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World peace, when I hear that combination of words 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 of how beauty contest contestants are stereotyped as answering "heavy" questions that are meant to make their intelligence shine with “light” answers. The host will ask, “What is the one thing you want most in life?” to which the standard answer is “world peace”. With a bit of humour, later in the movie when Gracie is asked that sort of question, she pauses dramatically as we expect her to rant on her view of beauty contests. Yet, she bites her tongue and says, “world peace”.
Well, these days we got to wonder if world peace really is only a “light” answer to a “heavy” question in beauty contests? Seriously, the way the world has seemed to be teetering on the edge of a third world war this past year as greed, power lust, and a desire to control the supply of the rare earth minerals needed for future “green” energy sources have trumped rationality and common civility. The Industrial Revolution didn’t come upon us free of warring over control of resources. Should we not expect that the Green Revolution will come about in the same way? Sorry to sound like a conspiracy theorist but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Inspector Brackenreid on the Murdoch Mysteries, it’s “Follow the money”. There’s a lot of money in rare earth minerals. Moreover, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Dr. Gregory House from the medical drama “House”, it’s that everybody lies when it comes to their health. When it’s money and lies calling the shot, how can we expect peace?
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 prophetic imagination, of what things will be like when the Triune God of grace 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 imagining of future peace (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 the 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 reimagine our world back within the bounds of the first days of creation when God spoke the Word and the breath of that Word brought things into being out of nothing. But in that future day, God will make Creation anew out of the chaos we’ve made of the present creation, a Creation in which the Presence and knowability of God fills everything. No longer will God seem veiled or hidden.
Back to Isaiah, when this One, this Jesus Christ, returns and sets things right – imagine this – 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 FAITH like that of a little child 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.
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 among neighbours, we can work together and bring about world peace. World peace is also not something we should entrust to world leaders. Seriously, has there ever been a peace treaty that was not in someway loaded with greed and powerlust? 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. Hospitality in the name of Jesus is a core component of world peace. 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. Churches are not clubs marked by philanthropic gestures. Churches are communities, communions of people who because we know the love of God in Jesus by the free gift of the Holy Spirit we show steadfast love and faithfulness to one another.
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. The more openly we model Jesus’ hospitality to the world around us expecting nothing in return, the more we foreshadow world peace. Being hospitable to one another, to everybody, is our gift of giving the foretaste of world peace to our surrounding communities.
Friends, the word welcome is probably the centre-most word in Christian faithfulness. Welcome one another, indeed welcome all peoples with the same love that Christ Jesus has welcomed us each. Amen.
