The Season for Promises

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

'Tis the season for prophecy. For the truth of God, spoken into the mess and beauty of human life to change us, challenge us, strengthen and inspire us.

Advent is a time for steeping ourselves in prophecy – in the promises and vision and challenge of God – because that’s how we learn what we’re supposed to be expectantly waiting for at the coming of God into the world. The Advent season is for immersing ourselves in God’s promises so that we truly look forward to those promises being fulfilled, both in God made flesh at Christmas and in the final coming of the reign of God.

That’s why I love the hymns we sing at this time of year: so many of them are the promises of God – the words of the prophets – set to music that gets those hopes and expectations rhythmically into my body and mind. Others might read and re-read and pray the words of the prophets found in our Advent Sunday readings and daily devotionals, or experience prophecy in art or actions like the outpouring of giving.

However you do it, this is the season for immersion in the promises, and it’s easy to love the healed and holy world presented to us by Isaiah this morning: that famous image of the wolf dwelling with the lamb – the “peaceable kingdom” where all the predators and the domestic animals live safely together and snakes no longer bite. It’s a promise of freedom from the fear of death and danger, freedom from the need to protect ourselves against a violent, unpredictable, hungry world that will snatch away what we love and depend on.

Sign me up!

And that’s only half the vision. The promise starts with the healing of our political, social reality: the promise of a nation, a world, ruled by God’s perspective, not a human one. Governed by wisdom and holy strength, equity and generous justice, instead of cronyism, competition and selfishness. 

What a relief that would be!

And the wicked will be destroyed. That’s a promise that you and I will be able to interact with anyone without the dangers of being abused, robbed, cheated, abandoned, or maliciously embarrassed.

It’s also a warning against doing any of that ourselves, of course – but it’s easier to be honest and generous when you don’t have to defend yourself against threats from others!

God doesn’t just promise to create a safe natural world, or a safe human world. It has to be both, because we can’t separate ourselves from our environment, or the environment from us. (We try, but we truly can’t!)

It’s a promise I want to long for, but that I actually discount a lot in my daily life, and I bet I’m not the only one who doesn’t live all the time like the promises of God are right here and now.

You see, like many of you, I have a lifetime of training in how to live in a world that is dangerous and untrustworthy. I’m better equipped to fiercely protect my credit card number and seek out “safe” neighborhoods than to openly trust strangers or even neighbors. You’re probably better equipped to practice skepticism about all political statements or protect your children than to camp out in the lion enclosure at the zoo or believe our next election will bring holy unity and prosperity.

Almost all our everyday decisions – from automatic ones about seatbelts and lights to life decisions about marriage, family, careers, and homes are shaped consciously or invisibly by the un-peaceable kingdom: the messy, often evil, violent everyday world that betrays us with loss, disease, disasters, and selfishness so routinely that we automatically protect ourselves. So that we shape ourselves to live with dangerous wolves and unreliable rulers, which makes us misfits in God’s world of gentle vegetarian lions and righteous, trustworthy governance.

And that is what John challenges us to change.
It’s how he challenged the people who came out to meet him in the Jordan wilderness:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!

Change. Change your heart and mind and soul and self so that you can live in the peaceable kingdom, so that you conform to the world of God’s healing, instead of cooperating with and defending ourselves from the sometimes malicious, sometimes indifferent, generally untrustworthy world we’re used to.

Repent!
John isn’t telling us to feel guilty. He’s telling us to actively, positively, turn away from all the ways we compromise with an untrustworthy, unhealthy environment.

Those compromises vary from person to person. Buying a home security system, or planning work and activities around the needs of a resume, college or professional, are ways some of us defend against the hungry world when the completeness of God’s care doesn’t seem practical and real. Others may compromise with the common evil of the world by neglecting to vote, or not paying attention to injustices that don’t touch me personally. Some of us walk with our keys between our fingers at night, keep our hands in plain sight, or routinely hide our true selves – making these painful compromises of our freedom and trust because that’s how we get along with a dangerous world.

Many of those things do keep us safer in the un-peacable world, but they also shape our hearts and minds to discount God’s promises, to protect ourselves from the vulnerability of actively expecting the peaceable, righteous, world of God here and now.

That’s why “all Judea” were confessing their sins with John at the Jordan: the compromises to not get in trouble with the Roman government, to protect your sheep a little more than your neighbor’s, to get what you can from the boss, the marriage, the market before somebody else cheats…
They were naming the distrusts and self-protections they – we – have to let go of in order to freely long for God’s promises with all our hearts, and to be able to fully live in the holy world of God when those promises are fulfilled around us.

John is calling us to pro-actively change our habits of defensive self-interest, or cautious fear and anxiety, into habits of courageous trust.

But letting go of all those mostly unconscious defenses and self-interest is incredibly nerve-racking. It’s a profound and counter cultural change.

Like the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to John, we may be tempted to fall back on these things tha have kept us safe and strong in the un-peaceable world.

It’s difficult. But there’s another promise so many of us have already received that makes it possible.

Do you remember how we pray at each baptism for
an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love [God], and the gift of joy and wonder in all [God’s] works.

And did you know that the roots of that prayer go right back to the words of Isaiah we heard today? That the gifts you and I are given by the Spirit in baptism are, at root, the wisdom and understanding, the holy strength and trust, the full experience of the reality of God that are what enable Isaiah’s envisioned ruler, the shoot of Jesse’s tree, to see with God’s eyes, hear with God’s ears, and lead a whole world of righteousness, of free, secure and trusting relationship with God; generous, selfless justice and equity. And defeat the wicked with a breath.

The kingdom may not have fully come yet, but God already gives us everything we need to live the life of the healed world.

So join me this Advent in steeping yourself in the promises, the prophets, the truth of God’s righteous and holy world spoken into the noise and anxious danger of our human world.

Sing those promises with me. Or read them and pray them. Use Advent devotionals, or Christmas carols and movies, or the songs of secular artists who sing a vision of a healed world. Act those promises into your life with the practices on the Wayof Love Advent calendar and the lighting of candles in the darkness. Look for the gifts of the spirit already given in your life: for holy strength and courage, wisdom and the experience of awe and the vibrant presence of God, especially when you don’t think you have them.

Steep yourself in prophecy and promise until that longing to fully experience the promises of God without limit leads your heart and soul into John’s invitation of repentance, into the courage and trust and change that makes us whole.