Lectionary Reflection for Advent Sunday A on Isaiah 2:1-5

In this Advent and Christmas Season, my writing will focus on the epistles and Old Testament readings from the Revised Common Lectionary. But that doesn’t mean that I have ignored the Gospels. If you’re looking for my reflections on the Gospel readings, they are in the new Advent and Christmas Guide from Sacredise, Living as Advent People. You can find that here.

WHICH GOD ARE WE WAITING FOR?

One of the things I love about the Christian Calendar is that it constantly calls us to re-evaluate what we believe and how it impacts our lives and relationships. Socrates famously declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, but an unexamined faith often produces the kind of complacency that makes self-examination seem unnecessary and even ungodly. All too often, those who dismiss the questions and discoveries that could catalyse faith evolutions find no reason to assess the impact of their ideas, attitudes, words, and actions on other people. The destructive artefacts of these ‘True Believers’ have been on distressing display for all to see this year. While I know that a season like Advent is unlikely to breach the battlements of their certainty, I still believe in the power of this season to break through to anyone who is even minimally open to considering more compassionate, creative, and welcoming ways of being. And this year in particular, I find a question in the words of the prophet Isaiah that I believe we all need to answer: What kind of God do we worship?

I often quote Richard Rohr’s words, “You become the God you worship”.^¹ This means that our impact on our loved ones and neighbours, and our influence on our world through what we support and how we vote, is determined by our vision of God. But perhaps, in the light of Isaiah’s prophecy in 2:1-5 (which we will examine in a moment), we need to narrow the question down to this: do we believe in a God of love or wrath, of ultimate creativity or ultimate destruction?

For much of Christian history, followers of Jesus have believed in a God of limited love, even though most of us would vehemently deny it. As Richard Rohr writes:

In the early second century, the church began to call itself “catholic,” meaning universal, as it recognized its own universal character and message. Only later was “catholic” circumscribed by the word “Roman” as the church lost its sense of delivering an undivided and inclusive message. Then, after an entirely needed Reformation in 1517, we just kept dividing into ever-smaller and competing fractals.²

In one breath, we claim that God loves all, but in the next, we insist that this Divine Lover still sends some people to eternal torment.³ We claim that God created the universe, but then we suggest that it will all exist for only a few thousand years—and as an examination room which will ultimately be destroyed when God decides they are tired of giving people chances to pass the test and populate heaven. This God is not particularly creative and is ultimately defined by God’s wrath against those who fail to believe in the right things, and by the destruction of said sinners and of the cosmos.

It is no wonder that faith in such a God has led to followers of Jesus supporting polarisation, authoritarianism (perhaps believing it to be a version of theocracy), and violence against “God’s” enemies (which conveniently seem to be the same people who are “our” enemies). This faith has justified the exploitation of our Earth as a dead storehouse of resources for us to use at will (since it’s going to be destroyed anyway). It has created hierarchies of “God-imagedness”, claiming that white, Christian, heterosexual men are more important and God-like than women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, and those who follow other religions. And in the name of this God, Christians have killed, tortured, robbed, and abused, while still claiming to be “saved”, believing that they will go to heaven, and asserting that those they hurt will not. Is this really the kind of God we’re supposed to be waiting for in Advent? Is this the Emmanuel we beg to come to us as we sing?

But what happens if we believe in the other kind of God—the creative, inclusive, all-loving God? Well then, we get a completely different picture. Which brings us to Isaiah’s prophecy in the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures from the Lectionary for Advent Sunday.

A VISION OF A NEW WORLD

In the eighth century before the Christian era, Isaiah caught a glimpse of God’s dream. The people of Judah were wrestling with the shifting political landscape of their time. The Assyrian empire was striving for dominance over the world, bringing the constant threat of invasion, conquest, and exile.⁴ But they were also plagued by the internal strife and injustice that were fragmenting their society. Isaiah confronted the destructive actions and attitudes of his people and spoke out against their idolatry, injustice, and corruption (1:21-31 and 2:5-22). But in the face of the turmoil in their world, and alongside his prophecies of judgment, Isaiah proclaimed a different reality. It’s not that he was contradicting himself by speaking both judgment and promise. Rather, as Michael Chan notes, “promise and judgment are not contradictory realities: judgment serves promise, and contributes to bringing about the fulfillment of promise”.⁵

In Isaiah’s vision, God’s presence would be available to, and recognised by, all nations, and in the light of God’s love, all people would come together in unity, peace, and justice. Weapons of war would be turned into implements of sustenance for life. Disputes, which Isaiah was realistic enough to acknowledge would always be present, would be resolved through God’s wisdom and intervention. For the fearful individuals that were Isaiah’s contemporaries, this vision offered a hope that in the healing of their world would come the peace and security, the sufficiency and community, that they needed for a fulfilled and joyful life. It was not just a grand dream on an international scale. It was a very specific and localised hope that took seriously the interconnectedness between nations, leaders, people, and the Earth. And, because of this, it included the call for each individual to do their part by simply “walking in the light of God” (2:5). This grand dream would be built, Isaiah proclaimed, as it was manifested in miniature in each individual life.

This vision of a new world of peace and justice would have seemed impossible, even absurd, at the time. But it was a call for the people to imagine a possible future. As Joel B. Kemp points out, the Hebrew words which are usually translated “in the last days” do not imply the end-times, but simply a future, more hopeful time.⁶ The Common English Bible, for example, helpfully prefers the phrase “In the days to come…”. But more important than the timeline was the description of what God’s promised future could look like. It is a vision in three parts, and it can still be a source of hope and motivation for creative action today. As Barbara Lundblad writes, “biblical visions in both testaments come to us from the future, longing to shape the days in which we are living”.⁷