Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen
Who do we wait
for?
Who do we wait
for?
The obvious
answer for us during Advent is that we are waiting for Jesus.
But then a second
question arises: “What are our hopes,
our longings, our expectations as we await his coming?”
Do we have any?
Peace.
We talked about
that last week.
“Neither shall
they learn war anymore.”
To wait for Jesus
is to wait for the Prince of Peace.
And our hope, our
yearning, our expectation is that with his coming will dawn a new era of “peace
on earth”, to quote the angel’s song at his birth.
And when those
angels sang that song, they did not sing of heaven, but earth.
The hope, the
promise, is that our lives here on earth will change as a result of the coming
of the Messiah, and that we will one day live in peace.
Today, Isaiah
invites us to sing a different song of hope.
It’s not just
about peace, it is also about righteousness.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his
waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
What does it mean
to us that Jesus will come to bring righteousness to the earth?
Historically and
Biblically, there have been three different frames of reference through which
we understood and talked about the faith.
And they centered
around who we believed Jesus to be.
One understanding
of Jesus’ work is that he is the Victorious King who has waged the battle
against sin, death, and the powers of evil, and won.
In doing so we
have been set free from the power of evil, free to worship him and live in his
Kingdom.
This
understanding of the saving work of Christ has been called “Christus Victor”.
A second
understanding that has dominated our perception of Jesus’ work for centuries is
that of the Righteous Judge and sacrifice of atonement.
In this
understanding the power of evil is the moral failures of each of us, our
failure to obey the law, and the various sins that we have committed that leave
us condemned.
Righteousness in
this sense is to repent of those sins, largely understood as immorality, and
receive the forgiveness offered through Jesus’ atoning life and death, and then
to walk in the newness of life, free from the sins that had dominated our
previous experiences.
This
understanding of Jesus’ work has been referred to historically as the classical
theory of the atonement. Jesus is the
lamb of God who died to take away your sins.
There is a third
way of understanding Jesus’ work, and I refer to it as the ‘Family of God’
understanding.
Every time we
refer to God as our Father, we are thinking in this sense.
The problem here
is that we have become separated and estranged from God our Father. We have wandered astray like the prodigal
Son. That is our sin.
And repentance is
to return to the Lord our God.
The work of
Christ our Brother is to guide us back through the power of his love into
communion with the Father and one another.
Righteousness in
this regard is reconciliation.
It is being one
with God and one with each other.
Isaiah envisioned
this type of righteousness in our lesson for today.
When he speaks of
righteousness being the belt around the Messiah’s waist, he doesn’t refer to a
great cosmic battle between the forces of Good and Evil.
Nor does he refer
to the sacrifice of Atonement, in which the Lamb of God is offered up for the sins of the world.
Rather, he speaks
of the wolf living with the lamb,
The leopard lying
down with the kid,
The calf and the
lion and the fatling together.
It is an image of
the reconciliation of all Creation.
There is one
phrase that often captures our attention and our human desires.
“he shall strike the earth with the rod of
his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall
kill the wicked.”
When we hear
those words our thoughts go back to the understanding of Jesus’ as the
Victorious King, and the wicked as those evil persons he has destroyed.
Here I am going
to invite you to think about God destroying “wickedness”, not the “wicked”.
At least that is
what Isaiah goes on to describe.
Our human nature
is to desire that our enemies are destroyed.
To use the images
from Isaiah, as lambs we desire a world free of wolves and leopards.
As calves we’d
like a world free of lions.
As children we’d
like a world free of poisonous snakes.
You see, we are
locked into a way of thinking.
·
The powerful will dominate the weak.
·
The rich will exploit the poor.
·
The majority will run roughshod over the
minority.
·
Violence will leave victims.
·
And every victory will come as the result of
another’s defeat.
It’s a world view
that cannot free itself from the understanding that life itself is all about
winners and losers.
In this world
view, righteousness depends entirely upon your own perspective and situation in
life.
If you are the
weak, the poor, the minority, or a victim of violence, then you hope for the
day that the rich and powerful, the majority, and the violent bullies of this
world are overthrown.
But if you are
part of the privileged and powerful class, then your understanding of the world
is quite different.
Chances are then
that you will view your actions as serving the cause of righteousness, not
injustice.
I’m rich because
I’ve lived a good life, and the poor aren't because they haven’t.
I’m powerful
because I’m right.
In this sense, we
live in a predatory world.
The wolves feast
at the lamb’s expense.
But the
redemption that Isaiah envisions is not that wolves and leopards and lions and
bears and asps and adders will all be destroyed.
No, Isaiah’s
vision is that “They will not hurt or
destroy
on all my holy mountain;”
It’s the lion and
the lamb together.
It’s a world in
which the snake will not bite, nor the human crush the snake.
There is a
disconnect here between our human concept of righteousness and God’s.
As humans we tend
to think of righteousness as the one way, as though the whole world will one
day be lambs, and there will be no wolves.
But God sees a
reconciliation of the whole Creation in all its diversity.
The bottom
line: People who are different from
me will also be saved.
It will be “the calf and the lion and the fatling
together,
and a little child shall lead them.”
Why isn’t this
the case today?
Why is
reconciliation so difficult?
There are two
forces that are hurdles to be overcome in order for reconciliation to happen.
Appetite and
Fear.
Lion’s have to
curb their appetite for lambs, and lambs need to learn to not be afraid of
lions.
Without that,
both groups will envision the destruction of the other as the only way.
Who is this Jesus
that we are waiting for?
Have you ever
noticed that every culture tends to see Jesus as one of them and picture him
accordingly?
In Japan, Jesus
is depicted as being Japanese.
In Norway he has
blond hair and blue eyes.
It’s a black baby
that lies in the manger in Africa.
Lambs envision
Jesus as a lamb, and lions as a lion.
But what if Jesus
came to us, not like us, but in the image of those we most need to be
reconciled with?
What if accepting
Jesus as my Lord meant accepting those very different from myself as a brother
or sister?
That’s what
reconciliation is all about.
We cannot love
the Father and hate his children.
To Love the
Father is to love our brothers and sisters as well.
And no, it is not
for us to destroy those who are different from us.
Jesus came to
reconcile the world and has called us to be his ambassadors of reconciliation.
And so we wait
and we hope for that day when the lion and the lamb shall all lie down together
and be led by the child of Bethlehem.
Amen
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