Scripture Reading
Message Audio
Message Text
This is the first Sunday of Advent. It marks the beginning of the church calendar year. Advent is the time when we reflect on the coming of Christ and what that means for us.
I will be focusing on the passage from Isaiah (2:1-5). Let us read this together.
Who was Isaiah? He was a great prophet during the time of Judah. The role of prophets was to use near-term predictions of consequences if people did not turn back to God. You may recall that the people of Israel were eventually divided into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah to the south. By Isaiah’s time, the northern kingdom of Israel was taken over by Assyria, and the peoples there were assimilated with Assyrians. Judah somehow still remained in tact for now.
In chapter 1 of Isaiah, he talks about the great evils that have come upon this society. He speaks of the social injustice and the lack of compassion people have. If we read that chapter carefully, we will see how much it reflects our society today. But in that same chapter, we also learn about God’s faithfulness to those who follow God’s heart and ways.
Chapter 2 is where we focus today. It contains great imagery and poetic language. It visualizes what it’s like to be God’s people. For children of God – and that is all of us – it gives us an image of the kind of life we are to live.
One thing I lament about this day and age is our loss of imagination. We live in a very technological, scientific and data-driven society. Big data is the solution to figuring out people’s desires, wants and concerns. In my previous life as a lawyer, we got pretty into online marketing. I had to put up content that people were searching for. And so I delved pretty heavily into keyword research – that is, looking at what people were typing into Google. And doing that reveals the kinds of questions they have and the concerns they have. And basically I use those keywords as the topics for articles we put on our website.
That’s how many websites are written today, especially those that are looking to drive a lot of traffic to them. In this kind of data-driven society, we have lost touch with deeper elements of what drives us – intuition, imagination and vision. And this is why a lot of biblical language – especially from the Old Testament – seems out of touch with today.
But let’s try to do what we can and delve into this passage today.
The passage starts with “In the days to come…” This is a vision, a dream, something to imagine and strive for. A vision and dream can be a powerful thing, but our society has become very cynical. Having dreams is seen as naïve and wishful thinking. We are taught to be concrete and to be realistic. But my friends, dreams and visions are what have changed the world. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech remains one of the most famous and lasting speeches. It laid out a dream of a society in which racial division is replaced. Society is not there yet, but the dream remains as a standard by which we all strive. We need to recapture the ability to dream big dreams and have big visions for our lives and the world.
It says the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest one. Imagine that: the mountain of the Lord is the highest – higher than the mountains of any other worldly values. Higher than money, higher than professional success, higher than being popular. What a picture that is!
Nations stream to it, and peoples all over say “Come, let us go!”
And for what purpose? “That he may teach of us his ways and that we may walk in his paths”.
And because the peoples learn of God’s ways and walk in his paths, what is the result? The result is peace and harmony in this world. God will “arbitrate for many peoples.” People will “beat their swords into plowshares,” and their “spears into pruning hooks”. Do you know what those things are? Instead of weapons that kill, they will be transformed into tools that produce food to feed people.
What a vision this is! Isn’t that an exciting vision for the world? In a world that’s filled with self-interest, violence, hatred and selfishness, isn’t this a refreshing vision for the world?
But to learn God’s ways, we must be awake. That was the message of the other Scripture passages we read today. Awake: as in, be alert and aware to what is happening in the world and inside of us. We must be awake to what the world is teaching us.
Right now you all spend most of your days in school. You are getting an education. But make no mistake: the purpose and function of our education system is to help you fit into the economic and social systems of our society. That’s not a bad thing by itself. It’s a necessary thing so that we can function and survive in our society.
But our schools are not where we should be getting our identity from, or where we learn the values that define us. Somewhere along the way in our world, we have really defined who we are by the occupation we hold. Think about it: we are all created equally by God, right? That’s what we believe, don’t we? Yet at some point, our identity deviated from that and into what we do. We became human doings, not human beings.
And our schools do an excellent job in steering us into one of those identities. However, we must realize that what we do is just a means of survival and functioning in this society. It should not be the end of who we are. We have confused means and ends. Do you know the difference between those two? Means is just a method, a path. So it’s a method to supporting yourself and making a living. But it should not be the end. It should not define who we are as human beings. And we should definitely not measure our worth by what we do.
Doesn’t our Bible and faith teach us something very different? Haven’t we learned over and over that we are God’s beloved children, no matter what we do?
These are the “teachings of his ways” and absorbing God’s teachings are how we “walk in his paths”, by not absorbing the values of this world, but instead walking confidently as children of God.
That vision of Isaiah foreshadowed the kind of peace that Christ was to bring, and how different the ways of Jesus would be from the ways of the world. As during this Advent season, while we enjoy the festive music and sentiments, let us reflect deeper, be awake and think about the deeper teachings of God.
Thanks Simon for your inspiring and uplifting reflection! Your message gives me hope. I like that idea about having a vision and that we need to keep dreaming. Thanks also for reminding us that in order to be awake, we need to continually learn and reflect on God’s words. “Come, let us go!That he may teach of us his ways and that we may walk in his paths”.