Sermon for 2 Advent

Sermon for 2 Advent, Year A

December 5, 2004

St. Luke’s Church, Jamestown, NY

Eric M. Williams

Living in Hope

This past week a tree fell down in our back yard.

Fortunately it was someone else’s tree and it narrowly missed our garage,

though it wiped out our neighbor’s tool shed.

Outwardly the tree looked fine.

But upon examination, the trunk had rotted from the inside out,

and was nearly hollow and couldn’t withstand

the windstorm we had a few nights ago.

I was reminded of our tree when I read the gospel for today,

the powerful and challenging words of John the Baptist:

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees;

every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and burned.”

The tree now lying in my yard didn’t need to be cut down;

it fell over all by itself,

through its own internal weakness.

The wind just helped it along.

So it was with ancient Israel in the time of the prophet Isaiah.

He had watched the Assyrians destroy the northern kingdom

and he warned that the same was going to happen to Jerusalem,

which had grown weak in faith and righteousness.

Judah was like that tree rotting from the inside out,

and the Assyrians were the gale force wind

coming to knock it down.

But then Isaiah goes on to offer a vision of hope—

in one of the most beautiful and powerful images in the whole Bible.

Out of the dead stump of Jesse, new life will come.

This branch will be a new king, a descendant of King David,

and this Messiah will bring about a new kingdom.

This kingdom will be a kingdom of righteousness and peace.

It will come from the Jews but will involve all the nations.

Peace shall extend to all peoples and to all of creation.

Finally the curse of Eden shall be lifted,

and once again all nature shall live in harmony.

This vision was recorded and shared by Isaiah over twenty seven hundred years ago.

For all that time, Jews and later Christians as well,

have nurtured and tended this vision,

have passed it on in book and song and art.

They have refused to let this vision go because it is an important vision,

it is a true vision of what God wants for this creation,

a vision of what God is doing in the world.

I even heard echoes of it this week when the youth group went to Little Theater.

If you haven’t yet seen The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I urge you to go.

This play is based on a novella of the same name

and tells the story of a seemingly disastrous Christmas pageant.

From the beginning, everything goes wrong.

The director breaks her leg and her replacement is a novice

who does everything wrong, including casting the Herdmans,

six of the meanest, most difficult, most disruptive children in town.

Yet, without giving too much of the plot away,

the play really demonstrates the power of God’s story

to change lives and to bring peace and reconciliation.

That is certainly the power of Isaiah’s vision.

It takes us all the way back to the Garden of Eden,

back to the way God meant for us to live.

In Eden all the creatures lived together in vegetarian harmony,

no creature killed or ate any other creature,

but all lived in peace and plenty by God’s grace.

In Eden humanity enjoyed a close relationship with God

and with all other creatures.

It was the perfect life—until we blew it.

If you remember your Genesis,

all that changed because Adam and Eve listened to the serpent

and chose their own will instead of God’s will.

Into God’s perfect world, sin and death entered the scene.

In other words, from the very beginning, things have not been right on planet Earth.

I think we know this deep down.

I think we feel the wrongness of things.

We are not meant to suffer and die; we are not meant to kill and be killed.

We are not meant to live in competition with each other and nature.

We are not meant to live in fear and hatred of others.

We were created for a better life—a life based on love and peace.

We were created for the world described in Isaiah’s vision—

the Peaceable Kingdom.

So how do we get there when all we have known

is this screwed up world of sin and death?

That is the essential message of both John the Baptist and Jesus.

John came with one basic message—Repent!

He knew that the key to gaining the Peaceable Kingdom

was repenting, turning away, from the kingdom people knew.

Repenting literally means turning around 180°,

changing your perspective, your path and your direction.

It means acknowledging your sin and letting it go,

and making a new start,

no matter how many new starts it takes.

It means getting baptized in the filthy Jordan

and coming out cleaner than any bleach could make you.

It means having the guts to give up self-righteousness

and learning what it means to accept God’s righteousness.

And repentance leads to hope.

Once we acknowledge that we are dependent on God (not the other way around)

we are free to live as God intended:

“in harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus.”

The challenge that we are given is to live that way now.

It would be easy to live that way if we lived in the Peaceable Kingdom.

It would be easy if that’s the way everyone and everything around us was.

But it’s not that easy.

I believe that you can distill from Jesus’ teaching one very simple theme.

Live in the world as if it were already the kingdom of God.

Jesus was not stupid.

He knew that this world was far from the kingdom.

He knew the world was dangerous, corrupt, and wicked.

He knew that his teachings and ministry

were heading him straight for the cross.

Yet he never wavered.

He continued to proclaim and live in God’s Peaceable Kingdom

even as we beat him and spat on him and crucified him.

He knew that the only way to redeem this sinful world,

to bring it kicking and screaming into God’s kingdom,

was not just to talk the talk about peace and love

but to walk the walk all the way through death and beyond.

That’s what it means to live in hope.

It means becoming the tree that is not rotted from the inside out,

but is healthy and sound in faith and hope

to withstand any wind, no matter how strong.

It means clinging to faith in the Peaceable Kingdom of God

even when things are going to hell in a handbasket,

because things are always going to hell in a handbasket.

It means having the courage and the vision and the faith,

to live in this screwed up world

as if it were already the kingdom of God.

Because by doing so, we help God actually move this world

a tiny step closer to the world he intended,

where Christ truly reigns,

where the wolf and the lamb are best buddies,

and where the Herdmans always star

in the Best Christmas Pageant Ever.