Fitting Into the Round Hole.

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Mathew 3:1-12

December 8, 2019 + Advent 2

I.

The Scripture readings for this Sunday, like those we heard last week, follow a pattern.  The gospel gives us the mess we’re in; the epistle tells us how to live differently now; and the Hebrew Scriptures reveal a vision of God’s Kingdom which is coming.  These readings express again the overarching theme of the season of Advent, which is that we need to get ready because God is coming into our world to transform, heal, and redeem.

We begin with the the gospel account of the ministry of John the Baptizer in the wilderness of Judea.  John’s basic message is to point out that the-world-as-we-know it is messed up.  People have wandered, or been chased, away from the kind of world God wants.  This is not sustainable.  God is therefore coming to set things right.

But we won’t be able to see it, let alone participate in it, unless we repent, which is to say, change our way of thinking and acting now.  We need to change the way we live together so that we are more in tune with God’s vision.  

John is saying that the Kingdom of God is like a round hole into which square pegs will not fit.  At this point, we are all square pegs.  Therefore, we need to use our time now to cut and sand and file down our sharp edges, points, and corners, so that when the time comes we will both see and easily slide into God’s Kingdom.  

Christians have always understood John to be the last of the Hebrew prophets.  He himself intentionally takes on the life-style of the first of the classical Hebrew prophets: Elijah.  He is, for us, the Elijah-figure whose arrival immediately precedes the coming of the promised Messiah.

In effect it has been the ministry of all the prophets to get people to reshape, reform, renew, and revive their lives, recovering the form of social justice and personal righteousness given in the Torah, forming a community of equality and peace in which no one has too little, and no one too much, power or wealth.  The whole message of the Bible is to take the seminal experience of the Hebrew people, God’s liberation of them from slavery in Egypt, as a kind of template for what God intends for all creation, and to live in advance in God’s shalom by following the spirit of the Torah embodied in specific shared values and practices.

The job of the prophets is to appear as living reminders of this revelation.  They sharply and consistently criticize where the nation has fallen short and been corrupted by injustice and inequality.  And most of them also offer a vision of what God intends, as we see in the reading from Isaiah today.

And John does the same thing.  We know from other accounts that John demands that the wealthy give away what they have to those in need, and that powerful people divest themselves of their power.  This indicates again what anyone who has read the writings of the prophets already knows: that the messed-up-ness of the world is mainly economic and political injustice.  Some people have too little because others have taken for themselves too much.

We had better get ourselves in line with God’s plan quickly if we don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the Truth, suffering the fate of the useless chaff, which is to be burned.

II.

In the second reading, the apostle Paul encourages the church in Rome to become a community of inclusive welcome, unity, and hope.  He is concerned that the church, which was of course the center of the Empire, realize among themselves the oneness we now share in Jesus Christ.  

In those days the biggest problem facing the church was the tension between Jews and Gentiles.  Paul is saying that if we don’t get our act together in the church, we have no business trying to evangelize others.  We cannot preach one pattern of life in the world, when we do not inhabit that pattern of life among ourselves.  We cannot say that all are one in Jesus Christ if we are not one with each other in the church.  We cannot offer a witness to the love of God revealed in Jesus, if we hate each other.

For Paul, to fit into the round hole of God’s Kingdom, we have to chip off the self-righteousness that spawns our imaginary divisions.

One of the Great Ends of the Church in our Presbyterian tradition is “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”  That means that when people look at us they should see God’s living Presence in our life together.  They should see, not lock-step uniformity, but a community that has figured out how to respect and celebrate diversity and at the same time affirm a profound and essential oneness with each other and love for each other.  We sing: “And they’ll know we are Christians by our…” what? 

Our rigorous application of theological doctrine?  Our self-righteous bigotry?  Our judgment and exclusion of others?  Our enforcement of racial and gender bias?  Our support for economic injustice?  Our allegiance to particular secular leaders?  Our gauzy nostalgia for “the way things used to be”? 

No.  Our love. 

Churches and denominations fall into division when something other than the love of God in Jesus Christ becomes the most important value for them, when people cling to their own self-righteousness and their own agenda, their own desires and fears, their own external allegiances and loyalties, rather than submit in humility to Jesus Christ together.  

Paul reminds them that the Messiah comes as a humble servant!  He comes among the Jews in order to lift up their specific story of liberated slaves.  And he does this in order to “confirm the promises” given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which anticipate the inclusion of the Gentiles, which is to say, all people, all nations, in God’s coming Kingdom.

Therefore, following him is a matter of submission and obedience to Jesus Christ, and imitation of his life of service and humility.  To emerge into the Kingdom means to sand off your selfish ego, your craving, your encrusted fear, and living into the shape of Jesus.  

III.

Finally, it is the prophet Isaiah who gives us the vision of God's future.  The Messiah will come, and he shall be endued with the Holy Spirit, and he will judge with righteousness on behalf of the poor and the gentle.  

In God’s peaceful Kingdom, Isaiah says, the ultimate division in nature, that between predator and prey, is erased.  And he gives us this amazing picture of various animals getting along in what appear to be unnatural ways.  This picture is so far-fetched that it can cause us to dismiss it as something related to the hopelessly distant and irrelevant, even imaginary, future.  It’s nice; but it will never happen.  

But this picture isn’t really just some idealistic fantasy about the animal world.  In the Bible, animals can be taken as metaphors for different kinds of people.  I mean, the Psalms talk about human bullies as “young lions.”  Jesus sees people as “sheep without a shepherd.”  Even in today’s gospel, John calls the religious leaders a “brood of vipers,” snakes.

In the same way, we might take the non-violence and cooperation that Isaiah sees happening among these various animals to refer to the way people need to treat each other.  With his talk about lions and lambs, leopards and kids, calves and bears, oxen and snakes, he is saying that in God’s Kingdom, the strong will not oppress, exploit, or harm the weak.  He is saying that the rich will not steal and profit from the labor, energy, and productivity of workers.  The powerful will not suck the life out of the powerless.  God’s coming Kingdom will not be a place where some connive to get ever richer and everyone else struggles just to get by.  God’s coming Kingdom is not going to be a jungle of the survival of the strongest.  It will not be run on terror.

It is the same thing that John and Paul have just said in different ways: God’s realm, God’s justice, God’s future, the Kingdom declared to be at hand by Jesus the Messiah, is about cooperation, mutuality, and humility.  It is about the powerful giving up their power, and the powerless not having to fear them anymore.  It is about inhabiting a community of sharing in which those who have give and those who need receive.  This is in fact the model of the early church we see in the book of Acts.

And the most vicious and destructive of all predatory beasts gets represented in Isaiah’s vision as… “a little child.”  In the new, true world of God humans participate, but only as in their most innocent, weak, open, vulnerable, humble, dependent, and gentle state.  Only in wonder and joy do people emerge into God’s Kingdom of shalom.

That’s what the church needs to be: a place of healing and justice, forgiveness and peace, acceptance, welcome, generosity, and delight.

IV.

Of course, in Advent we are awaiting the arrival of a little child.  This child is described by Isaiah as the new, delicate, vulnerable green shoot springing from the old stump of Jesse, the House of David.  It is a veritable miracle, the way something new can emerge from something so old and apparently dead.

We know that child to be Jesus, God’s Son.  He is the One to whom we look to “decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”  He is the One who will establish among and within us this new Kingdom of peace.  He is the One who will bring us together to the place, where there is no more hurting or destroying.

And, as a way of saying the God will be all in all, and that God’s holy life will permeate the whole world, and there will be no separation between creation and Creator, he proclaims that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

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