ADVENT 1

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: ADVENT 1
PROPER: A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: December 2, 2001

TEXT: Isaiah 2:1-5 (6-9 explains world situation.)
Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob: that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

ISSUE: Isaiah addressed a very complicated world, not at all unlike our own. It was a time of impending war and destruction. It was a time when Judah and Israel’s faith was more perfunctory than genuine. Wealth and paganism prevailed at the expense of the poor. Isaiah saw an impending doom, coupled with hope that a remnant would remain and a new age of God would come. People would flow back to the holy city of Jerusalem like a river. In a time of great anxiety, hope in God’s love prevails.
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I would like to direct our attention today, and for all of the Advent Season to the passages from Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah and the Hebrew Book of Isaiah is quite articulate concerning the time in which it was written, and it has some very vivid imagery. Actually the book is not written entirely by one person named Isaiah, as the book covers an extensive period of the time. The first 35 Chapters may well be the work of the person Isaiah. The following Chapters may well be the work of continuing disciples or a school of thought following Isaiah’s thinking. But the Book clearly sees the times for what they were. The Jewish nation was facing a time of impending doom, and Isaiah recognized a need for transformation of God’s people. The Book is also rich in hope and expectations that God would not abandon his people, but would bring about a Messianic age of hopefulness.
Isaiah was himself probably a part of the upper class, living some 700 years before the birth of Christ. He lived in an age of significant affluence in the Jewish nation of Judah where the city of Jerusalem was the capital city. Isaiah’s observation was that the wealth of the upper classes was largely the result of injustice and oppression of the poor. Peasants were evicted from their lands to make room for larger land holdings and fine manor homes. Injustice often breeds by its nature a significant amount of violence. The national life was one of self-complacency and pride in its military strength, wealth, and luxury. Foreign influence along with their pagan gods had influenced both the peasant class, and rich class. They bowed down to them. The nation’s religious faith in Yahweh, The One God of Israel and Judah, had become perfunctory and formal, but lacking in genuine relationship. Judah became more trusting in their own strength and accomplishments than in its trust and dependence upon God.
Isaiah could not forget God (Yahweh). His mission was to call them back to returning to their allegiance to God. “In returning and rest you shall be saved.” (30:15) Again and again the people were not good at listening, and the nation met with desolation and exile into foreign nations. However, Isaiah’s message is not all doom and he gave hope that in return to God, a remnant would be saved. He even named his son, She’ar Yashub, meaning “A Remnant Shall Remain.”
When we look at various stages in history, it is interesting that there do seem to be various time when it appears that in certain ways history is repeating itself, running in cycles. Let me read to you just a few of the passages of Isaiah the follow immediately after the passage read this morning. This reading is taken from Eugene Patterson’s book, The Message, The Old Testament Prophets: (Isa. 2:6-9)
God, you’ve walked out on your family Jacob because their world is full of hokey religion,
Philistine witchcraft, and pagan hocus-pocus, a world rolling in wealth,
Stuffed with things, no end to is machines and gadgets,
And gods – gods of all sorts and sizes.
These people make their own gods and worship what they make.
A degenerate race, facedown in the gutter. Don’t bother with them! They’re not worth forgiving.
That’s very dramatic language for Isaiah’s time, but it may be somewhat descriptive of our own time. We are living in a pretty affluent time, when we know that there is often a growing separation between the wealthy and the poor. We are living in a time when people are becoming more and more enamored with the electronic things and computerized gadgets: cell phones, electric doors, lap-tops so we can work everywhere at all times, incredibly sized home TV’s, DVD’s, CD’s, and all kinds of stuff and toys to entertain us and our children. We’ve also seen growing interest in witchcraft and new age paraphernalia, and religions that lead people to suicide adventures, and empty exercises in hocus-pocus. So many of these things become what we rely upon for our life’s satisfaction.
Unfortunately we probably have more baptized Christians that are not inactively involved in the life and the mission of Christ’s church than are active and genuinely involved in their own spiritual development, and deep personal relationship with God through their love for Jesus Christ. Serious involvement and learning in the way of God does not come easy in a very secular world that is affluent and self-complacent. Finding peace with in and with God is hard.
Certainly one of the foremost issues of our time is how do we accomplish the mission of peace without war. The world, our nation included, seems to be invested in finding peace through violence. We have come to trust almost primarily in our weaponry and power as our strength and our ultimate salvation. We’ve come to find that nuclear power may well be our ultimate destruction. We’ve also come to find that military power and sophisticated weaponry is not quite so powerful against biological weapons like anthrax and germ warfare. The subtly of terror inflicts not just bodily harm, but fear, uncertainty, anxiety. Living frightened and fearful is not a pleasant way to live. Yet the world in its need to serve its own interests refuses to let go, to be transformed into something more hopeful. The world at times seems almost cartoon like. We powerfully truly to stamp out evil over here, and it pops up over there, time and again. We cannot find the way to lasting peace in spite of all our trampling down of others.
In our personal lives as well there is great difficulty in finding last peaceful relationships. So many folk battle one another, battle spouses, battle children. We find it hard in our pride to forgive, to change, to repent, to love sacrificially without reward. It is hard, very hard to heal the wounds and assuage the pain of so many of our human relationships. We really do need a savior. We really do need God in a meaningful and intense way: “A degenerate race, face down in the gutter. Don’t bother with them. They’re not worth deserve forgiving,” says the pessimistic side of Isaiah. Our world and our lives need to be reclaimed in a despairing and violent world. We need real meaning restored to what it means to be a human, a lover of one another, steeped in brotherhood and sisterhood, and in a relationship with a God that sustains us in being God’s own faithful people with purpose.
Isaiah had a vision, a hope, a dream, a vision from God:
There’s a day coming when the House of the Lord will be on a high mountain, and all nations will see it. All nations will be a like a river flowing up hill to God’s mountain. People will say, “Let’s climb God’s mountain.” God will show us the way he works and would have us do things, so we can live the way we are supposed to live. God will show us the way to peace, and how to beat swords and spears, our hatred and weaponry into plows and bulldozers so we can rebuild a fallen world. No more will nation fight nation, and persons try to humiliate and destroy one another. We won’t play war no more!
Who will lead us up the mountain to the house of God? Who will lead the way? Who will be our messianic hope for deliverance? God we need a savior to lead us back to you. Send us a savior, Lord! Help us to reclaim the savior and live each day as if he were due to arrive any moment. Come Lord Jesus and lead us to the Kingdom of God.