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Big Bad John December 4, 2022 Isaiah 11:1-10 Matthew 3:1-12
Some of you remember, I’m sure the song, Big Bad John, by Jimmy Dean, yes, the same one who sells the sausage- it goes back to 1961 when I was in college. I won’t try and sing it but the opening words are:
Ev’ry mornin’ at the mine you could see him arrive
He stood six foot six and weighed two forty five
Kinda broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip
And everybody knew, ya didn’t give no lip to Big John,. Big Bad John.
Whenever I read this picture of John the Baptist in Matthew I can’t help but think of that song. – The picture of the Baptist just seems like someone not to be messed with.
John certainly is the curmudgeon of Christmas almost as much as Dickins’ Scrooge, in the Christmas Carol. We can’t imagine him saying, “Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas” or singing Jingle Bells. He comes on the scene with a slightly grumpy demeanor. –He and his camel hair clothes and diet of locusts and wild honey. He didn’t mind a few bee stings I guess.–Don’t plan that for your Christmas dinner.
Of course, these are symbols that authenticate him as a prophet. Prophets were always people who relied on God and were not beholden to the powers that be. They stood outside the mainstream. Prophets were not fortune tellers so much as truth tellers. They spoke words of judgement to the nation for its lack of justice and mercy, for its mistreatment of the poor and powerless and the failure to maintain allegiance to the God who had brought them out of their bondage in Egypt.
So, we are not at the manger today. Instead of hearing from Magi and shepherds we hear John calling for repentance in the wilderness. The wilderness is that lonely desolate place. A place of wild beasts and hard survival, a place where one easily loses one’s way. It can be seen as a metaphor for all the places of alienation, fear and struggle that we face in life, the places of lostness and despair. Ironically, it’s the same place Jesus is goes to be tempted as he sorts out the meaning of his baptism and call. It is also the place of our lostness, our brokenness. And the place of the hopeless state of the world as it careens on towards the precipice of its own destruction. That’s what John sees in his day, and why his cry is so shrill and penetrating.
John comes to us this Advent 2022, saying Prepare, God is coming. –Prepare your lives, prepare your world. Prepare with justice and right living. John’s words have a sharpness and a hard edge because they must break through our defenses and rationalizations. He is harkening back to Isaiah’s words and reinterpreting them to put an emphasis on making our society ready our lives ready, our hearts ready to receive a God of justice and love, mercy and hope. The path that must be straight and the way that must be smooth is the way we are with each other. The way we hope and love and care. The way we envision the future and our connection to each other. To truly receive the gift of “God with us”, we must repent and change the focus of our lives John wants us to know. We must repent the shoddy callous way of the world and envision a new way of being.
So, his words come to us each Advent in all their strident glory to remind us what Christmas is all about, God is coming! –Get your heart and your lives ready!
Did John talk about Jesus born in a manger, or even envision a Messiah saying, “Father forgive them” from a cross? -Probably not, that was the mystery of God’s grace revealing itself uniquely in Jesus. But John did know that that God was doing something, and that the only appropriate response was repentance to ready one’s heart for God’s presence. God, he said, stood at the door of history, knocking. And he asks if we would dare to let God in. –It was not just about what happened in the first century AD. It is about that “Eternal Now” moment when God stands at our door beckoning to see our truer purposes and to hear God’s calling.
Every Advent as we prepare for Christmas we are asked again, “Are we prepared to let God into our lives, into our world?”
What John is telling us today is that that baby born in Bethlehem, whose birth we celebrate in three weeks, came with the presence of God. –Will you be ready to receive him? And the communion we celebrate today dramatizes the grace that was lived out in Jesus. A Jesus crucified and risen.
John comes to us this December reminding us that in all the frenzied activity leading up to Christmas, the shopping, the decorating the parties and socializing, God is waiting…waiting for us to find the reason for the season. God is waiting for us to do that internal preparation, that we might receive the gifts of grace and peace.
Today we invite you to this supper as the sacrament of his continuing presence and gift of God’s grace. Here the door is open to God. Here the past is redeemed, the present made new, and the future is filled with hope.
“The Return” November 27, 2022 Isaiah 2:1-5 Matthew 24:36-44
It is quite clear the early church expected Jesus to return. Initially, at least, it seems they expected it to be in the first century. The delay caused both anxiety and longing, as well as a need to readdress the issue in their theology. -Luke’s story of the early church in Acts tells of the disciples asking Jesus just before his ascension, “Are you going to restore the Kingdom of Israel now?” To which Jesus replies very bluntly, “It’s not for you to know God’s plans or seasons.” And here in our Matthew passage this morning, Jesus says, “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son,[a] but only the Father.”
The gospel writers, who were themselves having to re-think their expectations about Christ’s return, were making clear that Jesus rejected any actual dating of a time God might intervene in history in some new and dramatic way.
What Jesus said in the gospels of course, has never kept people from assuming they have unlocked the mystery of all this symbolic talk in the bible. It’s no secret there have been lots of folks who have predicted the end of the world since the first century. There was, Montanus, who predicted it in the second century, and people like Johnnes Stoeffler and Michael Stifel who predicted it for the 1500’s. There was even a pope, Innocent III, who set the date of 1284 for Christ’s return. Many more down through history to folks like TV evangelist Pat Robertson who said in 1980, “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be judgement on the world.” And Harold Camping, one of the most recent who set the date for 2011 for Christ’s triumphant return.
One of the most prominent and influential predictors was from New England. William Miller was born just down the road a bit in Pittsfield in 1782. He was one of 16 children. His father fought in the revolutionary war and afterwards bought some farmland just across the state line in NY. His father was a pretty stern and hardworking, practical man who focused on duty and honor. His mother was the daughter of a Baptist minister and leaned towards religion. William had an energetic mind but there was little time for schooling. It is said that there were only three books in the Miller house, a bible, a prayer book, and a song book.
After his own service in the war of 1812 where he survived a battle when several around him were killed by an incoming shell he began studying the bible on his own. He was particularly fascinated with the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation. Like most people in the mid 1800’s he took the bible as a divinely written book to be taken at face value in a literal historical and scientific way. He poured over it, cross referencing every word.
In 1832 he began to preach after several years of self-study, saying that he had unlocked the biblical prophecies in Daniel & Revelation and was certain he had found God’s timetable for the end of the world. He was sure it would be sometime between March 1843 -44.
He was a strong speaker and over the next dozen years he attracted a sizeable following who called themselves “Millerites” including a prominent Baptist minister in Boston. They produced a bundle of pamphlets and booklets outlining his arguments. Some of his followers pushed for a more definite date; finally he set the date for March of 1844. Excitement grew and Miller gave as many as 300 lectures in the six months leading up to March 1844. It was a kind of Trumpian crusade with an exclusively religious theme, or more like a Billy Graham crusade, if you remember him. There were around 50,000 who joined his movement and many more who followed less ardently.
At the appointed day in 1844 he gathered with a large group of his followers, many of whom had sold their homes and farms in anticipation of the end of history. They were waiting for something Miller called the “Rapture.”
They waited most of the day and into the night. When it didn’t happen, Miller went back to his books and recalculated the date and came up with Sept. 1844. Again, a group waited with him. When it didn’t happen again his followers splintered into factions, the largest group eventually became the 7th Day Adventist movement. Miller himself died 5 years later in 1849, a discredited and somewhat broken man at age 67.
The Adventist movement gained new momentum when WWI broke out and Charles Russell, another, more or less self-taught, bible student became convinced he had figured things out. He began to preach that Christ had in fact returned to earth in 1874 in invisible form and a new age had already begun and God had rejected all churches of the day as corrupt. Russell proclaimed that a small group of right believers would be the true church soon to reign with Christ. –They became known as Jehovah’s Witnesses –after their insistence on the use of the term Jehovah for God.
Both of these men and many others like them tried to reduce the great poetic images of the bible into concrete formula. It has been true right on down to more recent years when we have seen movements like the Branch Davidians –who were off-shoots of the 7 Day Adventists. You may remember them from the news in the Clinton administration.
Of course there are many others on the conservative side of Christianity who are eagerly are awaiting literal “Return of Christ” in the sky sometime soon, and have made popular books like “Left Behind” series and “The Late Great Planet Earth” which, have made millions for their authors, but are discredited by main line scholars. I remember clearly hearing my grandfather’s minister say he didn’t expect to die back in the mid 50’s. -He was around 60 years old then. I’m sure he is long since dead.
As NT Greek scholar Mark Davis notes in one of his blogs on this Matthew text, even the Greek is little ambiguous here about exactly what these sayings in Matthew indicate. It’s not clear, for instance, in the Greek, if being the one left behind is to be avoided or preferred! – as in, you may have been “taken” or “swept away” by Noah’s flood in the story, and “left behind” in Noah’s boat to start civilization over again. Likewise if Jesus comes as a “thief in the night” maybe that means he comes unrecognized or even undetected. Davis titles his blog, “Left Behind and Loving It,” which gives a little indication of how he’s thinking.
The Question for us these 20 centuries after Jesus is not when, or if, Jesus will come back, but how we can live towards the radical understanding of God’s love for all humanity that Jesus exemplified and proclaimed.
The writers of books like Revelation and Daniel and even Isaiah today were caught up in the suffering of the faithful and the injustice in the world during their time and wrote out of a longing for God’s redemption and an ecstatic affirmation of God’s saving grace. It was a type of imagery intended to give hope and courage to the beleaguered faithful, not to be taken as a road map of how God was about to act but a great affirmation of God’s love and involvement with the world!
Advent is an anticipation, a longing, where hope is in the air and one’s heart lingers on the possibility of what the world might be, if humanity really tuned in to God and let the songs of angels fill our hearts. Advent is to give us a reminder that the Jesus of the cradle and the Jesus of the cross are both gifts of God’s hope for us.
Today is Christ the King Sunday – It is relatively new in the liturgical calendar. It was first instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925. He did so amidst the rising nationalism of the day to remind people and nations where ultimate loyalties should lie and to affirm that churches should not be under the control of governments but free to express and practice the faith. It was originally set for the last Sunday of Oct. but was later changed to the last Sunday of the lectionary year, the Sunday before the beginning of Advent. It has since been adopted by most protestant denominations but is sometimes called Reign of Christ Sunday.
I chose the two readings from Luke one from the first chapter and one from the next to last chapter today because they seemed to round out Luke’s gospel and this ends the lectionary focus on Luke for the next two years. The first reading sets the stage for the coming of Jesus with this dramatic prophecy of Zechariah, couched in all the Jewish prophetic expectation. And the second is both an appalling and wondrous picture of the Crucified Savior messiah, coming with divine grace, a ‘king’ ridiculed and denounced, and given a tortuous death.
The two pictures are both complimentary and oppositional. The one has all the expectant language of a longed-for mighty hero coming with divine power and authority, fulfilling ancient dreams. —The other pictures a sacrificial lamb who has become the scapegoat for those who actually are in power. –But of course, we know ‘the rest of the story’, to borrow one of the late Paul Harvey’s tag lines. –God was in that suffering dying one. Those who knew and loved him best experienced his presence and felt his power even after his gruesome death. What seemed like a painful lost cause, was, it turned out, the turning point in millions of lives down through history. What they saw in that act of non-violent self-giving and forgiveness was the action of God giving hope to humankind. Self-giving love is God’s answer to the problem of human evil.
Imagine, the king that God sent, in answer to the centuries old prophetic longing, was a king not of conquest or power, not of mighty armies or political agendas but a pheasant hobnobbing with the poor and the outcasts and calling fishermen to be his version of avant-garde servant-leaders.
I can’t help but wonder what old Zachariah thought as he saw his son’s life and Jesus’ life unfold. –John beheaded, in his early 30’s and Jesus Crucified. –Both executed by the state for what was perceived to be anti-government agitation. It couldn’t have been what Zechariah was expecting. Jesus’ and John’s lives were hardly like his prophesy in any literal way.
There had been three different people claiming messianic credentials around the time Jesus was born, right after Herod the Great died. They tried to raise armies and foment revolt against the Romans. All three were killed in short order. None left any disciples or caused any discussion of life after death. Interestingly the revolt that finally did take place in 66AD lacked any central leader. A couple of bands of Zealots had some initial success and overran a Roman garrison massacring the Roman soldiers and stealing weapons and gathering more supporters. Nero responded by sending more of his Legions under the generalship of Tacitus, who later became emperor himself. They were determined to squash this revolt and they did. The Romans knew something about power and how to use it. Interestingly, the Jewish historian Josephus thought that the Roman general Tacitus who became emperor was possibly the messiah the prophets had in mind. He had the pomp and the power.
As we read the prophesy of Zechariah, one can’t help but feel he was expecting something a little more Roman-like. –But that was not what God had in mind. The God that Jesus revealed by his life and words was a God who seemed to be saying that humanity could only be saved by sacrificial love. -Not the kind of king anyone imagined.
Paul, who writes from prison to the church at Colossae, a little over 60 years after Zechariah, articulates a new vision of Christ as supreme with language that is echoed in the opening of John’s gospel.
15 He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in[e] him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in[f] him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God[g] was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Paul writes this in 62 AD, -two years later, he was beheaded by Nero and an earthquake destroyed both the church and the town of Colossae. Neither was ever rebuilt.
I think Paul came to this great poetic affirmation about Christ, not from some grand theological insight, or even revelation, but from his own dramatic and unexplainable encounter with the Resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus. That experience gave him the strength and courage to face his own death and the calamities of his time with a deep and abiding faith that God was with him and involved in the future of the world. –You don’t get that kind of faith simply by reciting Paul’s theology or memorizing the Nicene Creed; it only comes with your own encounter with Christ.
One of the stories I stuck in my files several years ago was of a couple named Frank and Elizabeth. I am sorry to say I did not write down their last name. But they had an only child, Ted, who was killed by a drunk driver at age 18 just before his graduation from high school. He was the apple of their eye full of promise and plans. The other driver was also a young man, just a couple of years older than their son. He was one of those kids who had been in constant trouble.
Frank & Elizabeth were so devastated and angry over the death of their son they could only think of making sure this other boy got his punishment. They wanted him put away immediately -and for a long time.
Of course, it didn’t happen as they hoped. The trial was delayed, and postponed, then continued; all the while he was out on bail.
Frank and Elizabeth kept track of everywhere the boy went in the intervening months. Finally, the trial came, and they expected to get their vengeance. But in the end the boy received 5 years’ probation, with the stipulation that he spend every other weekend in jail and alternate weekends as a volunteer in the hospital emergency room and attend AA meetings. It was part of that attempt at “creative sentencing.”
Frank and Elizabeth were beside themselves with hurt and anger. They followed the young man even more closely, actually coming to the hospital and the jail to make sure his sentence was being carried out.
Finally, this young man, Tommy, was caught by his probation officer driving under the influence. He was given a 10 year jail term.
Frank & Elizabeth were so involved with him now that they began to visit him in jail. Over a period of about a year of this their feelings about him began to change. They got permission to have him released into their custody two nights a week. They took him to church on Sunday. It was a little awkward at first, but it gradually got easier. He finally broke down and begged their forgiveness. When the probation hearing came up they spoke for him and promised to help him rebuild his life.
It took a while, but for them, the presence of the Living Christ had been a part of their healing. Grief and anger had almost sent over the edge and torn them apart. Faith in Christ had been the one thing that held them together and helped them overcome the great tragedy in their lives and allowed them to love again. Christ had become king in their lives. The one crucified & resurrected. It made a difference. That is the Christ Paul knew. That is the Messiah Zechariah unknowingly proclaimed. That’s the king that makes a difference in human life.
I really chose the Second Thessalonians passage from the lectionary as a kind of teaser passage looking towards Advent. -Advent is that time when we prepare for Christmas by thinking again about the longing, and the expectation, of Christ’s return and God’s direct involvement in history. We get bits of that expectation leading up to Advent. Mike alluded to it last week as he quoted from the first chapter of Second
Thessalonians, and this bit of scripture today, written at the end of the first century or the very beginning of the second century, highlights how intense and specific the expectation and longing for God’s intervention was among the early church.
So, just hold that in your mind through the next month or so, we will revisit it’s themes and the questions it raises.
For today, I want to focus on the Psalm. All the Psalms are part of the worship material of ancient Israel. Some Psalms cry out to God for forgiveness, or for God’s help, some recite the wonder of God’s creation, or God’s gracious acts in the past. All of them lift up awe and wonder as they celebrate God and God’s gracious relationship with God’s people.
I don’t so much want to analyze today’s Psalm as to connect to its feeling of wonder and mystery accompanied by its deep affirmation of God’s care and involvement with us.
I want to do that by simply telling a story that was once told by the Rev. Dr. Fred Craddock at a workshop I attended. He was the highly esteemed professor of preaching at Chandler School of Theology.
He told of going out for a drive on a Sunday afternoon with his family when his kids were small. Suddenly, his two kids in the back seat start yelling, “O daddy, stop the car! Stop the car! -There’s a kitten back there on the side of the road!”
Dr. Craddock, who was just Dad to them, said, “Settle down kids. It probably belongs to someone and I’m sure its mother is capable of taking care of it, and cats have a way of finding their way home.”
The kids, of course, were persistent, “But dad, there wasn’t any mother there and it looked real small. I’m sure it going to die if we don’t go back and get it!”
Craddock, trying to be practical said, “Now just relax kids, you don’t know that, and besides we’re just going for a nice quiet ride to look at the scenery and enjoy ourselves.
Kids: “But dad, -We can’t just let it die!”
Finally his wife nudges him and says, “Honey, why don’t you just go back and make sure there’s a mother cat around.”
So he turns the car around and drives back near the spot where the kids saw the kitten. And sure enough, there it is, all alone.
With strict instructions for the kids to wait in the car, He gets out and walks to where the kitten is. It is a scrawny, scraggly looking thing. Dried mucus in the corner of its eyes and obviously full of fleas. It is scared and lost and hostile.
Craddock knows he has no choice but to help it, so he reaches down to gently pick it up. As his hand goes down the kitten begins to hiss & spit. Baring teeth and claw, it slaps out with that little paw and digs those sharp little claws into Craddock’s hand and tries to bite him. But he finally manages to get the kitten by the scruff of the neck, and with a few words under his breath, brings the kitten back to the car. -The kitten is placed in a cardboard box they had used to carry some sandwiches and soda for the trip. And Craddock admonishes the kids not to touch the little flea bag until they get home and at least clean it up.
When they get home, they manage to give the little thing a flea bath. And the kids give it some warm milk. They get a bigger box and ask their dad for one of his tee shirts to make it a comfortable bed. In the ensuing days they feed it and take it to the vet and get the appropriate shots.
A few weeks go by and the kitten grows and has the run of the house. One day Craddock comes home and starts to hang up his coat and he feels something rub up against his leg. He looks down and there is the kitten. He reaches down and strokes the kitten. Now instead of hissing and scratching, the kitten arches his back up to receive the caress.
–Is that the same cat? –The same one that was scared and ready to fight only a few weeks ago?
Well, yes and no. Not the same in the full sense of the word. -It’s not just a matter of getting rid of the fleas and getting plenty of warm milk. We all know there is more to it than that.
Craddock concludes, “Not long ago God reached out his hand to bless me and my family. When he did I looked at his hand; it was covered with scratches….Such is the hand of love.”
God keeps reaching out to us, keeps trying to overcome our fear and our barbed resistance.
It is no coincidence that the word translated “Saved” in the N.T is the same word that is translated “Healed”. The sense of the word is to be made safe & whole, secure in every aspect of one’s being.
It is precisely that sense of security and well-being that is celebrated by the Psalmist. The God who has created the grandness of the universe and the world we know, embraces us in the fullness of love. That God reaches out with hope for us and seeks to give us grace.
What Jesus’ life and death dramatizes is that through the love of God we are made secure, and whole. There is both forgiveness and hope for us. God has come to us with a gentle hand of love and seeks to bring us home.
As we celebrate the Lord’s Supper today, we rejoice in the affirmation that God’s love is made real for us. God’s love knows no end. –“Neither, height, nor depth, nor any other creature”, as the apostle Paul said, can separate us from that love.
We invite you, come take this supper with us and know the gift of God.
Isaiah 65:17-25 Luke 21:5-19
Predicting the future is always a bit precarious. -Most of the TV analysists have a tough time predicting the election results -even with all their polling ahead of time. They were wrong as much as they were right even in this last election. Of course, it doesn’t keep them from trying. Everyone would like to know the future and anyone who thinks they know the future and can tell it in a convincing fashion will always get a little press coverage.
Trying to tell the future has been a preoccupation of humans since we crawled out of caves. You can find palm readers and fortunetellers in every major city or tourist town even today. There were Greek oracles and fortunetellers in the time before Jesus and there has been in just about every other culture in history. The bible makes a point to warn against using soothsayers and fortunetellers. The biblical perspective is to simply trust in God and live one day at a time. Of course, the prophets themselves described both doom and hope they saw ahead at different times, and ultimately they foresaw God initiating an idealized world of peace, justice and tranquility. We got a bit of that imagery in our Isaiah passage today. It came out of Isaiah’s understanding of God’s caring for the world and especially the downtrodden and persecuted.
Today we have Jesus predicting the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, -something Mathew & Mark also mention. Of course, all the gospels were written after the event had actually happened, during the war with Rome from 66 AD to 70 AD. Some suggest that Jesus might well have perceived that an impending war with Rome was coming without any divine input. There was, in fact, a restless undercurrent of opposition and resentment towards Roman occupation in a large segment of the population during his lifetime. And when you combine that reality with the religious fervor of expectation and belief that God was on their side the fuse was all but lit. The religious anticipation of God’s intervention in history that had built on the sayings of Isaiah and Jeremiah had been made more emphatic by books like Daniel and others written in the 200 years before Jesus. Also, by the time Jesus began his ministry the rebuilding of the temple was almost completed and that served to heighten those feelings that God’s time of intervention was near!
To what extent Jesus thought that his own ministry was a harbinger of God’s imminent involvement in bringing a new world order is still debated in New Testament studies. But it is clear that the earliest church, and in particular Paul’s preaching, interpreted the death and resurrection of Jesus as a clear sign that God was ready to initiate a new era.
Paul had been a Jewish biblical scholar and had no doubt not only studied the Old Testament prophets but had also studied the intertestamental writers who were so focused on God’s coming intervention. In the beginning of his ministry Paul thought Jesus’ return would happen in his lifetime and even suggested to the church at Corinth that it might be better not to get married. (see 1 Cor. 7) A few years later Paul would moderate his expectation as he realized that God’s timing of a New Age might be different than his own anxious hope.
But, as catholic scholar, John Dominic Crossan in his book, Historical Jesus, argues the war with Rome and destruction of the temple in 70 AD only served to again heighten the expectation and longing for Parousia, or Day of the Lord. By the time the gospels were written, all of the other predictions mentioned by Jesus here in Luke have in fact happened:
War, check – 66 -70AD
Earthquake, check, -even the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius burying Pompey (79 AD) would have seemed to be a harbinger of the earth changing and something big on the horizon.
Plague -check! -Libya, Syria and Egypt all experienced a plague in the first century. Many scholars think it may have been the first case of bubonic plague outbreak.
Famine – check -Paul had collected contributions for Christians back in Israel.
And the Harassment, Prison and Death for Jesus’ followers mentioned in today’s passage were sporadically part of the picture in the second half of the first century for Christians. So Luke quotes Jesus speaking of things that Christians had already experienced.
All of that added to both the longing and the expectation for God’s intervention coming soon. Truth be told these biblical images and dream-visions were from the outset the metaphorical, symbolic language of hope, not concrete historical data for the future. They were the poetic utterances intended to help us envision the world of God’s hope and to encourage us towards such a world.
America has always been the hot bed of popularized “end of the World” thinking in part because our democratic view of biblical interpretation that said just read it and take it on faith as a simple declarative statement has led to hundreds of opinions and a plethora of divisions of belief.
Methodist Bishop William Willimon, formerly Chaplain and professor at Duke U. in a little commentary on the end of the world prophesies says”
“Apocalyptic texts (that is texts that talk about God’s Revelation about the future) are thick with vivid imagery. Poetic metaphors are enlisted in order to talk about an ambiguous future. All of that makes the text difficult for us modern hearers. The modern world tends towards reductionism. We want to talk about tomorrow, but we want to do so in a way that is prosaic, simple, direct… The Christian hope is not a simple hope. It is born out of the conviction that whatever the future holds, God holds the future.”
Isaiah’s beautiful vision of a kingdom to come, full of peace, beauty and long life was spoken to a people facing untold hardship. They were returning to the rubble of a land destroyed by war. They had been in captivity some 70 years, Jerusalem and the first Temple lay in ruins. –Imagine returning to broken down houses, overgrown fields, a city with no defenses. It was a depressing scene and the future looked all uphill. –Some of the work would not be finished in the lifetime of those returning.
But Isaiah shares a vision with them that what they are working towards is not a hopeless, wasted dream but a part of God’s plan for the world. None of them saw it come true –but does that make Isaiah’s words any less true?
–I don’t think so. Isaiah simply gives a broader, longer picture than simple human historical perspective can conceive.
It is precisely the problem of fundamentalists, whether Christian, Jewish, or Moslem, that they take scriptural language and strip it from its historical and literary context and translate its poetry into simple absolutes.
It often does violence both to the biblical intent and to human life.
The eschatological images of Jesus and Isaiah are enunciations of that Divine Vision that comes in God’s time. It is that consummation of history that is God’s Shalom of creation. The Earthquakes, volcanoes, & wars, are visual symbols of the dramatic changes that must erupt in the world for it to be what God intends. It must be such a total makeover that only God could accomplish it.
This Thanksgiving season we give thanks, not just for how many things we have, but for family, for community, for the love that sustains us as well as that deep hope we have in a God who not only belongs to the saints and prophets of the past but who sustains human life now and in the future. –And we commit ourselves anew to the dreams of our forefathers and mothers to live closer to that kingdom ideal we pray for every Sunday.
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