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In the days of the prophet Isaiah the world was a mess. The Assyrians had conquered the people of Israel and had driven them into exile and slavery, and they were threatening to do the same with the people of Judah. But a new king will come, says Isaiah, one upon whom the spirit of the Lord will rest. And in that day "the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the young lion and the yearling together, and a little child shall lead them." Is he kidding? Everyone knows that in the real world when a wolf and a lamb get together the result is always lunch! And a little child will lead us? How could a child possibly lead when presidents and kings and the generals at the Pentagon can't seem to do so? Isaiah must not have known much about the real world. The real world is nothing but "nature, tooth, and claw," "survival of the fittest," and random acts of violence signifying nothing. The real world is the man in Baghdad weeping over his brother's casket in yesterday's newspaper. The real world is crushing poverty in places like the South Bronx. Real life is young mothers with AIDS who are shuttled between insensitive bureaucracies, and children on their way to an early death in the urban wilderness of crime, drugs, and abandonment. "What I have seen in [the South Bronx] and similar neighborhoods for thirty years isn't a misfortune that happened by mistake," Jonathan Kozol says in his book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. It is injustice that has been created by people, who are responsible for it. Kozol was as an idealistic young teacher in Boston's inner-city when he wrote his first book forty or so years ago. In those days, he says, he thought people would read his book and say, "'Separate and unequal schools? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.' I thought the problem was lack of knowledge. Now I think it's lack of will. Now, I don't expect what I write to change things. I write simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted [to happen. This is the real world]." John the Baptist was a witness to the real world in his day. John the Baptist's preaching was the kind of preaching that Walter Rauschenbusch argues is the only kind of preaching worth doing - preaching "with no sword but the truth." "Indeed," Rauschenbusch says, "may we [Christians] preach so truthfully that people will call us terrorists. If you preach that way you will never again have to worry about whether a sermon is 'meaningful.'" "You brood of vipers!" That was the gentle opening line of John the Baptist's sermon to the good church people coming to him for baptism. "Your world is a mess, and it's you who have made it that way. And don't think you please God just because your granddaddy was Abraham and you've been circumcised and all that. You've got to prove your repentance by the fruit you bear!" said John the Terrorist. The vocation of the prophet is to raise questions about the assumptions people make. You assume you're OK because you've been circumcised? You assume you're right with God because you've been baptized and confirmed and go to church once in a while? I tell you, there is more to it than that, said John, whose prophetic word was a kind of terrorist witness that was designed to get the attention of the person in the pew, just as Kozol's witness to the mess in the streets of our nation today ought to get the attention of every armchair reader with a martini at his elbow. The job of the prophet is to raise questions about the assumptions people make. And one might assume that in the messed up real world we live in there is no hope for anything better. But that also is an assumption that it's the job of the prophet to question... ...and so later, when John was in prison for preaching like a terrorist to King Herod about the way that king had messed up the world in his day, John sent his own disciples to Jesus to ask, "Are you, Jesus, the one we are to hope for? Are you the one Isaiah spoke of, the one upon whom the spirit of the Lord will rest, the one who will give us a new dream, a new vision, a new life? Are you the one who will not judge by outward appearances and who will defend the poor of the land with equity, the one who will strike down the ruthless and raise up the humble? Are you the one who will bring the kingdom Isaiah spoke about, where 'the wolf will lie down with the lamb?' Are you the child who will lead us, or are we to hope for someone else?" Given the messed up world we live in, what are we to hope for? Given the messed up world of Israel in the time of Isaiah, with half the people already in slavery in Assyria; given the messed up world of Herod and Pilate, with the Romans and the shysters in charge and the poor and the weak on the run; given the messed up world of the South Bronx and Baghdad and Colorado Springs; given the real world of Jonathan Kozol's experience and ours, what is in store for us? What are we to expect? What is there to hope for? One might assume - some do - that there is no hope. If this world is destined for nothing but "nature, tooth, and claw," survival of the most powerful, and random acts of violence signifying nothing, then the vision of a day when lambs and wolves will dwell together seems pretty stupid. It does seem stupid, of course, until we question our own assumptions. Toward the end of his life, Sigmund Freud debated with himself what he called The Future of an Illusion. The illusion Freud was referring to was God, the illusion of a supernatural being as a source of truth and moral authority. Freud was not debating whether God exists, but whether mankind could survive without the illusion of God. He was debating whether human beings wouldn't fare better - psychologically, culturally, and morally - without the illusion of God rather than with it. In the end, for Freud, the voice of empiricism and reason wins the debate. Human beings may or may not fare better without God than with God, he concluded, but we must do without God because the world of reason, the world of empirical science, is the only real world we have. But I wonder. I wonder if Freud's conclusion is not really just an assumption of his own, an assumption about what is real and what is not that simply leads to a new illusion, an assumption, which, if not challenged, leads to the illusion that science is a dependable source of truth and moral authority and cultural health. That is the illusion of our day - that science alone can help us see what is real and important and meaningful, that only science can reveal to us the "real" truth about the world and lead us to the "real" truth about the meaning of life. Science is the idol of the twenty-first century. God as an old man with a long white beard and his priests in the temple have been replaced by men and women in long white coats. This is why Ronald Reagan could say, while the rest of us stood by offering no objection, that he personally believed abortion is wrong, but that we must leave it to science to tell us when a fetus becomes a human being. We stand silent because the illusion we now live with is that science is god, and that the world and the visions that science gives us are the only real world and the only meaningful visions. I don't want to be misunderstood. I value science; I know science is important. Science tells us much that is important about the way God's world works. Science can point us to the origins of the universe and to the nature of disease. Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat and what the statistics of survival are for a fetus at a certain stage in its development. But science by itself has no more moral authority than you or I do to declare such criteria to be the definition of human life, anymore than a government, any government, including our own, has the moral authority to claim its own legitimacy and then demand our obedience based upon its own unchallenged claim. To ask either science or government to decide the meaning of life for us is not to live in a real moral world at all, but to live in a world of moral fantasy, in a world that lives with the illusion that science or government alone possess either the authority or the wisdom to define what is real and what is important or meaningful. If Freud had framed his question differently, if, like the prophets, he had questioned his own assumptions, he might have arrived at a different answer. The question he might have asked, but didn't, the question the prophet asks, the question an Isaiah or a John the Terrorist might ask in our day, is this: Given the vision of science or the vision of emperors, on the one hand, and the vision of God on the other... ...given a vision that provides nothing beyond a clinical description of a messed up world, on the one hand, and a vision of hope on the other... ...given a vision that provides no alternative to "tooth and claw" except more and larger teeth and claws... ...which, would you say, is more likely to serve us better, and which more likely to prove the more deadly? It makes all the difference, doesn't it, what sort of world and what sort of God we believe we have. The basic question is not whether God exists, but what sort of God we have. Martin Luther King, Jr., began one of his sermons with this Advent offering drawn from the Bible: "At the center of the Christian faith is the conviction that in the universe there is a God of power who is able to do exceedingly abundant things in nature and history." (Strength to Love, 1963) It makes all the difference in this messed up world whether we believe that. Alfred Delp believed it. Delp was a priest who was member of a group of Germans who dared to think and talk about what a new social order might look like after what he believed would be the inevitable collapse of the Nazis. And, of course, he was arrested by the Nazis, because he had a vision of a different world, a vision of reality different from the "tooth and claw" vision of fascism. In prison Father Delp wrote a series of Advent meditations. "Advent," he said, "is a time for rousing. In Advent, human beings are shaken to the very depths of their beings, so that they may wake up to the truth about themselves. The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is a shattering awakening, [a shattering of assumptions that is a necessary preliminary to real life]. Real life begins," Delp claimed from his prison cell, "only when the whole framework is shaken." Imagination such as that was illegal in Nazi Germany, because to the Nazis such imagination amounted to terrorist preaching. Those in power in Berlin could not tolerate people like Father Delp running around loose like an Isaiah or a John the Baptist with a vision of some alternative reality to the collective national delusion. Father Delp noted that Isaiah's time had been very much like his own, a politically hopeless time: "From the imperial throne to the holy of holies, the outlook was hopeless," he recalled. "'Hopeless' - that is the iron shackle with which history often seeks to fetter healing hands, to break the hearts of men and women, and to reduce them to trembling hesitancy, cheap silence, or tired resignation." But "at the center of the Christian faith is the conviction that in the universe there is a God of power who is able to do exceedingly abundant things in nature and history." It makes all the difference in this messed up world whether we believe that. Alfred Delp believed it. John the Baptist believed it. Isaiah believed it. Theirs was a God of hope, a God who can make things happen contrary to all human assumptions, a God whose power can take a messed up world and do lovely and loving things with it and in it, things contrary to reason, things not capable of being understood or defined in a laboratory or political poll, things that blow major holes in our assumptions about what is real and important and meaningful. Isaiah's poetry offers us another world, a world ruled not by crafty politicians or tough generals or men and women in long white coats, but a world led by a little child. It is a ridiculous notion. "It is a ridiculous thing," said Martin Luther, "that the one true God, the high Majesty of the universe, should be made human." Such a vision blows major holes in our assumptions. Reason leads us to look high up into the heavens and low down into the microscope for reality, and there is much that is real and good to be found there. Jonathan Kozol looks at the streets of our cities, and there is much that is distressingly real to be found there. Isaiah and John the Baptist look at the board rooms of our corporations and the priorities of our governments and the arrogance of strident religious fundamentalists, whether Jewish or Muslim or Christian, and there is much that is frighteningly real to be found there as well. But for the reality that can save us in a messed up world, our eyes and ears and hearts and minds must be fixed elsewhere. They must be fixed on Bethlehem, in the manger where the child lies and where, against all odds and contrary to all human assumptions, divine love becomes human flesh in order to lead us away from assumptions that kill us to the reality that can save us. For the reality that can save in a messed up world like ours, we need the poetry of Isaiah, where wolves and lambs are playmates and friends. We need the music of the soul that can lead us away from the iron shackle of hopelessness that breaks the hearts of men and women and reduces us to trembling hesitancy, cheap silence, or tired resignation. "Who could ever have conceived this or thought it out?" asked Luther. "Reason wants to climb to heaven to fathom the divine," he notes, "but reason must bow and confess her ignorance when she cannot see what lies before her eyes in the manger." A little child shall lead them. And, of course, the child does. He leads us from his crib in Bethlehem right through the messed up real world, right through downtown Jerusalem and the South Bronx and Baghdad and Colorado Springs to the reality and vision and hope of the Cross, which is where truth is found - the truth that love is not dependent upon circumstance. It is the child who leads us to Calvary where we discover the most basic truth of life - that what is really important and meaningful can be found and lived even in this most messed up of worlds. Sometimes we cannot understand our messed up world. We cannot understand the wolves that would imprison us or destroy our hope, whether they are the wolves of Assyria or the wolves of Rome or the wolves of modern terrorists in our own streets and of our own making. Sometimes we cannot understand those who would shatter dreams rather than create and share them. But, like Jesus, like the Lamb, we can still love them. And without complete understanding, we can love them completely. Which God would serve us better?1 It makes all the difference what sort of world live in and what sort of God we believe we have. That is why, in our exile in our day, we too sing not the dirge of despair, but the Advent song of hope: "Come, O come, Emmanuel." In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. 1For a fascinating discussion of Freud and this question, see Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992. |