In Days to Come...
Text: Isaiah 2:2-5
This past week, I must admit it came as a near complete surprise to see any degree of movement towards a peace deal in the Middle East. Nothing has happened for the past seven years, and even someone as optimistic as I am, was getting rather jaded. I am a junkie when it comes to international politics, I follow the news, I try to keep on top of things, looking for trends, and comparing it to past experience.
And then suddenly, surprisingly, there comes this conference in Annapolis, Maryland, where bitter opponents came together for one simple reason: to talk. Nothing more, no grand schemes, no magic wand, no sudden “poof!” and it’s all solved… Nothing like that. It’s simply a commitment to talk to each other, and to keep talking to each other for a minimum of every two weeks. Nothing big… really… and it almost seems to be too good to be true…
Yes it is tantamount to lighting a single candle in what has felt to be a rather dark period in recent history. It was a glimmer of hope… and oddly coincidental, as it happened just as we begin the season of Advent. It is something to hope for, in days to come…
Advent is as season that we’re not really all that comfortable with. We don’t like waiting. The decorations are already up, and the carols are all ringing up and down the hallways of shopping centers, in radio broadcasts, television commercials, and internet ads… As far as they’re concerned, we’ve long since been in the season of Christmas. Yet Advent, this time of anticipation, is really something different. It’s about that anticipation of something that is coming, that has not been fully realized. It is not a coincidence that Advent is like that anticipation and expectation of the birth of a child, particularly in those last weeks and days. I think that’s something that most of us can relate to… (Right Laura?)
Life today seems like a mix between rushing and waiting. We hurry to get to doctors appointments on time, only to have to sit and wait for our name to be called. We rush to airports, and train stations only to wait in line. And this time of year, we hurry off to Christmas sales (or returns) and again we wait…
But in Advent we talk about a different kind of waiting. It’s a time in which we slow down, take stock of our lives, and prepare. It’s also a time of expectant longing, where there is hope of fulfilment. In Advent we wait for the world to be changed.
Sometimes it is difficult to wait. And sometimes, it is hard to look towards the future with any kind of positive feelings; to find reasons to hope at all. We often wonder if the future will be a nightmare. Will the days to come be another depiction of a desolate and forsaken land? Will the future hold images of more destruction, more death? These days, it is hard to hope. It is hard to wait, knowing that the world may never be changed to what it should be.
In contrast to this, our first reading for this morning is Isaiah’s vision of hope, his prophetic dream of the future. This is a promise from God full of hope, and full of expectation. It is a vision of the new age that is promised to the people of Judah and Jerusalem...
The vision seems too good to be true... and perhaps it is. The people of Isaiah’s time refused to accept God’s dream of hope. The rest of the second chapter of Isaiah tells of the choices that Judah and Jerusalem made. They chose not to travel to the mountain of God...they did not make any moves towards being a people of peace. They made the choice not to actively wait in hope, nor did they help to usher it in. As a people, they chose to ignore the ways of God.
But the vision of hope that Isaiah proclaims is the focus of today’s Old Testament lesson. It speaks of hope, and of peace. It speaks of longing, of waiting expectantly for a time when God’s ways would be our ways. It’s important as we hear Isaiah’s prophecy that we remember that this is not a ‘once-upon-a-time’ kind of story, nor is it a fairy tale. It doesn’t look back at the past with rose-coloured glasses, dreaming of things that happened long ago, in a time far away. Isaiah’s vision is different: it’s a ‘in the days to come’ kind of story. This is a vision of hope of a new age, an age pregnant with possibility and rich with promise. This dream is about stuff that is going to happen any day now, in the not-so-distant future... if only we will wait expectantly, if only we will travel to the mountain, and help to usher in God’s peace amongst us...
The words from Isaiah are familiar… we even heard them as recently as Remembrance Day.
He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
It is a timeless hope, but not a vain one. We get glimpses of hope realized, that somehow we are slowly, but surely moving to this day of peace dimly shining before us. The trouble is, it gets hard, when we know there are generals making plans, that companies still fashion new and even more destructive weapon systems.
Yet as this recent meeting last week reminds us, we now live in an age in history that for the most part, nations actually negotiate with their disagreements more than they fight. During the 20th Century, the tolerance that populations have for war has shifted dramatically. The world as a whole has been far more stable than it ever has been in previous centuries. Yes, conflict and war are still there… but so are these glimpses of peace.
He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
If we listen to those words again. It’s the word shall that gets our attention. It appears again and again! Five times that word appears. Some teachers remind us that “shall” is the strongest word in our language. Shall gives place to no doubts, no conditions for the occurrence, no room for alternate views. Shall means it will absolutely come to pass.
For us, the Advent hope is that this shall be in days to come. We may want to fix a date, we may want to have goals met, and timetables followed… but that’s not the way it works. Advent hope is that sense of looking forward, to have this as a goal to work towards, to trust that in God it will indeed unfold, but to know that we are not yet there. What we do have are glimpses, small little movements, that in retrospect add up to something far larger than we realize. Despite the notable exceptions we hear of in the news… be it Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur… on the whole nations are not lifting up swords against nation… something that would have been almost incomprehensible one hundred years ago… Even so, we’re not “there” yet. We still have a long way to go. God still calls us to that hope in days to come.
The passage from Isaiah talks about a changed world. In present day language, his powerful words might read something like this:
They shall turn their bombers into flying hospitalsand their warships into food freighters;nation shall not fire rocket against nationneither shall they train armies any more.
We, like the people of Judah and Jerusalem, are hungry for hope and longing for peace. This world has been waiting for a time where Arab and Jew and Palestinian live as sisters and brothers. As Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said this week about the peace process in the Middle East, "It is time for the circle of blood, violence and occupation to end. It is time for us to look at the future together with confidence and hope. It is time for this tortured land that has been called the land of love and peace to live up to its name."
Any day now, this will be a world where there is no longer need for armies or secret police, no more prison compounds or detention centres. Any day now this will be a world where the billions of dollars spent on armaments are diverted to feeding, clothing, housing, teaching, and healing the peoples of the world. Any day now this will be a world where all are neighbours and every individual in treated as intrinsically precious.
But how do we wait? As we begin this Advent season, we cannot wait passively, and simply let things come to us. As people of God, I believe that if we desperately want, nay need, the world to change, we need to be part of actively trying to make a difference? Our waiting cannot be a cynical one of ‘well, that will never happen’. Rather, our call is to be an expectant ‘any day now!’ Advent calls us to wait with hope instead of despair. Faith calls us to trust in the promise expressed best by Julian of Norwich 600 years ago: “All will be will, all will be well, all manner of things be well.” We wait for the changing of the world in ways big and small. We wait for peace, for justice, for good news, for the announcement of liberation and salvation for all people. In days to come, all shall be well.
Amen.
This past week, I must admit it came as a near complete surprise to see any degree of movement towards a peace deal in the Middle East. Nothing has happened for the past seven years, and even someone as optimistic as I am, was getting rather jaded. I am a junkie when it comes to international politics, I follow the news, I try to keep on top of things, looking for trends, and comparing it to past experience.
And then suddenly, surprisingly, there comes this conference in Annapolis, Maryland, where bitter opponents came together for one simple reason: to talk. Nothing more, no grand schemes, no magic wand, no sudden “poof!” and it’s all solved… Nothing like that. It’s simply a commitment to talk to each other, and to keep talking to each other for a minimum of every two weeks. Nothing big… really… and it almost seems to be too good to be true…
Yes it is tantamount to lighting a single candle in what has felt to be a rather dark period in recent history. It was a glimmer of hope… and oddly coincidental, as it happened just as we begin the season of Advent. It is something to hope for, in days to come…
Advent is as season that we’re not really all that comfortable with. We don’t like waiting. The decorations are already up, and the carols are all ringing up and down the hallways of shopping centers, in radio broadcasts, television commercials, and internet ads… As far as they’re concerned, we’ve long since been in the season of Christmas. Yet Advent, this time of anticipation, is really something different. It’s about that anticipation of something that is coming, that has not been fully realized. It is not a coincidence that Advent is like that anticipation and expectation of the birth of a child, particularly in those last weeks and days. I think that’s something that most of us can relate to… (Right Laura?)
Life today seems like a mix between rushing and waiting. We hurry to get to doctors appointments on time, only to have to sit and wait for our name to be called. We rush to airports, and train stations only to wait in line. And this time of year, we hurry off to Christmas sales (or returns) and again we wait…
But in Advent we talk about a different kind of waiting. It’s a time in which we slow down, take stock of our lives, and prepare. It’s also a time of expectant longing, where there is hope of fulfilment. In Advent we wait for the world to be changed.
Sometimes it is difficult to wait. And sometimes, it is hard to look towards the future with any kind of positive feelings; to find reasons to hope at all. We often wonder if the future will be a nightmare. Will the days to come be another depiction of a desolate and forsaken land? Will the future hold images of more destruction, more death? These days, it is hard to hope. It is hard to wait, knowing that the world may never be changed to what it should be.
In contrast to this, our first reading for this morning is Isaiah’s vision of hope, his prophetic dream of the future. This is a promise from God full of hope, and full of expectation. It is a vision of the new age that is promised to the people of Judah and Jerusalem...
The vision seems too good to be true... and perhaps it is. The people of Isaiah’s time refused to accept God’s dream of hope. The rest of the second chapter of Isaiah tells of the choices that Judah and Jerusalem made. They chose not to travel to the mountain of God...they did not make any moves towards being a people of peace. They made the choice not to actively wait in hope, nor did they help to usher it in. As a people, they chose to ignore the ways of God.
But the vision of hope that Isaiah proclaims is the focus of today’s Old Testament lesson. It speaks of hope, and of peace. It speaks of longing, of waiting expectantly for a time when God’s ways would be our ways. It’s important as we hear Isaiah’s prophecy that we remember that this is not a ‘once-upon-a-time’ kind of story, nor is it a fairy tale. It doesn’t look back at the past with rose-coloured glasses, dreaming of things that happened long ago, in a time far away. Isaiah’s vision is different: it’s a ‘in the days to come’ kind of story. This is a vision of hope of a new age, an age pregnant with possibility and rich with promise. This dream is about stuff that is going to happen any day now, in the not-so-distant future... if only we will wait expectantly, if only we will travel to the mountain, and help to usher in God’s peace amongst us...
The words from Isaiah are familiar… we even heard them as recently as Remembrance Day.
He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
It is a timeless hope, but not a vain one. We get glimpses of hope realized, that somehow we are slowly, but surely moving to this day of peace dimly shining before us. The trouble is, it gets hard, when we know there are generals making plans, that companies still fashion new and even more destructive weapon systems.
Yet as this recent meeting last week reminds us, we now live in an age in history that for the most part, nations actually negotiate with their disagreements more than they fight. During the 20th Century, the tolerance that populations have for war has shifted dramatically. The world as a whole has been far more stable than it ever has been in previous centuries. Yes, conflict and war are still there… but so are these glimpses of peace.
He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
If we listen to those words again. It’s the word shall that gets our attention. It appears again and again! Five times that word appears. Some teachers remind us that “shall” is the strongest word in our language. Shall gives place to no doubts, no conditions for the occurrence, no room for alternate views. Shall means it will absolutely come to pass.
For us, the Advent hope is that this shall be in days to come. We may want to fix a date, we may want to have goals met, and timetables followed… but that’s not the way it works. Advent hope is that sense of looking forward, to have this as a goal to work towards, to trust that in God it will indeed unfold, but to know that we are not yet there. What we do have are glimpses, small little movements, that in retrospect add up to something far larger than we realize. Despite the notable exceptions we hear of in the news… be it Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur… on the whole nations are not lifting up swords against nation… something that would have been almost incomprehensible one hundred years ago… Even so, we’re not “there” yet. We still have a long way to go. God still calls us to that hope in days to come.
The passage from Isaiah talks about a changed world. In present day language, his powerful words might read something like this:
They shall turn their bombers into flying hospitalsand their warships into food freighters;nation shall not fire rocket against nationneither shall they train armies any more.
We, like the people of Judah and Jerusalem, are hungry for hope and longing for peace. This world has been waiting for a time where Arab and Jew and Palestinian live as sisters and brothers. As Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said this week about the peace process in the Middle East, "It is time for the circle of blood, violence and occupation to end. It is time for us to look at the future together with confidence and hope. It is time for this tortured land that has been called the land of love and peace to live up to its name."
Any day now, this will be a world where there is no longer need for armies or secret police, no more prison compounds or detention centres. Any day now this will be a world where the billions of dollars spent on armaments are diverted to feeding, clothing, housing, teaching, and healing the peoples of the world. Any day now this will be a world where all are neighbours and every individual in treated as intrinsically precious.
But how do we wait? As we begin this Advent season, we cannot wait passively, and simply let things come to us. As people of God, I believe that if we desperately want, nay need, the world to change, we need to be part of actively trying to make a difference? Our waiting cannot be a cynical one of ‘well, that will never happen’. Rather, our call is to be an expectant ‘any day now!’ Advent calls us to wait with hope instead of despair. Faith calls us to trust in the promise expressed best by Julian of Norwich 600 years ago: “All will be will, all will be well, all manner of things be well.” We wait for the changing of the world in ways big and small. We wait for peace, for justice, for good news, for the announcement of liberation and salvation for all people. In days to come, all shall be well.
Amen.
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