Is There Hope on the Horizon?
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Second Sunday in Advent
December 6, 1998
Isaiah 11:1-10
Each December the news magazine, The Economist of London, publishes a prospective for the coming year. You can find the issue now at most newsstands entitled, logically, "The World in 1999." The magazine's analysts offer a potpourri of reflections on the state of the world. They suggest, for instance, Southeast Asia's new year could be the most miserable in a generation; they see the disintegration of Russia; they understand the Middle East as "trapped in the coils of Arab-Israeli conflict;" they warn of a nightmare in Africa if the Congo War spins out of control; they brood about Latin America, fragile and close to financial collapse.
As for us here in the United States? The commentators fret about three things: the possible slowing of the economy, the paralysis of leadership caused by scandal in the presidency, and the question, "will the troubles of the world--financial and political--all pitch up on America's doorstep looking for expensive and difficult solutions?"
Amid all of this worldly trend and tea-leaf reading, there also appears an article by the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria. This article reflects on the future of statecraft. Mr. Zakaria tells us that "despite all of the tumult of the developing world, the major industrialized nations continue to move unavoidably into the world of globalism, technology and cyberspace." He tells us in this futuristic age diplomacy will return to its roots, but not to a 19th century diplomacy of Edwardian toffs in striped pants and bowler hats passing Whitehall cables to one another while meeting in a baroque ballroom to redraw the map of Europe." No, Zakaria advises us our accustomed summits, governmental conferences and bilateral talks represent a diplomatic style now passé, and that because of the rise of fluid capital markets, information technology, global media, the end of communism, the inefficiencies of government regulation we see a significant decline in the autonomy and power of the state, the major player of diplomacy for the last two or three centuries. For a fascinating variety of reasons Zakaria sees us returning now to statecraft as it took place in the Renaissance, comparing Alan Greenspan, for instance, to a figure bearing the credibility of a 15th century cardinal. And he closes the article by asking, "If we are indeed entering a world of Renaissance complexity, with many actors, public and private, overlapping jurisdictions, competing loyalties and dizzying change, where should the statesman look for wisdom? As it turns out there is a highly intelligent guidebook seeking to preserve and enhance the power and autonomy of the state against its many challengers. Written in 1513, Nicolo Machiavelli's The Prince is available at most bookstores."
The world in 1999? The future of statecraft? Nicolo Machiavelli? This for Advent? What is going on? Well, there is another book on statecraft you can find in the bookstore--most of you have it right in your own home, on a side table, in your library--somewhere--and it is the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah spent his whole mature life contemplating, reviewing, reflecting on, analyzing--and decrying, vilifying and reviling the statecraft of his contemporaries. Isaiah fulminated against the political alignments, the international intrigues, the brutal tyrannies running rampant over vulnerable peoples of his own time. He acted as a one man impeachment brigade, acting as both prosecutor and judge, investigator and jury attacking and defining as guilty of deception and treason the legitimate leaders of his nation. Anyone who would divorce religion from politics never met Isaiah. Although he offers a glimpse of the world in 701 BC, he is a modern, and we could tape his observations and political polemics into The Economist's World of 1999.
You see, Isaiah lives amid the busy trade routes joining Assyria and Egypt. Generation after generation, century after century he and his people know the terror of imperial regimes, the ransacking of their cities and the rape of their women. Isaiah and his people bend under obsequious treaties appeasing the powerful; they surrender to the enemy's cultural, military, political--and worst of all, absolutely infuriating Isaiah--they surrender to the enemy's religious practice and loyalties. At wit's end, grieved and vexed, Isaiah finally rejects the political and religious hacks who ruin his nation. He believes they are topsy-turvy. They put faith in arms, confidence in bribes, trust in political coalitions, hope in military strategy, dependence on economic sanctions. And Isaiah believes all of this reliance on the instruments of power and the threats of coercion are, in God's eyes, a fraud, a sell-out, an egregious diplomatic blunder and an iniquitous religious betrayal. What we would call political realism and the power arrangements inevitable and necessary to hold together a national community, Isaiah sees as a geopolitical catastrophe. The dickering with these arrangements saves nobody: justice gets lost in the arrogance and police power of the rich; peace, in one way or another, becomes just a balance of terror.
And Isaiah is right. Trusting in force, the marshaling of muscle, the pursuit of status, the coveting of power gets us into deep trouble. We know it. Our world proves it. We see it in our newspapers, face it on our streets, feel it in our wallets, worry about it with our kids. The unpredictable and explosive world The London Economist anticipates in 1999 and the world Isaiah observes and condemns 2700 years ago are cut from the same cloth. No progress. No difference. Politics as usual. "The same old same old." Cynicism the order of the day. . . .Heaven forbid!
II
Question: Is there another way? Can we place our trust elsewhere? Is there hope on the horizon? Well, thank God, Isaiah thinks so. In the face of cynicism and sellout he mediates and draws for us a fresh and dynamic hope. It lies in this radical, this stunning vision of a new public presence. Remember the wonderful lesson we read a moment or two ago? Someone, Isaiah says , someone comes to our troubled world as if a green shoot out of a dead stump; someone arrives on the scene fresh but with roots going deep; someone comes not as new branch on a dying tree, but as a robust sprout springing from a root deep underground, in Isaiah's case, not from King David's house--a bloody, corrupt and adulterous dynasty in disarray, failed, defunct--not from David, but from Jesse, David's father, the very source of just and gracious communal life.
So, what hope does Isaiah envision? What hope hovers on the horizon? Isaiah introduces a presence among us judging not by what eyes see, nor by what ears hear, but a righteous presence judging the poor and deciding with equity for the meek of the earth.
Hear that? A presence deciding for equity! A servant presence filled with the spirit blowing away our craving for inequity, stinging our complacency, upsetting our comfort. As one commentator puts it: "This presence among us inspires righteousness--against every propensity for huge surpluses, against self-sufficiency, against destructive self-interest, against all greedy leverage that destroys the neighbor. We find a spirit-filled presence leaning against our festering anxieties, making us safe enough not to need so many layers of security. The one upon whom the spirit rests makes way so the poor, the weak and the marginalized may come to a fair share of political access and a fair share of economic wherewithal, not capitalist, not socialist but right-wising--turning rightwise--the human requirements of healthcare, housing and dignity. . . Creation is not geared to poverty, homelessness and oppression. This deepest Divine imperative coming from God's own heart, is for righteousness and equity."
Oh friends, here resides Messianic hope. Here we see what the "spirit of council and might" promises in a new future.
And yes, what about that second vision? Talk about hope on the horizon! This word-image of the lion lying with the lamb, the goat-kid with the leopard, the child at the snake's hole--this word-image by the prophet calls us to reconciliation and peace across vast gulfs separating our cultural, racial, national and religious identities--Jew and gentile, black and white, male and female--it envisions Israelis and Palestinians speaking to one another through means other than car bombs, Hutus and Tutsis recognizing one another as brothers and sisters, Serbs and Kosovors believing neither finally deserves a genocidal mass grave, and Republicans and Democrats capable of moving beyond almost pathological mistrust, contempt and vitriol--Isaiah envisions living in trust and vulnerability with one another, the penchant for advantage, the temptation to deceive, the urge to take away dissolved in mutuality and harmony. As one commentator writes, "as a wolf in the respectful presence of the lamb; as a kid, unafraid at the table next to the leopard. . . we see in this marvelous image a hope our cynical, jaded and mistrusting adult lenses can hardly countenance: why "a creation reconciled and led by a little child, innocent enough and unafraid, ungreedy, uexploitative; little calves, little bear cubs all playing around the hole of the snake, unbitten, unpoisoned!"
What is this, a dream? Is this peaceable realm an illusion? In one way, perhaps, yes. Woody Allen captures the literal unreality of it all when he observes, "The lion and the lamb may lay down together . . . but the lamb won't get much sleep." To be sure. But a vivid transforming message spills over us. Isaiah's vision reveals that violence is finally alien to God's nature and to ours, that violence distorts and turns inside out and upside down God's high purpose that each of us should finally be a gift to one another, a presence bringing our own humanity to its fullness.
My soul! What a rich and radiant promise! What hope on the horizon for you, for me, for all those we love, for our world. Hear our prophet? "They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea."
Do you believe it? Please! In that assurance, I invite you this morning to this Holy Table, confident that here--at this moment--the barriers between and among us are down, confident the Spirit draws us--yes, in this moment--in this place, around this table, into God's very community of hope, a community no longer on the distant horizon, but here! Here now!
Let us pray:
We hail you, God's anointed, the long awaited one!
Hail, in the time appointed, your reign on earth
begun!
You come to break oppression, to set the captive free;
to take away transgression, and rule in equity. Amen
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