseer minister I would ask you a rather meaningless and ridiculous question like “how far would you be willing to follow a star just to see the baby Jesus and give him a special gift?” But, a question like that is just more of the sentimentality, nostalgia, and superstituion that fill our churches already.

A more biblical approach would be to note that these three men were astrologers. The studied the stars and looked for meaning in their patterns. We would be remiss simply to compare them to the roadside psychics and astrologers that litter our pathways today. Rather, it would be better to compare them to the premiere scientists of our day – people like James Clark Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble. Maxwell gave us Field Theory and Electromagnetism; radio and wireless technology would not be available to us without him. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe in that everything is related and relative to the speed of light. Hubble discovered that there are more galaxies in the universe than the Milky Way and was more or less the inventor of extragalactic astronomy as we call it. He also discovered that all galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from each other rather than decreasing in speed and collapsing in on itself. Without this counter-intuitive acceleration which apparently did not begin until 5 billion years ago our universe would no longer exist.

Similarly, our three wise men in Matthew saw something in the heavens which indicated a revolutionary upheaval in the way we understand our existence. It is likely, they saw a supernova, a star dying an massively explosive death that feeds the surrounding area of its galaxy with the material to form new stars and the heavier elements that form planets and indeed carbon-based life forms such as ourselves. They saw a star dying that would bring forth new life elsewhere. This reminds me of Jesus saying about himself, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24). Could the heavens indeed have been telling of the glory of the Lord?...and three astrologers not Bible experts saw it?

Following a stellar sign of the cruciform life of the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus the Messiah, these three wise men had a vision to follow, a vision that would lead them into the presence of the Lord of the universe where they would simply just bow down and worship him and give to him of themselves. We must ask ourselves, What star are we following, if at all? Where is the star that will lead us to a deeper commitment of worshipping our Lord and Savior with our whole lives? What is our mission and what will it take for us to follow it. Are we following Jesus in his way of life, the cruciform way of life. The way of laying down our lives for him and loving each other as he has loved us each, loving the world as God has loved it, sacrificially and long-suffering.

What will it take to get us to make the leap from simply going to church every Sunday to wanting to know Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit to learn and live the Christ way of actually putting all other things aside to follow him and the mission he has given us of being his disciples, of being his body to everyone we meet? The call is at work in our midst. Jesus says, “Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. My yolk is easy and my burden is light.” Most of us I’m sure know what it is to have our burdens lifted by the Lord. We know the Peace that he has to give. We wouldn’t continue to come here if we didn’t. Yet, are we ready to make the commitment to do something as crazy as follow an exploded star, to follow Jesus Christ, to take up our own cross of the life of faithfulness, to bow before him and lay the entirety of our lives and not just a portions of them at his feet, and worship him with the entirety of the gift of life he has given to us each?

500 billion years ago something beyond our comprehension happened that kept the force of gravity from causing the universe to collapse back in on itself...the love and will and plan of the Trinity for his creation maybe? Roughly 2,000 years ago by the Incarnation of God the Son as the man Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit according to the love of God the Father the Trinity acted to free his creation from the gravitous, self-destructive force of sin and death. The question for us today is will we follow our Lord who died a supernova-like death to bring about the New Creation? Will we persist like apathetic experts who are ignorant in their own field and likewise given to betrayal or will we pick up our crosses and walk the way of the cross following Jesus which is the only proper way to greet this particular king? Amen.

Joseph's Delimma

Text: Matthew 1:18-25

In my previous church we had a spell of having concerts by some pretty big names in Canadian folk and traditional music. We were fortunate enough to have one among us who had “connections”. As the minister I found myself in the (for lack of a better word) awkward situation of having to introduce these artists and groups like Tanglefoot, The Brian Pickell Band, Pierre Schreier, Garnet Rogers, and a few others. I never knew quite what to say and for the most part the artists themselves didn't care. Yet, as the one doing the introduction I needed to make it sound like I knew a little something about them and liked their stuff. As the host for the evening I had to praise the artists and commend them to the audience. Failure to do so would have offended artist and audience alike.

Well, looking at the Gospel of Matthew and how he introduced Jesus the Jewish Messiah and Lord and Saviour of all creation I have to say that I'm left scratching my head because it seems he means to offend. He begins with Jesus' genealogical pedigree and simply says, “A record of the lineage of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” In the genealogy Matthew mentions four relationships: Judah and Tamar, Boaz and Ruth, David and Bathsheba otherwise known as the wife of Uriah, and then Joseph and Mary. If you know the Old Testament, Matthew is quite obviously saying that Jesus' particular link to David and to Abraham is morally tainted and not upright according to the Law. Jesus was born into a whole lineage of sin and more over, a lineage into which he had to be adopted.

Moving on from the begets, Matthew is the only gospelist to portray Joseph's dilemma at having to deal with the fact that his bride-to-be had suddenly become pregnant with a child that was not his own. While pondering what to do, he had a dream in which a messenger of the Lord tells him that this child would save his people from their sins and that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Moreover, there's that prophecy in Isaiah about a virgin conceiving and let's not fail to notice that this baby is God with us. Should Joseph believe this crazy dream and be gracious to Mary? Or, should he do what the religious/moral authorities of his day would have him do and that would be to break off the engagement? This would have grave consequences for Mary.

And so Matthew begins his Gospel with a troubling if not offensive introduction. If we are thinking people which I assume we are we will want to ask why. Why does Matthew introduce Jesus with scandal rather than by praising Jesus and commending him to us all as our Lord and Saviour? Well, it may be that Matthew wants us at the very outset to catch a glimpse of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father towards us and how he chooses to be gracious towards us rather than condemning. Matthew does this by making us to consider Joseph's dilemma.

Joseph had to adopt Jesus and love him as his own son for Jesus to be the Messiah of the line of David. So also, we have no place in this royal lineage as a kingdom of priests unless we also be born anew, born from above of the Holy Spirit by whom we are adopted into the communion of God the Father and God the Son. The Holy Spirit bonds us to Jesus so that we share in Jesus' own relationship with God the Father. Joseph's steadfast love and faithfulness towards Mary and the child within her beams brightly of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God for Israel and the children of the Holy Spirit to be born through her...that's Jesus and you and me.

I find it quite staggering that God the Father in and through the presence and powerful and utterly gracious work of the Holy Spirit loves us as much as he does Jesus, his own son and is as steadfastly faithful to us as he is towards Jesus. Even when we are in the midst of impossible situations, when it seems all hell is breaking loose around us he is with us and faithfully working for our good making us to be more and more like Jesus by making us to know who Jesus is in his very self as the one who gives himself selflessly in all love and humility for us to heal and deliver us now in the present from the effects that our sin and the sin of others has on us. As we draw close to Jesus by service and devotion we find that he removes the deepest of our character flaws. He frees us from fear and self-pity, and pride, and our constant striving to be our own god. He truly saves us from our sins.

It is truly as Paul said, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). For us to become the righteousness of God means that we become part of God's steadfastly loving and faithful acting in the world right now to set right his creation which by our act of sin has become subject to death. For God to be righteous does not mean that God is morally superior. Rather, it means that in his love and faithfulness God acts to save us from our own demise even when we are morally decadent. We are godless children whom the Triune God of grace has claimed as his own. The Father according to his love through the faithfulness of Jesus, the Incarnate Son, by the powerful presence and working of the Holy Spirit in and with us has adopted us to be his children. The inheritance that belongs to Jesus the firstborn Son now also belongs to us. We now, like Jesus, also call God “Abba. Father.” Matthew's rather troubling introduction of Jesus the Messiah begs us to consider the nature of God's love for us. Just as Jesus must be adopted by Joseph in love and faithfulness to Mary into the morally tainted line of David to be who he is as the Messiah, so God the Father in Christ Jesus has by his own decision acted to adopt us each as his own children into the communion of love that the Trinity is and this is what it is for Jesus to save us from our sins.

Now to ponder Matthew's introduction and Joseph's dilemma a bit further we have to note with an exclamation point how Matthew wants to show us right from the beginning that the reality of God coming and being with us as one of us is going to be something that does not meet our expectations and something difficult to handle especially for those who think they have mastered morality and religion and indeed who think they have mastered God. Grace is the element in this story that is so unexpected, so unpredictable, and so hard to handle. If we were reading or rather hearing Matthew’s gospel back when he wrote it, we would expect Joseph to publicly denounce Mary and that the village would react with such bitter anger towards her sinful ways that they took her outside the city and stoned her to death. That’s what we would expect. But instead, grace calls us to take another look at the situation. God calls us to be gracious towards people in situations that trouble us for what we suppose to be religious and moral reasons.

Joseph's dilemma reminds us that we must be careful how we judge people and their troubling situations for we never know when we might be passing judgement upon those through whom God is working or will work. We are called to be gracious in all situations. Grace leads people to Jesus. God’s kindness leads us to repentance it says in Romans 2:4. God shows his kindness to people when we choose to be gracious towards others. The baby Jesus, God’s means to save all of humanity, became Messiah as the direct result of Joseph being faithful to God and gracious to Mary rather than condemning her on a false pretence of faithfulness. When we let our hearts be moved with compassion and show grace it lends to salvation, to people discovering that they have been adopted into the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It lends to the presence of God working visibly and effectively in peoples lives to save. Amen.

The Word Who Invites us to Live

Text Matthew 11:2-11

I was once in on a conversation where a medical doctor was asking her friends what they would do in a situation she had just encountered. She had made a house call to a paraplegic who was suffering from a skin abscess that was going to require surgery and a 6-9 month hospital stay in a room of four. This would be the second time around. She didn’t want to go through with it because there are certain things that paraplegics need help with that are just humiliating to have done in front of other people. So she was putting it off, a decision that would lead to her eventual death. She then went on to share a bleak picture of her life with this physician. She was upset with her husband, who did nothing besides hang about elsewhere in the house, her son also. She had lived this way 20 years and could see no reason to endure another 20. Then, in all seriousness, she asked this doctor to write her a prescription for something to end it all. Well, the doctor was asking her friends “what should I do?” Even the doctor thought that the continuation of this person’s life was torturous.

           The responses were mixed mostly involving what we could call “psychologizing” the patient. Our culture has bred a wealth of armchair Dr. Phil’s who play God by distantly trying to sympathize with a person and then solve their problems. I know about how accurate I am in that department so I like to refrain from it. There were also faith-based questions. “Does she have any faith…believe in God…have a church?” I sat there just listening with not much to say. As far as what I would have done. My training in seminary would have led me to simply reflect back to the patient, “So you want to end your life and you want me to write the prescription?” and see where the conversation goes.

As I listened I thought two things. First, I began to wonder as to whether I’m required in Canada to tell some official if a person truly is suicidal? The second thing I was thinking was I’ve been there. I’ve been pushed to the point of wrestling with whether or not my presence in this life is worth it. We all have our limits as to how much we can cope with before becoming overwhelmed. That’s part of being human particularly in the wake some event like a death or a debilitating accident or a divorce or an act of violence coming to rob us of life as we know it. When that happens we all will have to decide whether we want to live this new life that has been thrust upon us or not. Many people avoid that decision. Being a minister I have encountered widows, widowers, indeed whole families still stuck in limbo years after the death of a person simply because they were struggling to find the reason to continue on and adapt to this new life that was not theirs by choice. I’ve heard people speak of deceased person as if they just died ten years after the fact. They’ve gotten stuck somehow and haven’t made the decision to start living again. They’d rather be dead too, but know that is not an option.

This woman, though a paraplegic, was still a human being still trying to decide whether life is worth living even 20 years after having her life radically changed by an accident. I can’t blame or fault her for wanting to end it. Like I said, I’ve been there, even as a man of faith, I’ve been there. The course of life can to often lead us to a point where we find ourselves asking, “Is my presence in this life really worth what I’m going to have to endure for the rest of it.” It is common for us to imprison ourselves in something or other to avoid dealing with the question; work, materialism, substances, over-indulging, just staying too busy, or just finding somebody to hate – whatever we can find to avoid answering the question do I really want to live this life that I have been given. Indeed, life is a gift. Didn’t a one of us ask to be born. We are here by accident or by decision of parental units. It doesn’t matter which. We have been given life and we are accountable for how we live it not just to God but also to ourselves and to one another. How we live or choose not to live has consequences not just for ourselves but more so for the “others” in our lives.

Turning towards a more theological understanding of this problem, one of the traditional ways of talking about the Holy Spirit is the confession that he is the Lord and Giver of life. At creation it was the Holy Spirit by whom God the Father spoke the Word and breathed life into all of creation. Life is not God in us. Life is a gift from God for which we are accountable. The new life given to us in Jesus Christ is akin to living in the breath of God as the Holy Spirit surrounds and indwells us creating His communion of love in our midst, uniting us to Christ Jesus as his body, that we might live in the image of him in this world. He is the Head of a new humanity meaning we are in a network of relationships which we call “our lives” and the Holy spirit is their in the midst of it pointing us to Jesus the Son and to the true life that God has given us in Him. So, whenever we find ourselves wrestling with the “do I really want to live” question and if so “how”, I believe we are wrestling with the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life. And his answer to us, is to point us to Jesus and says “I am with you always. In the depths of your agony I am with you. Like the breath flowing through your body I am with you. You would not be alive right now were I not here giving life to you. You are the way that you are because this is the life I have given you to live that you may be a witness to the depths of my love. From this point on you shall live knowing that I am with you and this is all you need.”

John the Baptist, the one sent to announce the coming of the Lord, was imprisoned for calling to account those who were abusing the gift of life and causing others to suffer. While in prison he was battling with issues of the value of his life and God’s ability to keep his promises. He sent his disciples to Jesus to get some assurance that he had not lived his life in vain because Jesus was not living up to expectations. John like most Jews of faith in his day was expecting someone who would deliver them from the oppression of the Romans, of their own kings, and of their own religious authorities. The answer Jesus gives to John in a roundabout way is “John, don’t lose hope because I am not what you expect, for indeed I am the fulfillment of Scripture. I am the one who removes the curse of sin and death and God-forsakenness. I give life, life with God in the midst of it to those who have believed themselves cut-off from God.”

These miracles that Jesus performed…healing the blind, lame, leprous, the deaf, and raising the dead, and preaching good news to the poor…were more than just curing what ails the physical condition. In those days people believed that these diseases were evidence of being cut off and cursed by God. They believed that those who suffered from them had sinned so horribly bad that not only were they no longer allowed into the temple to be in God’s presence but God was punishing them with physical suffering. Even more so, healthy clean people were not allowed to touch them or they could not go in the Temple. By healing them Jesus removed the false curse from their lives and made it so they could worship God and be fully accepted into human community. He removed their shame and left them pondering how will I now live now that the curse has been taken away. Shame plays a major factor, deserved or not, when it comes to getting on with life.  It is dibilitating.  Shame cuts us off from others, yet oddly not from God. 

What Jesus gives through the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit is freedom from the binding power of shame. He comes with his Word – “I am with you always” – and he speaks it to us until we finally hear it and then he becomes redundant. It is a Word that cuts through our shame and gives real hope to us and invites us to really live...in him sharing his relationship with God the Father through the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit.  This real hope leads us to want not just to cope with life but to be proactive in it, to take the sufferings of others upon ourselves, to tell the world that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, to rejoice in the Holy Spirit and point to Jesus Christ and say to all he is our hope.

Jesus said to John the Baptist by way of John’s followers, “Blessed (Happy) are those who do not take offense at me.” A lot of people get tripped up in hearing the Word of “I am with you” because it’s not what we expect nor what we want. We want action. So, as if we were God we dismiss it and only find further bitterness. Yet, we cannot separate God's acts from his being. Giving us himself is the powerful thing the Trinity does for us. His presence in us and in the midst of our relationships changes everything. True life, blessedness, happiness is only found in living as a witness to the love of God in Christ in the sure knowledge that he is with us. God with us is what Christmas is all about. Praise be to God he keeps trying no matter how often we say no or don’t get it or can’t see past our own expectations. God wants us to live…in Him...and he will make it so. Amen.

Peace...See It!

Text: Isaiah 11:1-11; Romans 15:4-13

World peace, when I hear that phrase it reminds me of Sandra Bullock in the movie Miss Congeniality. She played the role of Gracie Hart, a very tomboyish FBI agent who went undercover at the Miss United States Beauty Pageant to capture a terrorist who dubbed himself “the Citizen”. When she received her orders to go undercover Gracie expressed her disdain for beauty pageant contestants as “stuffed bikinis who want world peace”. She was making fun off how beauty contestants so simplistically and generalistically answer those philosophically "heavy" questions that are meant to make their intelligence shine. The host will ask, “What is the one thing you want most in life?” to which the standard answer is “world peace”. Oddly, later in the movie when Gracie is asked that sort of question, we are given a dramatic pause as we expect her to rant on her view of beauty contests. Yet, she bites her tongue and says, “world peace”. Is world peace only something that beauty contestants want?

Well, peace is a hard thing to imagine. Really, it is. Truly we need to ask ourselves what do we mean when we say peace? I think we have a predisposition to think about peace as being among nations when it can also mean peace among neighbours. Moreover, in this world of talk shows, we have also been brainwashed into an understanding of peace as inner peace. Unfortunately, there is no peace with oneself unless there is peace with one’s family and friends and immediate community. On the subject of inner peace we frequently get reminders of how damaging a lack of inner peace can be especially among our young. I remember a few years an incident in Omaha, Nebraska because my sister lived hardly a mile from where a troubled nineteen year old, took the route of mass murder/suicide because he did not have inner peace, meaning a healthy love of self and others. His suicide note reflected that he believed himself to be simply a pain in the bum to everyone in his life, a far cry from inner peace. Although, we can contribute a good bit of his disposition to mental illness, we can not help but also chalk one up to the failure of family, friends, and his social community to have the courage to get involved in the life of one of their own. I don’t say this to blame anybody but rather to expose a culture that let’s someone who is suffering so painfully slip through not just a crack but a crevasse because mental health is a “private” matter. To that effect, we are all to blame.

Peace among neighbours is another hot topic these days particularly when houses are being built en masse hardly ten feet away from each other. In the compact world of the sub-development neighbours frequently commence to feuding when one neighbour does something that the next-door neighbour considers to have a negative impact on their property value because they all look more or less the same. It is a strange world when the first thing a person does upon moving into one of these urban sprawl subdivisions is build a fence, a fence which will require their neighbours approval and assistance if built on the property line (negotiate your way through that sometime) or you can just say “to heck with my neighbour I’m building it one inch on my side” which is exactly what your "neighbour" was hoping you would do in the first place. Neighbour gets worry-free fence and you pay for it.

So anyway, peace – peace is such a hard thing to imagine. It seems that in order to have it on the global level we have to learn how to do peace at the neighbourly level. In order to have it at the neighbourly level we have to learn how to do peace at the individual level. But, and a big one at that, the prophet Isaiah does not lead us down that road of thinking. The way he “sees” things is quite different. I use the word “sees” quite particularly. His vision, his imagination, of what things will be like when the Triune God of grac finally says “enough” is quite different than our saying, “I’ve got to get myself together and then get things right between my neighbours and me and then hopefully when we’ve all got our patchouli together, we can work on world peace. That is not what Isaiah sees for the Trinity's world after he, not us, has put it to rights.

Isaiah’s vision, his imagination (and please don’t think imagination here in the sense of he’s just imagining things. Imagination to the Old Testament Prophets was seeing the way things are/will be from God's perspective.) is that One will come, the One whom we’ve come to know as Jesus Christ, and in the end he will put things to right. The Spirit of God will be upon him. He will judge according to righteousness and equity giving the poor what they need. He will strike the land with the Word of the Truth and his breath shall put to death the wickedness and the wicked, those who have worked against God and his people. Isaiah's vision of that day calls us to re-imagine our world back within the bounds of the first days of creation when God spoke the Word and the aspiration or breath of that Word brought things into being out of nothing.

Let me step aside here and talk about the Trinity creating things out of nothing. There is a Russian physicist, Alex Vilenkin, who has written a book Many Worlds in One: the Search for Other Universes in which he describes what a good many, if not a majority of theoretical physicists, are saying about how our universe came into being. Without mentioning God, he says that the only reasonable, theoretical, and mathematical conclusion we can come to when talking about the origin of our universe – or any universe for that matter – is that it came into being out of nothing. In the midst of non-existence, no space and no time, a very dense particle out of nowhere began to do something called quantum tunnelling creating a false or unstable vacuum which exploded or rather big banged to become our stable vacuum of space-time. Now, fourteen billion years later under conditions more unique than New York City being levelled by nuclear bombs and suddenly out of the nothing that is left emerges a fully functional Boeing 747 life emerges and there’s you and I conscious life on the planet Earth, a planet that is in a Hell of a mess…and…and...and it appears quite probable that there are an infinite number of parallel universes where we may or may not exist and where things might be better or worse. The parallel universe part is just theory but it is comforting to me that in a parallel universe somewhere there is a me who hasn't messed up so badly.

We who are used to thinking of a universe according to Isaac Newton might think Velinkin has gone off the deep. Newton's universe, the universe of the Enlightenment and Modernity, was a static empty container into which things have been put that function according to set laws which we can understand and use to our benefit through technology. But, things have changed with the discovery that atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons that are made of even tinier particles that are acted upon by forces. James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish mathematician and physicist' did a lot of work in the area of electro-magnetism published and in 1879 published his paradigm changing work The Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in which he opened up the world of radio waves and Field Theory. This work inspired Albert Einstein who has in turn given us a dynamic understanding of the universe in which everything is related to the one constant of the speed of light.

Newton's universe only needed a God to create the big machine and set the law's for it to operate. In the end, Newton's empty container universe and his Deistic understanding of God left God ultimately unnecessary even as Creator. Atheistic Scientism and the Kantian reduction of religion to moralism are its byproduct. On the other hand, Einstein's universe with its emphasis on relationship much more resembles its Maker who is the personal, relational communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who give themselves to each other in love so completely that they are One. Moreover, Einstein's universe is much more open to the Incarnation of God the Son; the Light in, by, and through whom all things were created and are held together.

Back to Isaiah, when this One, this Jesus Christ, returns and sets things right – imagine this – (and if you think parallel universes seems crazy) wolf will lay down with lamb, leopard with kid, lion with calf, cow and bear. Lions will eat straw instead of hunt and kill. Predation will not exist in this new creation. Moreover, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where not the old and the wise lead, but rather a little child. This may seem odd until we remember Jesus pointing out that the FAITH like that of little children is what we are called to have, indeed gifted by the Holy Spirit to have to be rightly related to God. Finally, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where everything is full of the knowing of God.

The Enlightenment world of Modernity to which we all owe our antiquated understanding of reality says that God is outside the system and therefore cannot be known. Yet, the Bible says that God who is indeed outside the system can be known as he has revealed himself in the system in a way that human conscious life can know and understand him. God has revealed himself and made himself knowable to us as the Triune God of grace in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son and his relationship with God the Father in God the Holy Spirit, a relationship he has by grace made us able to partake of in the same Holy Spirit who unites us to Jesus the Son. Isaiah “sees” that one day the whole earth and not just the people on it, the whole earth will know the Trinity by partaking of his life, indeed, be filled with the knowing of God as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Peace on earth, world peace, if you can imagine it, looks like the loving communion that is the Trinity, loving communion not only among people but among the animals where predation rather than self-sacrificing love is the rule of life, and among the tiniest particles of which all things consist.

For Isaiah, world peace does not come about by me getting myself together so that I have inner peace and then, having inner peace, I can work with my neighbours to have peace among neighbours and then, having peace amoung neighbours, we can work together and bring about world peace. Isaiah says that God himself will intervene and fill everything with the knowledge of himself, with the loving communion of the Trinity, and then there will be peace, peace in which there will not even be predation in the animal world. Can you "see" that?

Well, believe it or not, God has given his creation a foretaste of this peace. Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians exhibits this particularly through Paul's encouraging them to welcome one another. Paul wrote Romans to address a problem in the Roman churches where Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians were not welcoming Jewish Christians into their midst. There was a wave of Jews and Jewish Christians returning to Rome at the time Paul wrote the letter. Boldly, Paul, who had no prior relationship with the Roman churches says, “Welcome one another, just has Christ Jesus has welcomed each of you.”

Hospitality in the name of Jesus Christ is a core component of world peace. In the Biblical imagination, the “seeing” of the prophets and apostles and of Jesus himself, there will not be world peace until Jesus returns and God puts all things to right. But until then, we are to offer hospitality to one another just as Jesus showing divine hospitality through the giving of his life over to death has welcomed each of us to himself to partake through him in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in his relationship with the Father. He has quite hospitably made us partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

Isaiah’s “seeing' of peace has been given partial hands and feet in the communion of the church. The way we Christians welcome one another is the linchpin of world peace. We are not gathered here on Sunday morning just to sing hymns, hear a sermon, and drink some coffee. We are here to show hospitality to one another, to love one another as Jesus has loved us each as a sign and foretaste to the world of the Trinity's New/renewed Creation coming.

Jesus has shown loving hospitality to us each by giving us the gift of the Holy Spirit so that we know personally the relationship that he and God the Father share, a relationship marked by steadfast love and faithfulness. Churches are not clubs marked by philanthropic gestures. Churches are communities, communions of people who because they know the love God in Jesus Christ by the free gift of the Holy Spirit where people show steadfast love and faithfulness to one another because they have experienced this from God in Christ.

Please do not think that I am insane in saying that we have a foretaste of world peace here or even that we are the foretaste of the healing of the entire universe.  In Newton's universe they think that if it cannot be observed or measured, then it does not exist.  In Einstein's universe there is so much we cannot see but know is there by the way things relate to one another; i.e., the effects the unseen have on what we can see.  Therefore, it is certainly not a stretch to say that the more openly we model the love of God in Jesus Christ to one another and all peoples before the community around us, the more hospitality we show to the world around us expecting nothing in return, then the more we foreshadow the world peace that is coming.

Friends, showing hospitality is central to Christian faithfulness. Therefore, welcome one another, indeed welcome all peoples with the same love that Christ Jesus has welcomed us each. Amen.