"The Picture on the Lid"

The Picture on the Lid--December 6, 2016

"⁶The wolf shall live with the lamb,
  the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
 the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
  and a little child shall lead them.
 ⁷The cow and the bear shall graze,
  their young shall lie down together;
  and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
 ⁸The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
  and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
 ⁹They will not hurt or destroy
  on all my holy mountain;
 for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
  as the waters cover the sea."

When you start on a jigsaw puzzle, you start by taking a look at the picture on the lid of the box.  You see what the finished puzzle will look like when it is complete.  You note things like colors that appear in certain parts of the picture, and you observe what is on the edges and the corners.  And then you go to work putting pieces together.

The finished picture not only gives you a sense of hope at what the completed image will look like, but it also gives you direction for how to get there.  And at least if you are anything like me, once you see the picture on the lid, that picture pulls at you to start putting pieces together, even if only one or two at the moment, to begin to try to get the whole picture to be complete.  The completion, the harmony, the sense of everything belonging, of everything being included even if you don't know how yet, that drives us to want to start putting pieces together. 

And so, slowly, sometimes with missteps along the way and wrong pieces connected until the right connection is found, slowly, we take puzzle pieces and work to join them rightly.  The box top makes the promise to us that they will all fit eventually, and if you take that promise seriously, then every individual step of putting pieces together is somehow important.

So... Isaiah has a picture for us to see.

It is a picture of a promised future, a picture in which all the pieces of all of creation fit together and find their belonging.  It is a future in which those who have long been enemies are reconciled, in which predators are transformed to live at peace with their former prey, and the prey are no longer afraid.  No one will hurt or destroy.  No, not one.  And Isaiah offers that picture to us, not simply as a possibility, not simply as one of many things we could make out of the pieces in front of us, but as God's promise.  Isaiah doesn't say, "Well, if you all work hard enough at it and all do one extra random act of kindness, you can make the world a perfect place with sheer moxie and determination," nor does he say, "If you don't like this picture I'm giving you, you can always choose a different future where you all live estranged from one another forever and ever."  God is determined to renew creation, even quite unnaturally from the way we seem wired to kill and eat each other, and the pieces do not fit any other way but with restoration.  There is no option of leaving somebody out because we do not like them.  There is no option of the wolves all pinning all the blame for the world's problems on the cows and deciding to kick them out of the scene.  There is no scenario in which God will forever leave the puzzle unfinished because the pieces in one corner of the rectangle can't get along with the pieces on the opposite corner.  There is only the promise that eventually every last piece belongs.

Even yours.  Even mine.  No matter what anybody else says.  It is not up for a vote, thank God.

There is the promised future right in front of us, staring back at us like the lid of a puzzle box.  New creation where lions and cows and wolves and lambs and humans can live with one another.  Old hates are turned from.  Old enmities overcome.  Old grudges let go of.  Old fears no longer necessary.  New ways of living together begun.  A new kind of new.

Now... if that is the picture we have... where do we start with the pieces in front of us? 

It may feel like we are a long, long way--maybe impossibly far--from the picture on the box.  But, ok, yeah--that's because we are a long, long way from getting there. But every puzzle starts out that way.

The question for us today, then, is, What might it look like to find the first few pieces from the pile of chaos in front of us, and to put them together where they belong?  How, in other words, do we take the first step, maybe one of a thousand, sometimes with wrong turns and missteps, but always trying and always searching for pieces that go together?  How do we begin?

Maybe here.  What if it started with a conversation--maybe over lunch, maybe over coffee--with someone with whom you disagree.  Over anything.  Maybe it's the distant sibling who gets on your nerves.  Maybe it's someone at work who always seems to have a chip on their shoulder.   Maybe it's someone you have been avoiding out of shame because you know that you have wronged them and have been ignoring them to ride out the anger from a distance.  Maybe it's someone who voted differently than you--there are more than 60 million who did, no matter what you picked.  But whoever it is, sit down and have a civil conversation.  Ask questions, and listen to how the other person thinks and sees things.  Find out what upsets them, and what gives them hope.  Listen more than you speak.  Be honest when you disagree, and be up front about why--what underlying assumptions, convictions, and facts are you starting with. Be respectful.

Now, I readily grant that even if everybody who ever reads these words goes out and takes that suggestion, at most the only difference in the world will be that a lot more lunches and coffees have been consumed and at best a number of civil conversations may have happened.  That's a far cry from lions and lambs, wolves and cows, all getting along in peace.  Of course it is a long way from that.  But it is on the right trajectory.  It is on the right road.  Because one of the things that may happen in a conversation like this is that you and I may come to realize we are not just the innocent lambs and cows--there are ways each of us is part of the problem, and each of us has been the wolf and the lion.  If we have all convinced ourselves that "they"--the people with whom we disagree--are the predators, and we are the innocent and eternally righteous sheep, we will never be willing to listen, and we will always assume we are totally in the right.  But what if there is something of the wolf in me that I haven't been able to see yet?  What if I have blind spots I cannot recognize, but which will only emerge if I am talking with someone else who can respectfully help me see them?  What if the only way we quit retreating to our own little bubbles that become their own little worlds, with their own realities and their own "facts," is if at some point someone risks hearing something they won't like by buying a friend a latte and picking their brain about their differing opinions on something?  What if those are the first pieces of the picture at hand to start with, just "honest listening" and "civility," which, like the edge pieces of the puzzle, help us to start the work of putting everything else together?

The whole picture is a long way away, and a whole new creation is not in reach by the end of just this day.  But maybe on this day, civility is the benchmark to reach on the journey... and then we'll go from there. 

Today, let us begin the movement, to sift through the pieces around us and look for pieces that can fit.  Let us dare to believe the promise that eventually, everything belongs.

Lord Jesus, keep speaking to us your promised future, so that we will begin to anticipate its coming.