Isaiah 2:1-5
Advent, Eschatology, and Moral Arcs
James Sledge December
1, 2019
Recently
I’ve seen a number of articles and posts on social media commemorating thirty
years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. What a momentous time. The Soviet
Union collapsed. East and West Germany became one country. Former puppet
regimes began new lives as independent nations. And people heralded the end of
the Cold War.
There
was great hope for the future and talk of a “peace dividend.” America was the
sole remaining superpower, and many hoped that military spending could be
curtailed, allowing increased funding for social programs, education,
infrastructure projects, and so on.
There
were reductions in nuclear arsenals. Military spending remained flat for a few
years, but no big peace dividend materialized. After 9/11, military spending increased
dramatically, and we’ve been in an endless “war on terror” ever since. Now
Russia’s war in Ukraine and interference in US elections feels a little like a
return to Cold War days.
Through
much of history, hopes for peace often seem to disappear like mist burned away
by the morning sun. “Peace on Earth” will soon by plastered all over Christmas
cards and Christmas displays, but our hopes for peace always seem to get
overwhelmed by our tendency towards violence and war.
Back
in 1928, France, the US, and Germany signed something called the “General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an
Instrument of National Policy,” better known as the “Kellogg-Briand
Pact.” By the time the treaty went into effect a year later, the majority of
the world’s nations had signed it, including all the major players in World War
II, which would begin only ten years later.
In
the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship
that I have on my desk, there is a liturgy for lighting the Advent Candle. For
the first Sunday in Advent it reads, “We light this candle as a sign of the
coming light of Christ. Advent means coming. We are preparing ourselves for the
days when the nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears
into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more.”
Our
denomination came out with a new Book of
Common Worship last year. The Advent Candle liturgy is almost the same. It uses
the same verse from Isaiah about swords and plowshares, but the introduction is
altered slightly. It now reads, “We light this candle as a sign of the coming
light of Christ. As the Lord has promised, in days to come, The nations shall
beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks…”
Apparently
we are no longer preparing ourselves for the days promised by the prophet. I
have no idea what prompted the revision. It could have been simply to make the
liturgy shorter and simpler. But perhaps the change acknowledges the seeming
futility of preparing for something that never seems to come.
We
do know how to prepare for Christmas however. I wonder if Advent getting
swallowed up by Christmas is only partly because the secular, retail world
starts focusing of Christmas so early. Perhaps it’s also because Christmas is
the only thing we are sure will arrive, and so we’re happy just to do Christmas
for a month.
We
also know what to do to prepare for Christmas. We’re well practiced at getting
ready, at decorating and playing Christmas music and singing carols and
shopping and wrapping presents and having Christmas parties and planning visits
to relatives. But how are we supposed to prepare for a vision of days to come
that never seems to arrive?
I
can’t imagine that anyone is expecting my sermon to provide an answer as to how
we might bring God’s new day to fruition, but just in case, I have no such
answer. For that matter, neither does the prophet Isaiah. He doesn’t call on
the people to raise up the mountain of the Lord,
to judge between the nations, or even to beat their swords into plowshares. It
is God who will bring a new day. It is God who will triumph through love. If we
have become disenchanted by our repeated failures to create heaven on earth,
perhaps we have been placing too much hope in ourselves and not enough in God.
Part
of the life of faith is finding the balance between trusting and hoping in what
only God can do, and doing the things we are called to do that bear witness to that
hope. And I wonder what that might look like for Advent, for this time of
waiting and preparing.
The
trusting and hoping part might be about longing for something more than a good
Christmas. It might be about having a bit of eschatology as a part of our
faith. Eschatology is a fancy word about the study of the end or of last
things. It’s a big part of our theology, but all too often, progressive
Christians have ceded eschatology to the lunatic fringe, to those predicting
the world’s end or talking about some imagined rapture.
On
more than one occasion in the training I do for new elders and deacons, I’ve
asked people about their eschatology, their understanding of an end, and had
people look at me like I had asked them if they knew how to perform an
exorcism. When I explored that reaction, they told me that their faith had no particular
beliefs about the end.
But
Advent and Christmas are all about the promise that God is moving the world
toward a certain end. It is the promise of peace on earth, of swords beaten to
plowshares, of a day when people of all nations, races, tribes, and clans shall
come from east and west, north and south to sit together as one.
It
is Christian eschatology that allows Martin Luther King to say, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." The
bend in that arc is assured, not because of the inevitability of human
progress, but because it is the end to which God in Christ Jesus is moving all
of history.
By
faith, the prophet Martin knew that, and so he could continue his work in the
face of what seemed like impossible odds. In the same way, knowing that God
controlled the moral arc of history allowed the prophet Isaiah to glimpse days
to come, when swords would become plowshares. And so he could say to the people
of Jerusalem, and to us, O house of Jacob, (O people of God),
come,
let us walk in the light of the Lord!
Perhaps
during this Advent, along with getting ready for Christmas, we might recover a
bit of eschatology. Perhaps, like the prophets Martin Luther King and Isaiah, we
might glimpse with eyes of faith that moral arc of the universe. And having
glimpsed it, we might live in ways that help others see the bend of history
that is surely coming.
The
other day, I stumbled across a couple of quotes from Desmond Tutu that strike
me as helpful guides for walking in God’s light, for helping the world see the
moral arc of history. The first is, “People often speak of God being
even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of
the despised.” And the second is this, “Do your little bit of good where you
are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
O
people of God. come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
No comments:
Post a Comment