Hospitality and Peace

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Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:5-7

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.

 

Full of the Knowledge of God

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

“The Earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”  “The Earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”  That is a very rich metaphor.  Though I had read this passage at least once every Christmas season for who knows how many years and on many other occasions, the first time I never really heard it, noticed it was there, was well over fifteen years ago while listening to a New Testament scholar named N.T. Wright talk about our future hope as Christians, a future where everything is filled with the knowledge of God. I have pondered this very profound metaphor ever since.    

N.T Wright is very keen to point out that the future reality that the Bible points us forward to is not our disembodied souls going to heaven when we die and staying there.  Yes, we will spend a little time after death without our bodies with Christ in a place Jesus called Paradise.  But, that is not our ultimate goal.  Rather, what we are headed for is Resurrection to live in Creation made new.  This wonderfully awesome and beautiful Creation that God created, blessed, and called very good will be healed and freed of Sin and Death and Evil and as Isaiah says…wait for it…wait for it…, it will be full of the knowledge or better yet the knowing of who God is and what God’s nature is like, full of the unveiled presence and glory of God just as the waters cover the sea.  The goal of our existence is as Wright says, “God is going to do for the whole Creation what he did for Jesus on Easter morning.”  Resurrection into a New Creation, this is our hope in Christ.  This is what God is up to and pointing forward to that is what we the church are about.

Isaiah’s prophesy here, like all of the biblical prophesies which look forward to the Day of Creation’s deliverance and restoration is symbol rich, metaphor rich.  We need to “crack the code” on the meaning of the symbols and yet be careful to not get too specific or literal with them by trying to peg them down to specific dates and so forth.  They are meant to provoke “hopeful imagination”, to make us want to see God’s promise fulfilled, to make us “abound in hope”.

The first metaphor or symbol in Isaiah’s prophecy here is that a shoot shall come up out of the stump of the lineage of ancient Israel’s King David, a ruler full of the Holy Spirit, a righteous ruler who will judge fairly on behalf of the weak and oppressed.  This metaphor is a pretty obvious one to nail down.  This ruler is Jesus.  He is the Jewish Messiah who has brought and will bring the Kingdom or Reign of God to earth.  

The next metaphor/symbol that Isaiah gives us is of a world that is free of predation, free of those who kill and devour.  The nature of relationship in creation will change from predation to Peace/Shalom.  The nature of relationship in creation as we know it now due to sin is predatory.  The strong devour the weak.  Poverty, war, climate change are all the result of the powerful devouring the weak.  With this image of a world without predation Isaiah means to cause us to hopefully imagine that the world that Jesus is bringing about will be free of all forms of predation.  There will be peace, harmony, Shalom.

Looking at this third image, that of the earth being full of the knowledge of God as waters covering the sea.  Well, the symbol of the “sea” in the world of apocalyptic/prophetic imagery often means humanity, the chaotic sea of humanity.  Water is the symbol of the source of life.  As God is the source of life, I think this image is telling us that the personal, life-giving presence of God is going to be visible among the relationships of humanity.  The image of God which was marred by sin will be restored by God resting his presence upon and in us.

So then, what Isaiah wants us to imagine is the coming of the Messiah, full of the Holy Spirit to put things right in God’s creation and the noticeable difference will be that predation will not be at the heart of relationship anymore, but rather in its place will be the personal presence of God.  The image of the Trinity – the loving communion of God the Father Son and Holy Spirit – will radiate forth from humanity in our relationships with each other and in our relationship with the Creation as a whole.

Leaping forward in time a few centuries from Isaiah to Paul, this hope-filled image of the image of God restored in humanity undergirds Paul’s understanding of what the church is.  To Paul, the Holy Spirit-filled Messiah has come.  Jesus is that shoot rising from the stump of Jesse.  Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom of God.  His death and resurrection is God’s judgement against humanity that kills wickedness.  With the breath of his lips, the Holy Spirit, God puts wickedness to death and recreates humanity in his image.  The Christ-like, Holy Spirit filled fellowship of Christians, us, is the first fruits of this new predation-free humanity.  As far as Paul, the former zealous Pharisee who hated Gentiles, was concerned, the fact that Gentiles and Jews were together in harmony, like-minded in their devotion to Jesus as Lord, worshipping God the Father with one voice is evidence that the day Isaiah held forth has begun.  The knowledge of God has begun to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

The New Creation, predation-free, Spirit of God-filled humanity that Isaiah put out there for us to “hopefully imagine” is now embodied in Christian fellowship.  The Holy Spirit filled life of Christ in which predation is disappearing and the loving communion of God is becoming evident shines forth in Christian community. Christian community, Holy Spirit filled congregations in whom the self-giving, self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ is embodied is living proof that God is faithful, that God gives strength to endure, and that God will deliver his Creation from the futility that pervades it. 

I hope you are catching a glimpse with your “hopeful imagination” of what exactly is going on in our midst as a congregation.  What Isaiah prophesied with spoken word as a promise, we embody as a visible, felt reality in our fellowship also as the promise of what God will ultimately bring about in Christ.   The love of God abides in us and is making us to be the type of people who go and comfort others.  The presence of the Lord is with us.  Christian acts of support are more than just good deeds.  They are living signs of the New Creation coming.  Our acts of support are the earth becoming full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.  Imagine that.  The love shown by each of you is the earth becoming full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.  Amen.

A World of Peace-filled Leadership

Isaiah11:1-10
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I went on a study tour of the Middle East back in 1995.  It was probably the most peaceful time in the last seventy years to visit the region. In 1993 Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization had struck a deal for peace in which they recognized each others right to existence.  Their leaders at the time – Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat – received the Nobel Peace prize for their efforts.  In 1994 Israel and Jordon had signed a peace treaty that opened their borders to each other.  These leaders were all men of war who saw that peace would not be wrought in the Holy Land by means of war.  More importantly, the realization came with accepting the responsibility that a peaceful future for their children meant they had to act to break ranks with their political bases and popular sentiments rooted in hate and fear and make the difficult decisions that would make peace a reality.

Given that everyone has their flaws, Prime Minister Rabin, President Arafat , and King Hussein were the type who believed that problems were best handled face to face.  Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein chose to work face to face rather than from behind negotiators.  Rabin and Arafat also met several times, not just in cold offices, but also in each other’s homes in the presence of each other’s families.  At one such meeting Chairman Arafat actually got on the floor to play with Rabin’s grandchildren.  How different the world would be today if global leaders actually put their prejudices aside and befriended one another as family? 

Of the three the character of Hussein truly needs to be noted.  As the leader of a land-locked nation in the heart of the most troubled area of planet Earth, he is remembered for his courageous kindness, his courage to speak the truth to his Arab and Israeli neighbours, and his willingness to open his land to refugees at great cost to Jordan.  His gracious hospitality in the matter or war refugees revealed his fierce generosity.

One of his gestures of kindness speaks more loudly than any to the character of this king.  On March 13, 1997 on the north end of the Israeli/Jordanian border, a Jordanian soldier open fired on a group of Israeli school girls killing seven and wounding six.  Hussein immediately returned to Jordan from an official visit he was on in Spain.  He then immediately went to the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh to sit with the grieving families.  When he arrived he went on his knees before the families saying the incident was “a crime that is a shame for all of us.  I feel as if I have lost a child of my own.  If there is any purpose in life, it will be to make sure that all the children no longer suffer the way our generation did.”  He also sent compensation to each of the families.

With respect to what happened to the bright light of these peace-filled leaders and their efforts, Rabin suffered assassination by an Israeli right-wing extremist in the fall of 1995.  Benjamin Netanyahu, who did not share his peace-filled sentiments, succeeded him.  Netanyahu soon began escalating tensions with the Palestinians all but eradicating the work of Rabin and Arafat.  The breakdown of peace in the region took its toll on King Hussein. His wife, Queen Noor, reflected on the king’s feelings at this time.  She said: “Everything he had worked for all his life, every relationship he had painstakingly built on trust and respect, every dream of peace and prosperity he had had for Jordan’s children, was turning into a nightmare.  I really didn’t not know how much more Hussein could take.”  Hussein died in 1999 of cancer.  Arafat remained a figurehead leader of the Palestinian Authority until his death in November of 2004.  The Palestinians suffered as much from infighting as it did in its struggles with Netanyahu.  Arafat may or may not have been poisoned.  Ironically,  the one Palestinian leader who sought a peaceful resolution with Israel was seen by both the Israeli and American governments as an obstacle to peace.  One might ask “peace on whose terms?”

Our passages today speak of the quality of character of Christ Jesus, the King who is to return and put the world to right.  The Psalmist says he will judge the people with righteousness, which means he will act to set things right.  He will defend the cause of the poor, bring deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.  Isaiah writes that the Spirit of the Lord is on him, the spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and his delight is the reverence of the Lord.  He is dressed in righteousness and faithfulness.  When he comes he will act, his executive orders will be judgements for the good of the poor, laws that will actually bring economic equity rather than just tax breaks for the super wealthy.  His words of truth will be like an iron rod striking the earth.  By his breath, i.e. the Holy Spirit, he will kill wickedness.

Isaiah continues and says that a day is coming when there will be no more predation.  The Temple Mount will no longer be a reason for people to hurt or destroy one another.  And…he says, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge (the personal knowing) of God as the waters cover the sea.”  This is the day we await and work for, the day when King Jesus returns, a day when the world will be led by peace-filled leadership.  This day is what our talk of waiting in Advent is all about.

These passages set the stage for our Advent longing for peace.  Advent isn’t about building our nostalgia around the birth of the Son of God in a cozy manger where he cooed with the doves so we can eat some turkey and open some presents and proclaim it to be peace on earth and good will towards men; fa-la-la-la-la.  Advent is about our deep longing for the day that is coming when Jesus returns with judgement in hand to set the world to right.  Advent is about us…US…sleepers awaking from our drunken stupor of consumerism, materialism, individualism, and greed that has turned the first coming of Jesus into some sort of sick celebration of debt, economic slavery, and environmental devastation. (Sorry if I’m ruining your Christmas with my conscience.)

In Advent we look at the world today and say, “Where are you King Jesus?”  No head of state on earth today in any way exhibits the quality of character or exercises judgements in the way the psalmist and the prophet Isaiah says they should.  Instead wickedness abounds.  The present leader of Israel is being brought up on charges of corruption.  The American President is about to be impeached.  The Canadian Prime minister says one thing in public and another thing in private and should have more to say to the American President than just complaining about being late for a cocktail party because of the President’s love of theatrics.   In America, children are getting locked in cages at borders.  In Canada, children on reserves are still getting sick from tainted water.  Refugee children are still washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean.  All these children will grow up in a world that is in an environmental crisis that our current global leaders do not have the courage to fix while they can because those sorts of decisions curtail campaign funding and are prohibitive to re-election.

Historian Ronald Wainwright in the last of his 2004 Massey lectures in which he was remarking how global leaders were ignoring the environmental crisis at hand, he said, “Adolph Hitler once gleefully exclaimed, ‘What luck for the rulers that the people do not think!” What can we do when the rulers will not think?”  He wrote that 15 years ago.  Today we have people who don’t think and rulers who will not think and all anybody seems to care about is what they see and hear on social media.  Nobody is thinking about the future of our children!

If there was ever a time for Jesus to return it is today.  Regardless, let us his followers awake and by the power of the breath of his Holy Spirit that he has breathed into us bear fruit worthy of repentance and live in harmony with one another to the glory of God.  Let us live in the image of the coming one who gave his body for the sustenance of the world and let his blood be shed for the forgiveness of our sin.  Amen.

Full of the Knowledge of God

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

“The Earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”  “The Earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”  That is a very rich metaphor.  Though I had read this passage at least once every Christmas season for who knows how many years and on many other occasions, the first time I never really heard it, noticed it was there, was well over decade ago while listening to a New Testament scholar named N.T. Wright talk about our future hope as Christians, a future where everything is filled with the knowledge of God. I have pondered this very profound metaphor ever since. 

N.T Wright is very keen to point out that the future reality that the Bible points us forward to is not our disembodied souls going to heaven when we die.  Yes, we will spend a little time after death possibly without our bodies with Christ in a place Jesus called Paradise.  But, that is not our ultimate goal.  Rather, what we are headed for is Resurrection to live in Creation made new.  This wonderfully awesome and beautiful Creation that God created, blessed, and called very good will be healed and freed of Sin and Death and Evil and as Isaiah says…wait for it…wait for it…, it will be full of the knowledge or better yet the knowing of who God is and what God’s nature is like, full of the unveiled presence and glory of God just as the waters cover the sea.  The goal of our existence is as Wright says, “God is going to do for the whole Creation what he did for Jesus on Easter morning.”  Resurrection into a New Creation, this is our hope in Christ.  This is what God is up to and pointing forward to that is what we the church are about.

Isaiah’s prophesy here, like all of the biblical prophesies which look forward to the Day of Creation’s deliverance and restoration is symbol rich, metaphor rich.  We need to “crack the code” on the meaning of the symbols and yet be careful to not get too specific or literal with them, trying to peg them down to specific dates and so forth.  They are meant to provoke “hopeful imagination”, to make us want to see God’s promise fulfilled, to make us “abound in hope”.

The first metaphor or symbol in Isaiah’s prophecy here is that a shoot shall come up out of the stump of the Davidic lineage, a ruler full of the Holy Spirit, a righteous ruler who will judge fairly on behalf of the weak and oppressed.  This metaphor is a pretty obvious one to nail down.  This ruler is Jesus.  He is the Jewish Messiah who has brought and will bring the Kingdom or Reign of God to earth. 

The next metaphor/symbol that Isaiah gives us is of a world that is free of predation, free of those who kill and devour.  The nature of relationship in creation will change from predation to Peace/Shalom.  The nature of relationship in creation as we know it now due to sin is predatory.  The strong devour the weak.  Poverty, war, climate change are all the result of the powerful devouring the weak.  With this image of a world without predation Isaiah means to cause us to hopefully imagine that the world that Jesus is bringing about will be free of of all forms of predation.  There will be peace, harmony, Shalom.

Looking at this third image, that of the earth being full of the knowledge of God as waters covering the sea.  Well, the symbol of the “sea” in the world of apocalyptic/prophetic imagery often means humanity, the chaotic sea of humanity.  Water is the symbol of the source of life.  As God is the source of life, I think this image is telling us that the personal, life-giving presence of God is going to be visible among the relationships of humanity – the image of God which was marred by sin will be restored by God resting his presence upon and in us.

So then, what Isaiah wants us to imagine is the coming of the Messiah, full of the Holy Spirit to put things right in God’s creation and the noticeable difference will be that predation will not be at the heart of relationship anymore, but rather in its place will be the personal presence of God.  The image of the Trinity – the loving communion of God the Father Son and Holy Spirit – will radiate forth from humanity in our relationships with each other and with the Creation as a whole.

Leaping forward in time a few centuries from Isaiah to Paul, this hope-filled image of the image of God restored in humanity undergirds Paul’s understanding of what the church is.  To Paul, the Holy Spirit-filled Messiah has come.  Jesus is that shoot rising from the stump of Jesse.  Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom of God.  His death and resurrection is God’s judgement against humanity that kills wickedness.  With the breath of his lips, the Holy Spirit, God puts wickedness to death and recreates humanity in his image.  The Christ-like, Holy Spirit filled fellowship of Christians is the first fruits of this new predation-free humanity.  As far as Paul, the former zealous Pharisee who hated Gentiles, was concerned the fact that Gentiles and Jews were together in harmony, like-minded in their devotion to Jesus as Lord, worshipping God the Father with one voice is evidence that the day Isaiah held forth has begun.  The knowledge of God has begun to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

The New Creation, predation-free, Spirit of God-filled humanity that Isaiah put out there for us to “hopefully imagine” is embodied in Christian fellowship.  The Holy Spirit filled life of Christ in which predation is disappearing and the loving communion of God is becoming evident in Christian community. Christian community, Holy Spirit filled congregations in whom the self-giving, self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ is embodied is living, tangible proof that God is faithful, that God gives strength to endure, and that God will deliver his Creation from the futility that pervades it.

I hope you are catching a glimpse with your “hopeful imagination” of what exactly is going on in our midst as a congregation.  What Isaiah prophesied with spoken word as promise, we embody as visible, felt reality in our fellowship also as promise of what God will ultimately bring about in Christ.  Here’s an example. The other day I went to visit Mac and Edith and Charles and Mary Lou were there.  They came to see Mac and Edith because the love of God abides in them and has made them to be the type of people who will go and comfort others.  The presence of the Lord was there with us.  Christian acts of support like that are more than just good deeds.  They are living signs of the New Creation coming.  Christian acts of support as was shown that day are the earth becoming full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.  Through the Christian love shown by each of you the earth is becoming full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.  Amen.