Advent 2 -- Voices of Hope

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

Back in the 1980s when there was considerable controversy over the economic policies of the Thatcher Government, we began to hear mentions of TINA or to put it in every day language, “There is no alternative.”

Whether you consider that view to have been correct is not a matter that belongs to this sermon. But our readings point us in the direction of questioning the status quo and looking for a world that can be very different indeed. We are encouraged to believe that we do have choices and to believe that there is so much more to life than marching to the drumbeat of conformity.

Let’s for a moment look at our reading from Isaiah. Now Isaiah of Jerusalem is sharing a vision of hope not in good times but in times of monumental insecurity. He is writing at a time when the Northern Kingdom of Israel is about to fall to the armies of Assyria and those same armies would soon endanger the Southern Kingdom of Judah where Isaiah lived. The world as his contemporaries knew it was falling in. Around them darkness seemed to be triumphant. And yet Isaiah proclaims a message of hope, a message of a better future. Rooted in the hope of a King in the line of David who will restore the good old days, he speaks in expectancy of a future King who would have the Spirit of God within him, a King who would do what is right, bringing a preferential option for the poor and a new age of righteousness.

But then the vision gets even grander for Isaiah goes on to talk of a future in which all the hitherto known enmities would be at an end. Here the language begins to sound positively utopian;

“The wolf will live with the lamb,
The leopard will lie down with the goat,
The calf and the lion and the yearling together.”

And I guess we listen to those words and think that these are nice thoughts but surely the prophet could do with a reality check! After all these things go against nature and should all creatures go vegetarian, there would be serious implications for the food chain.

But of course this language is not so much about the present age. Rather it is a vision of the reign of God that is to come and which is the future we are preparing ourselves for in this season of Advent.

But wait! Whilst at advent we look forward to God’s future in which there will be the peace and well being implied by the Hebrew word, “Shalom,” surely there are implications for us today. After all, seriously waiting on God means taking God’s future seriously and seeking the foster the signs of that future amongst us.

Back in the 19th Century, Edward Hicks who was a Quaker artist painted a picture entitled, “The Peacable Kingdom.” Were you to see the picture, you would at first notice a remarkable resemblance to Isaiah’s vision. All of Isaiah’s animals are to be found here. But there is something else as well. For on the left of the picture in the background are to be seen white settlers and native Indians. And what are they doing? They are making peace. For this is a portrayal of William Penn, a Quaker after whom Pennsylvania is named, making a treaty with
the local Indians at Shackamaxon under an elm tree. You see, this painting looks both to the vision of the peacable kingdom and to the contemporary signs of that Kingdom. Yes, here is both a depiction of Isaiah’s hope for the future and a depiction of that hope being taken seriously in the present tense.

But, if Isaiah offers a voice of hope, how you may ask does John the Baptist fit into such a pattern. After all, our first impression on meeting him is of one of those noisy Hellfire preachers whom many of us hoped we had heard the last of. He is not even nice to his hearers, addressing them as vipers , the sort of language which is a disciplinary offence if used by Methodist preachers against their congregations.

And yet, there is hope to be found in John the Baptist. For as he confronts the Sadducees who had misused religion to further the status of an idle wealthy elite, and Pharisees who have got hung up on the letter rather than the spirit of the Jewish law, he points his followers to a new future. And this future can be discovered in his call to “Repent” a word which taken literally is a call for a change of mind. This uncomfortable man is proclaiming a message to people who know the pain of injustice only too well, that there is an alternative, the Kingdom of heaven which is drawing near. And in this Kingdom, we are offered very different realities than those which are so suffocating in the present.

Once more as with Isaiah, we are challenged to envisage a new reality that is at odds with so many of the dark realities of the present. We are called to dare to think outside the box and to follow a path of nonconformity before those things which deny the possibilities of abundance of living. There always are alternatives

I wonder if we ever really appreciate the importance of hope. I don’t mean the optimism which can see where things are going to get better but the hope which seeing the difficulties dares to make leaps of faith to create new possibilities. It is that which we need as much as the very air that we breath. An example of this is the Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl who spent the last three years of the Second World War in Nazi concentration camps. Despite seeing many of his fellow prisoners give up, he was later to bear testimony that it was hope that kept hom going - the hope to rewrite the book that his gaolers had destroyed and the sadly to be unfulfilled hope that he would be reunited with his wife.

Isaiah and John the Baptist were both men of hope. Isaiah hopes in a future Davidic King despite the royal line having been morally contaminated. His vision of the peacable Kingdom speaks of the fiery beats being led by a child, possibly the young King Hezekiah. But most of all he places his hope in the Spirit of God resting upon a future King. For John, hope is placed in the one for whom he is preparing the way, one whom he probably doesn’t know but one who is more powerful than John himself, one whose sandals John is unfit to carry.

Desmond Tutu tells a parable about a light bulb that shone so brightly that it became convinced that its achievement was die to its own merits. One day, the bulb was taken out of its socket and placed upon a table. There despite its efforts it could do nothing, disconnected as it was from the source of its power. How much we need to remain connected to God who is the source of our hope!

Advent calls us to hope. It does not fail to take darkness seriously but it refuses to accept that darkness has the final say. Advent calls us to look to God’s future with hope that is rooted in the power and the nature of God. It encourages us to see that with God there are possibilities to be explored for alternatives in the here and now.

Oscar Wilde once said;

“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”

May we as we look to that time when God’s Kingdom will come with great power, look up at the stars and may we rejoice and take hold of the possibilities that God gives us to be pointers to that great hope to which Advent points us.



Bideford Methodist Church - Sunday December 9th 2007