The Dream of Advent: A Sermon for Tuesday of the First Week of Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72: 1-8

Luke 10: 21-28

All Saints' Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
Tuesday of the First Week of Advent

This fall I was given the opportunity to tutor elementary school students in a charter school in Oakland.  Last Wednesday, one of the students that I tutor was reading the Velveteen Rabbit.  While he was reading it, he started asking me a series of existential questions, “what does mechanical mean?” “what does it mean to be alive?” “why are we alive but robots are not?  Don’t we need power just like a mechanical toy?”  At first I thought he was trying to waste time as there were only ten minutes left in the session, and so I gave him a few polite answers, but he still kept pushing.  He seemed almost troubled at the thought that inanimate objects were not living things, and there was a palatable silence from my answers  which seemed to disrupt this child’s fantasy world.

Jesus said “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”

This seems to be an odd thing for Jesus to say, how do we as seminary students and professors even begin to approach such a text.  We can have the intellectual knowledge to say that Jesus is the incarnate Word, the Son of God, and the Messiah; but all of these things are mere words, built up from a Hellenistic and Jewish philosophical and metaphysical paradigm.  At the end of the day, these words they describe so little, if anything at all.  Unfortunately, It does raise a number of questions as to why we are here at CDSP studying theology and religion.

But before we run and burn all our degrees and course work to set them on fire in an anti-intellectual fervor, let us pause to consider what Jesus is saying.  Who and what is Jesus, and what does his being on Earth mean?   In Advent, we await the coming of Christ and the reign of God on Earth, in full recognition that the reign of God has already begun with the coming of Christ 2000 years ago.  Though we may attempt to try and understand what that may mean, I believe that the true meaning of the Advent of the Lord is elusive.  

When we turn the words of the Prophet Isaiah, we see a vision of the reign of God will be like.  The Prophet tells us that “a shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”  That shoot will judge the world with equity.  Not only that, the world will be reordered to reflect that justice.  Predators will lie with and eat with what was once their prey and infants will play with snakes.  It is a fanciful scene, idyllic, and dreamlike even.  

A common interpretation among Christians is that the shoot of the stock of Jesse is Christ.  As Jesus has already been born once and came into the world once, we can say that the reign of God has begun because we believe Jesus Christ is that judge.  There should be justice and equity in the world; the world should be reordered according to Isaiah.  Yet, I do not think any parent will willingly let their children play with poisonous snakes.  Nevertheless, we are presented with and confounded with a vision of God’s reign as it should be, and yet it is not.  There is still injustice and pain in the world.  How can we be living in the reign of God?  Perhaps this paradox is what confounds the wise, and yet I think we must suspend our intellectual ascent and consider the world through the eyes of a child, whom Jesus says is able to see clearly that which is hidden to the wise.

A psychologist I know told me once that the most grounded people in life are those that maintain a certain childlike curiosity about them throughout their life.  They are willing to examine and try new things, and embrace that childlike wonder and awe at the unexplored and newly imagined.  The desire to explore, imagine, and dream should never die as we transition from childhood to adulthood.

And yet as a society, I fear that we haven’t learned how to truly grow up, we have only learned how to grow old.  We are so afraid to have that childlike embrace of wonder and mystery, we are afraid to dream.  It is written off as childish pursuits in a realistic world.

Perhaps that is why Jesus says these things are revealed to infants.  The image of the wolf living with the lamb may seem like a far off fantasy dream world, and yet in a child’s imagination it is conceivable.  This is not to say that Isaiah’s vision is childish, but there is a certain child like awe and wonder at a world that has been reorder from a world of destruction to a world of peace.

Sadly, we live in a world of cynicism, fear, sorrow, hatred, and distrust, and we use all of our conceivable intellectual capacities to rationalize and explain away the deep inequities of our world.  Yet the Prophet Isaiah never promises that we will be freed completely from the evils of this world, but that there will be a judge to help us live into the vision and promise of the reign of God.  For us, that judge is Jesus.  Through Jesus Christ, through God, we have the freedom to imagine and dream of a world as it should be, and we have been granted the gift to live into and make our imagination and dreams a reality.  Christ calls us to be children once again so that we may dream of a world as it should be, and grow up to make those dreams a reality.  

This Advent, let us remember what it is like to imagine a world where anything is possible.  Even though it is childish, let us learn to dream once again.