Isaiah’s vision of an utterly peaceful world began with wisdom, compassion, righteousness, and peace. May we move toward it this Advent season.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the eleventh chapter of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 11:1-10). This coming Sunday is the second Sunday of Advent. The theme is peace, so it is entirely appropriate that the Isaiah reading is one of his accounts of the Peaceable Kingdom.
The wolf and the lamb lying down together. The lion eating straw like the ox. “And a little child shall lead them.”
Not surprisingly, Isaiah started with a description of what leadership would look like: that a shoot would emerge from the stump of Jesse, and that this new monarch would rule in a new and different way, with wisdom, with righteousness, with the fear of the Lord – that kind of reverent respect that, well, is frankly very uncommon amongst leaders of nations, now isn’t it?
The foundation of peace for the natural world, Isaiah said, was peace within the human world.
I can’t say that that is obviously true. If human beings ceased to make war upon one another, if human beings ceased to commit crimes against one another, if human beings abandoned violence forever, I’m afraid there would still be hunting in the forests and in the seas – at least until God changes the world. Nevertheless, Isaiah was absolutely right to seek out that first part of the vision rooted in peace amongst human beings. Because even if we can’t directly affect the peace of the rest of Creation, we can make peace amongst ourselves. We can choose wisdom over folly. We can choose compassion over violence. We can choose peace.
All too frequently, we choose folly. We choose violence. we choose war. All too rarely, we choose wisdom. We choose compassion. We choose peace.
In this Advent season, may we take a step, even a fraction of a step, towards Isaiah’s vision. Let us choose wisdom, righteousness, compassion, and peace.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below; I’d love to hear from you.
