What is this, to you?

The bible text for this week’s sermon can be found at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=504600889

I wonder….what do you envision when you hear these words?  

I wonder….what does this scene look like in your mind’s eye?

What is the setting? What does it look like? Is it gilded towering columns or a wide open field or a living room somewhere, or somewhere else? 

Who do you see? What do the people look like? What are they doing? What expressions are on their faces?

I wonder what you have seen in your own life that looks anything like this?

For me, I picture The Lion King - the Circle of Life scene where all kinds of creatures are willing to journey from wherever they call home... to gather together where the earth has created its own throne room of palatial rock...to see this newborn baby cub they can not possibly know...to bear witness to the dawning of a new era.

Either that of the regal award ceremonies at the end of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.When after immense suffering, brutal loss, and finally overcoming what seemed like an impossible foe...there is overwhelming joy and gratitude at peace and possibility. 

I cannot hear these words without also hearing them to the tune of Hendel’s Messiah with a full orchestra behind it. Trumpets blasting out triumphant strains. A full choir blaring out the chorus from deep in their bellies. Wonderful! Counselor! Almighty God! The Everlasting Father! The Prince of Peace! A packed sanctuary covered in lights and poinsettias for the big Christmas Eve celebration. I tried to find a version that felt a littles less intense, a little more mellow...but it simply doesn’t exist.

This scripture text creates an image so full of pomp and circumstance, so over the top, it seems other-worldly. It seems to match best with the images I can draw mostly from fantasy. But that’s what poetry does. I suppose poetry is not always so different from prophecy.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to a change in leadership, but even moreso a prophetic call to unfolding change in us as a people and in the world we share. It gives voice to the raw reality of where we’ve been AND lifts a lantern toward where we’re going, what lies underneath the veil. 

Some scholars suggest that these words are likely a psalm, a poem, a song for the occasion of a coronation and that these words refer particularly to the next king of God’s people - Hezekiah - a King who will historically repair so many things that had been so severely broken. These words are written to a people who have seen such destruction and experienced such pain - their people divided and scattered and at war with one another and their holy places raided and collapsed. And yet…they are also being healed, being restored, drawn into a new kind of kingdom. 

As Christians, many of us have been conditioned to think that everything, including these verses are about Jesus - that Isaiah’s role as prophet is one of fortune-telling, speaking of a baby that won’t be born for another 700 years. At least, that’s what I was always told. And maybe that’s what this is…but maybe not, maybe it doesn’t need to be that to have something to say to us in these days of anticipating God’s presence among us. There is danger in always insisting that our lens of seeing the world is the only or best one, and it has caused so much harm to the Jewish people. We don’t have to negate the holy story of Jewish tradition, a tendency that has caused enough harm already, to find messianic meaning here.

What if...this text is not about Jesus, but Jesus is about the things we find in this text and then some. What if the messiah isn’t about collapsing various identities and truths into one another, but expanding them beyond our wildest dreams. 

We hear words of what has been, what is, and what will be. There HAS BEEN anguish, and shadow, and isolation. There IS light and liberation. “You HAVE multiplied the nation, you HAVE increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as people exult when dividing plunder. For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you HAVE broken as on the day of Midian...For a child HAS been born for us.”

“Their authority SHALL grow continually, and there SHALL be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. They WILL establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness FROM THIS TIME ONWARD AND FOREVERMORE. The zeal of the Lord of hosts WILL do this.”

This kingdom of God, this way of being in the world filled with joy and goodness...has already begun and is still to come.  Lutheran tradition speaks of this as “already and not yet.” God’s redemption of the world is already among us and also forthcoming. It is the holy mystery of what already is deeply and fully true, and still unfolding. Advent straddles that space, weaves them together. It is the same mystery as at the Easter resurrection - where Jesus is both missing and yet standing right here.

Here the people are overwhelmed by an impossible weight that has been lifted, their humiliation removed, their trauma healed. They are overcome as the tools and monuments of destruction and injustice are themselves destroyed. There is liberation, restoration, and relief.  It opens to them the possibility of not just temporary peace but enduring endless peace. It opens them once again to hope.

King Hezekiah embodies this hope and ideal of what a king can and should be, what a faithful kingdom could be, what a good shepherd creates and cultivates. There is a glimpse now of something even better we can not yet comprehend. Even the people who most resemble what we imagine to be the ideal that God has promised, are echos of something even more majestic, something that changes how we understand and experience splendor and majesty altogether.  Even our grandest visions and hopes for the ideal community of justice and goodness is only a foretaste of what the world can be, will be with God over and through everything, a world that the Messiah will reveal as already unfolding a God who is even better that our best politicians, heroes, and saints.

We’ve heard the names and titles the ancient people gave to such a person. They used the things that brought together what they had directly in front of them and things that reached beyond what they could even imagine. Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

I wonder...what would you call the one who brought such things into being? 

I wonder...when you envision such an overwhelming experience of joy, relief, and possibility...what would that look like for you? Around you? What would that kind of majesty sound like?

What would change if you were to live as if this experience was already true?