Preparing our eyes to see

 

Text: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44

Can you imagine a world in which all the nations took their weapons and turned them into tools to be distributed to everyone so that they could grow food for themselves and for the world?  

A world in which feeding all the people everywhere was more important than fighting, patrolling borders and taking prisoners, amassing wealth and treasure, shooting people in schools and stores and clubs and movie theaters and houses of worship, blowing things up and tearing things down?  

Can you imagine how many farming tools there would be in the world if all the weapons, the tanks and guns and bombs, were so converted?  Can you imagine people actually doing that?  

The prophet Isaiah imagines that. Isaiah who is no blithe Pollyanna, no stranger to the horrors of war, of the destruction that ruins the land and snuffs out the lives of people and leaves the landscape desolate and unproductive. Isaiah has envisioned all of that and spelled it out quite graphically in many chapters and verses to all who would hear.  

But Isaiah also sees the world as God would have it, where, as we will hear him say soon, the lion will lie down with the lamb and a little child will lead them. He sees possibility of a world of peace, a place where all people strive enthusiastically to learn God's ways. Isaiah has envisioned God's people streaming into the woods and caves and holes in the ground, terrified, to get away from horrible destruction and now he lyrically describes them streaming eagerly toward God in great throngs.

Advent is upon us, the time when we stand somewhere in the middle and look toward the end, toward the time when Jesus will return in glory and all things will be made right, and also we look toward the beginning again, the birth of the baby and the time when Jesus came to live among us to show us God's love.

Those who read Jesus' words in Matthew today and imagine it to be the beginning of some kind of bloodbath haven't read Isaiah. The vision Isaiah has of the time when all things are made right is not about some kind of holy war or tribulation or intrigue, or gangs of insiders taking out the bad guys. That’s Herod’s MO, not the way of Jesus.

It's about peace and about all of God's people being fed both physically and spiritually - being made whole, having what they need.  About a time when no one is hungry either for food or for dignity, no one is dying, no one is being shoved aside by the powerful, no children are suffering abuse or starving, and no one is being stalked and killed and maimed.  

How does one prepare then, during Advent, for something so unbelievably incredibly wonderful and sublime as God coming to live among us so that peace will reign and all might have life abundant? We frankly can't even imagine such a thing for more than a few minutes before the vision disintegrates and disappears into the broken chaos that is our world. And these things seem very far away from us, either in a distant past or a distant future.

But I think we are wrong simply to imagine ourselves living in some kind of religious no-man's land, where nothing is really happening in terms of God's coming to us. If Jesus came long ago, and will come again far in the future to transform the world into something radically different than it is now, is there really just nothing doing in the meantime? What does God have to do with us - and what do we have to do with God - if we are just part of a vast middle time in between, so that Jesus is just a memory and the glory of God transforming the world into the New Heaven and New Earth is just a dream - as is the vision of sword beaten into plowshares and not studying war any more?

I believe that God comes to us often during this middle time in between. But God is hard to see - because God’s work looks like something else. Jesus looked like a little Jewish baby born to a teenaged mother in a back alley. God's angels who visited Abraham and Sarah to announce the impending birth of their son looked like three guys on a road trip. God's covenant with all of the earth, the people and the animals and earth as well, looked like a rainbow.  

And so I think that during this Advent time of preparation we need to prepare our eyes to see what God is doing in the world. We need to prepare our eyes to recognize God's work beneath the commonplace. To see a covenant within the rainbow, to see the hope of the world in a feeding trough. We need to prepare our eyes to be able to see those swords that have already been beaten into plowshares.  

So, if we are to focus on how and when God comes to us in our own world and in our own time, we must be awake, as Jesus warns us. We must be alert and watchful. We need to remember that the coming of God to us is always surprising, always unexpected, to be found in places one would not normally look. We must train our eyes to see and our hearts to wonder and our minds to allow for new things, unimaginable things, things as huge as tanks morphing into trees full of ripe fruit, things as tiny as a babe in arms.  

To see love, to imagine peace, to look for and experience God's goodness in the face of the world's debilitating, pervasive, corrosive fear-mongering that is the stuff of Herod and not Jesus.  

And then to show it to others. To show that love, to tell of our experience, to speak about our own longings and imaginings that include the wellbeing of people in the face of a world that wants to demonize, castigate, and exclude, and as we see every single tragic week, to lash out in murderous hatred.  

Yes, it is Advent and we are preparing. But we don’t have to wait to walk in the light now. Let us stream to the mountain now, let us envision dignity and inclusion now, let us speak against fear-mongering now, let us look for God now, let us take hold of Isaiah's vision and make it our own in the face of hopelessness and cynicism now. Because we are the people to carry hope into the world now, wearing the beautiful armor of Advent light.

So let's carry that light and let's watch, and learn to see, and pray this prayer every day as we begin a new year, Come Lord Jesus, Come.