A Dream of Peace

1st Sunday of Advent - C
Isaiah 2:1-5
November 28, 2010

A Dream of Peace

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the “holiday” shopping season is in full swing. Serious shoppers spent the early hours of Friday morning queued up in lines outside of electronics stores. They didn’t sleep, of course, but if they had they would have dreamed of the latest devices at bargain prices. Christmas musak is playing in the stores and malls. Once again Bing Crosby is “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” According to Clement Moore in his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” sleeping children dream of “sugar plums.” (My suspicion is that Moore didn’t know any actual children. At least I don’t know of any who even know what a sugar plum might be.) Parents dream of successfully steering between failing to please their children on one side and financial ruin on the other. We all dream of finding ten minutes to call our own, a chance to breathe a little, and maybe, just maybe a moment for the kind of spiritual attention we seem to believe the season deserves but seldom gets.

A whole series of industries—retailing, consumer credit, advertising, and manufacturing—is dominated by those who dream of consumers who spend to their limits and beyond. If this year does not exceed the last, their dreams will be dashed and it will all be our fault.

In the meantime the Church has a different dream, a dream as old as the Bible, a dream often-delayed and long-deferred. It is a difficult dream, a demanding dream. But it will not go away. It has haunted us all our lives. It has haunted us for centuries since the days of Jesus, since the days of the prophets.

We shy away from the dream because we believe that it is too hard for us. And besides, we say, it’s Christmas! We have visitors or long-time members whom we have not seen for months—maybe since last Easter—but who have wandered back in. We don’t want to make it harder for them to visit or come back than it already is. It will be hard enough. First-time visitors will have to make their anxious way through the doors, past the greeters and ushers, to find their ways to a seat that doesn’t already “belong” to someone else. This is hard because we don’t label them.

The others, the twenty-year members who are back after long absences, will have to endure greetings from newer members who ask, “Oh, are you new here?”

We’re concerned about these folks. We imagine that they will be put off by a serious dream that comes with a serious demand for serious discipleship. We’re more than a little put off by it ourselves. We imagine that they come to see the baby Jesus, so they can say, “Aw, look how sweet!” We’d like to see the sweet baby Jesus ourselves. We imagine that the fewer demands our message makes, the more winsome it will be.

I think we are mistaken in our imagination. I think that the folks who stop by are prompted by the Church’s dream. I think that our visitors are hoping against hope that they will see a bit of the dream realized, a glimpse at least of the dream come true. I think that we hope to get a glimpse ourselves.

They are looking for more than a dose of Christmas feel-good. They want to know if there is something here that is worthy of their devotion, their passion, their energy. If the answer turns out to be yes, then they’ll be back. If not, then we’ll not see them again until next year, maybe, when their disappointment has faded and they are willing to try again.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I think that Advent and Christmas are indeed times for a serious call to serious discipleship in the service of a serious dream. And I think that the texts that we read during Advent and Christmas present just such a compelling vision.

At first glance, the Isaiah text is all sweetness and light. In this reading we have the gentile nations coming to Judah in order to discover the ways of God. We have justice done among the nations in such a way as to render preparation for war unnecessary, so that the nations may turn their energies from the production of weapons and preparation for war to the peaceful activities of planting fields and tending orchards.

Of course, as usually happens with the prophets, there is more to it than that. These five verses come as a rather surprising interruption between the first two chapters of Isaiah. Before our text, Isaiah complains on God’s behalf that Judah has forsaken its God. Its sacrifices are all in order, but they are unacceptable to God. Justice has been trampled in the courts. The vulnerable are being exploited. No one rescues the oppressed. No one defends the orphan. No one pleads a case on the widow’s behalf. God rejects worship without justice. Therefore the people are called to repentance otherwise their society will lose its vitality: "[Y]ou shall be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water.”¹

Following our text there is more of the same: Judah is warned that a day of judgment comes when Judah will be held accountable for its failures.

This is not what we have in mind neither for us nor for our visitors in Advent. It’s a shock. William Willimon, formerly the Dean of Duke University Chapel, now the Resident Bishop of our North Alabama Conference compares the shock of this to getting a Christmas card, not from the infant, but from the adult Jesus: “Go, sell all that you have and give it to the poor, then follow me. Merry Christmas.” Or “Whoever takes up the sword dies by the sword. Happy Holidays.”²

But Isaiah’s dream comes in a context and it comes with a commission: the offer of a plowshares and pruning hooks vision comes to a world of swords and spears. And the vision demands a response: “O house of Jacob,” Isaiah says, speaking on his own behalf this time, “come let us walk in the light of God.”

There is a certain genius at work here. Whoever has assembled and arranged Isaiah in its final form knows something: Being God’s people is never easy. There are demands that go against the grain of our nature and of contemporary culture (no matter where or when we live). It will take a dream of great power, a dream sufficiently compelling to motivate the kind of action that God is asking. I think Isaiah’s vision has that kind of power. I think that Isaiah’s dream is sufficiently compelling.

For we, too live in swords and spears world, a world that is violent enough and unjust enough that a dream of peaceful justice resonates with our deepest longings and highest aspirations.

What couldn’t we do if we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks? According to one account, the nations of the world spent $1.5 trillion last year on making or preparing for war.³ The United States’ share of that was $661 billion, or 43% of the total.⁴ That’s a lot of plowshares and pruning hooks!

Let’s dream of other uses for that money.

In 2006, the United Nations set a goal for efforts to treat and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. It set a number of benchmarks to be reached this year. We’ve fallen behind. The world has been spending about $16 billion a year to fight HIV/AIDS. To meet the UN’s goals we need to spend another $10 billion.⁵ That’s $26 billion dollars all together. That’s a lot of money to you and me, but to the world’s militaries, it represents a mere 6 days, 4 hours and 45 minutes.

Or how about feeding the estimated 35 million people in the United States who live in food insecurity? That’s 35 million who may not actually be hungry right now, but who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It would only cost $12 billion to eliminate hunger and food insecurity in the United States, problems that actually cost us $90 billion a year.⁶ That’s 2 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes worth of the United States’ military expenditures to makes sure that no child goes to bed hungry and no senior citizen has to choose between eating and paying the rent.

Isaiah’s words not only provide a vision, they provide a strategy as well. The vision is a vision of peace. But it is a peace that comes from justice, rather than dropping from the sky or coming about by magic. And we can do justice, or at least we can live in that direction. We can live more justly. We can treat our own bodies with justice. We can treat each other with justice. We can treat with justice the people who make the things that we use. We can treat with justice the earth and the creatures who live on it and in its seas and in its skies.

This is the Advent vision according to Isaiah. We can commit ourselves to journeying toward God’s peace by working for God’s justice. We can summon others to join us in this journey and this work. We can live within the vision of Isaiah and invite others to live within it with us.

Advent is a time for a serious call to serious discipleship. I am convinced that people hope for such a call. That’s our own deepest hope. We and they are looking for a cause that we can embrace passionately, something to which we can give ourselves, a vision worthy of our lives.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Isa. 1:30.

2I found this citation in old notes, but I have no information as to its source other than it is attributed to William Willimon. I don’t doubt that it is his, though. It certainly sounds like him!

3Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Military Expenditure,” in SIPRI Yearbook 2010 (Stockholm: SIPRI, 2010), 177.

4Ibid., 198.

5Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, “At least 56 countries have either stabilized or achieved significant declines in rates of new HIV infectionsUNAIDSTODAY | UNAIDSTODAY,” November 23, 2010, http://unaidstoday.org/?p=1673#more-1673.

6Dr. J. Larry Brown et al., “The Economic Cost of Domestic Hunger: Estimated Annual Burden to the United States” (Sodexho Foundation, June 5, 2007), 4, http://www.sodexofoundation.org/hunger_us/Images/Cost%20of%20Domestic%20Hunger%20Report%20_tcm150-155150.pdf.