The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
December 9, 2007

2 Advent – A
Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12

In the days of the prophet Isaiah the world was a mess. The Assyrians had driven the people of Israel into exile and slavery, and they were threatening to do the same with Judah.

But there will be a new king, says the Prophet. One will come 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 where 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 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,” insists Jonathan Kozol in his book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. [What I have seen] 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 fifty 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].”

The real world is a man weeping over his brother’s casket in Baghdad. The real world is the wilderness of shopping malls that have us in their grip, where we shop ‘til we drop as if that were the meaning of our lives and where, at the Westroads Mall this week, a young man who could find no meaning in life ultimately sought it at the business end of a rifle. The real world is the wilderness of Baghdad and the South Bronx and Omaha and Colorado Springs.

John the Baptist was witness to the real world in his day. John the Baptist’s preaching was the kind of preaching that Walter Rauschenbusch argued is the only kind of preaching worth doing – preaching “with no sword but the truth.” “Indeed,” Rauschenbusch said, “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 Terrorist’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 because you’ve been circumcised and all that. You’ve got to prove your repentance by the fruit you bear!” he roared.

William Willimon tells about attending a funeral for the relative of one his parishioners when he was a young Methodist pastor. It was held at a small independent Baptist church in North Georgia. “It’s too late for Sam!“ the preacher shouted. “Sam might have wanted to do something different with his life, but it’s too late for him now. It’s all over for him. He doesn’t get another chance. But it ain’t too late for you,” he said. “People drop dead every day. Why wait? Today is the day. Repent! Make your life count for something. Give your life to Jesus! You never know what tomorrow may hold. Repent today!”

In the car on the way home, Willimon told his wife, ”That was terrible. I would never do that to a grieving family. That had to be the most inappropriate, tacky funeral sermon I’ve ever heard.” ”You’re right,” agreed his wife. “Of course,” she added, ”the worst part is: It was true.”

The vocation of the prophet is to raise questions about the assumptions people make and to point us to the truth. You assume you’re OK because you’ve been baptized and confirmed and go to church once in a while and get double gold stars when it snows? I tell you, there is more to it than that, said John, whose prophetic word was a kind of religious terrorist witness designed to get the attention of the people in the pews and to terrorize everyone with a martini in his hand at the Christmas party.

The job of the prophet is to question the assumptions we make as a people. The job of the prophet, as Tom Long reminds us, is to call us to repent. But the repentance John the Baptist calls us to is not just a “mid-course correction” of our personal behavior, says Long. “It is more radical than that.... The repentance John preached calls for us [to look at the truth, to look squarely at our world – at our lives, at our cities, at our nations and their governments – to look at ourselves as we really are before we assume that ‘I’m OK and you’re OK.’ It calls for us] to look behind before we look ahead. It calls for us to encounter the past we have lived, but have not fully experienced, the past we have inherited but not inhabited, before we [dare to] enter a future we do not yet comprehend.” John calls us to come to grips with the depth of our lostness in the wilderness of our nations, our cities, and our lives so that we can know the truth about our possibilities for the future.

Given the tone of John’s message, one might assume that in the messed up real world we live in there is no hope. But that also is an assumption, an assumption that it’s the job of the prophet also 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, the one 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 mess we’ve made of the world, 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 Baghdad and the Bronx and Omaha and Colorado Springs, 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. This world is destined only for more “nature, tooth, and claw,” more survival of the most powerful, and more random acts of violence signifying nothing, they say, so the vision of a day when lambs and wolves will dwell together is pretty stupid.

It does seem stupid, of course, until we question our own assumptions. And the job of the prophet is to question even his own assumptions. And the question Isaiah and John the Baptist ask us today, as they asked those in their own day, is this: Is what we see on our streets every day all there is? Is a larger and more vivid “tooth and claw” world for tomorrow the only alternative to the news we watched on TV last night?

And the answer of the prophet is, ”No! No, there is more. One will come 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.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., began one of his sermons with this Advent offering: “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 in Germany during World War II 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 Delp was arrested by the Nazis, of course, because he had a vision of a different world, a vision of reality different from the “tooth and claw” nightmare of fascism.

In prison Father Delp, too, wrote of Advent. “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. 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. Martin Luther King 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 political poll, things that blow major holes in our assumptions about what is real and important and meaningful and possible.

Gardner Taylor, now eighty-nine years old, was known as “the dean of the nation’s black preachers” during the second half of the past century. He was a behind-the-scenes colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., and an influential Baptist preacher who served the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn for forty-two years. (Can you imagine putting up with the same group of sinners for over forty years?) Anyway, a younger preacher, who hoped to learn from the older Taylor, once asked him how many “points” a sermon should have. ”At least one,” Taylor said.

And the point of this sermon is this: There is hope. In fact, as St. Paul says, “everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope.” And, with the world in the mess it’s in, it makes all the difference in the world which hope we are willing to repent and work for.

Isaiah and John the Baptist offer us different world, a world ruled not by crafty politicians or tough generals, but a world led by a little child. It is a ridiculous notion.

“It is a ridiculous thing,” said Martin Luther. “It is a ridiculous thing that the one true God, the high Majesty of the universe, should be made human.” It is a ridiculous thing that a little child shall lead us. Such a vision blows major holes in our assumptions.

Why not just follow the powerful and the rich of the world instead, with their seductive gods that glitter, their awesome gods that roar like lions, and their fearsome gods that breathe fire like volcanoes? “Yes, that is an option,” the prophets agree, “but the problem is that year after dreary political year those gods fail us.”

For that reason alone our eyes and ears and hearts and minds must be fixed elsewhere, if we are to find the God who can save us. Our eyes and ears must be fixed on Bethlehem. 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, and the poetry of John the Evangelist, where divine love takes human form. We need the music of the soul that can lead us away from the iron shackles of hopelessness that would break 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 Baghdad and Omaha 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 of Bethlehem 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. 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.

There is hope, the prophet and the apostle remind us, and with the world in the mess it’s in, it makes all the difference in the world which hope we are willing to repent and work for. And that is why, in our exile in our day, we refuse to sing the dirge of despair, and we sing, instead, the song of Advent: “Come, O come, Emmanuel.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.