"In days to come the mountain of the LORD's house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
and many nations shall come and say:
'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.'
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore;
but they shall all sit under their own vines
and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken." [Micah 4:1-4]
In all honesty, I am not sure we really want this vision to come true.
I am not at all convinced that we really desire not to teach our children to learn war any longer. Just the opposite, rather--I fear that the voices around us, the voices we have all agreed to nod along with as "common sense" and "conventional wisdom," would rather teach our children to continue in the ways of violence, hatred, and self-interest.
We do not want our children to cease learning war anymore--we simply want them to learn it better than the children in the next group over.
Ultimately, this is the problem: not that the living God does not offer a bold enough hope; not that we have tried the way of God's peaceable Reign and found that it just wasn't as good as it was billed to be; not that the Scriptures are unclear about what sort of a future into which God calls us. But rather, that we know perfectly well that the living God is going to pulls us out of our narrow self-interest, and we don't want that to happen--no, not when we could get an edge or an advantage over someone else and "win" against them, instead. To borrow a line from G. K. Chesterton, it's not that the peaceable way of Jesus has been tried and found wanting--it's that it's been found difficult and not tried.
And this, I have come to believe, is the heart of the matter. It is not that Jesus or the prophets are vague, ambiguous, or unclear about how God intends human beings to relate to one another. It's not that we are just having a dilly of a time trying to figure out how God feels about us killing each other, or inventing and stockpiling new and different ways to kill each other more and more efficiently. It's not that the Scriptures are hard to understand when it comes to whether or not to endorse a "me-and-my-group-first" way of thinking and acting. The Scriptures are painfully clear. The prophets like Micah here, or its parallel passage from Isaiah 2:1-5, speak with terrible simplicity and directness. The problem is not that we can't figure out what the Spirit-filled dreamers, poets, and activists that we call the prophets were trying to say to us. The problem is that we know--and we do not like what they have to say. We are not ready to stop teaching our children the ways of war. That much is clear, because we are not ready yet to stop teaching our children to see themselves as of greater importance than someone else's children.
There's the rub: deep down, we have built a way of life, we humans--in every country, in every hemisphere, in every culture, so nobody gets off smelling like a rose here--we have built a way of life that depends on the assumption that my life is of greater importance and worth than yours... that my livelihood is more important to protect than your own life... that my comfort is more important to safeguard than your subsistence... and that my feeling of security is more important than someone else's ability to live. We have built our ways of life on all agreeing that each of us is going to be as damned self-interested (and I mean that profanity--it is damnable) as we please and committed to self-preservation as possible, and we are all OK with it as long as we all agree that those are the rules we are going to play by.
And once we have all agreed to that, then everything is simply a matter of strategizing how get better advantages for myself to outmaneuver you and everybody else. So... if I determine that having more swords and spears (or whatever--pick your weapons) will help me look out for me-and-my-group-first, well, then, it's my "right" to get more, have more, threaten to use more, and develop more and better swords and spears than you have, so that I can "win." Isn't it?
And as long as I agree that you can also acquire as many ways to kill me as possible, we all will pretend that's a sensible "common-sense" way to live our lives. We did that on a global scale, if you'll recall, for three or four decades in the late 20th century, and we called it mutual assured destruction. Whether it's nuclear missiles during the Cold War, swords and spears in 8th century BC Palestine, or semi-automatic rifles in the headlines today, regardless of what weapons we are using, the deeper problem is that we have all collectively agreed that it's OK for each of us to guard for our own feeling of security at the cost of someone else's life--that it's OK for me to weigh the value of me and my comfort more highly than another human being made indelibly in the image of God. Once I've told myself that I and my interests take priority over anybody else's, I've already given in to learning the way of war. The root of our problem is our bent love of self over against everyone else around me, and then the problem is made increasingly worse by technological leaps in our ability to destroy each other in the name of "keeping myself secure."
Well, there it is--that's the bottom line here. Collectively, the conventional wisdom is that we will all be "free" to be as self-centered and self-interested as we want to be, or can get away with being, and from there, it's every man for himself to shore up whatever things we can in order to look out for me-and-my-group first. And all of that makes perfect and total sense once we have started from the assumption that my life is of greater value than yours. Once we accept that premise, then we also have to accept the corollary that, well, hey, sometimes people are gonna be crazy and violent to other people, but--say it with me now--"that's just the price of being free."
And because there is still this twisted, bent, diabolical impulse inside us to value ourselves more than the lives of others, we collectively just accept that logic whole hog. We don't want to give up teaching our children the ways of war--whether on the grand scale of nuclear missiles and drone strikes, or the collective agreement just to get used to mass shootings as part of our way of life, or the small-scale daily choices we make to grab more for ourselves and edge someone else out. We are deeply invested in the ways of war, the myth of redemptive violence, the lie that more swords and spears can make us "safe" from danger, and the logic of me-and-my-group-first. We are entangled in them, so deep down, we are threatened when prophets start painting pictures of being disarmed and having our weapons turned into plowshares and pruning hooks. We are so enmeshed in defining our "success" in terms of having more than our neighbor next to us that we are troubled by Micah's vision of everyone being satisfied with their own vine and their own fig tree.
Let's just be honest here: Micah can talk all he wants, and for the sake of looking pious we will nod and say our "Amen" when his words are written, but deep down our problem is that these self-absorbed hearts of ours don't want to have to listen to him.
But here is grace for us on this day. Despite our "children's warring madness" as the old hymn puts it, God refuses to give up on speaking this vision to us. God refuses to accept our self-destructive self-centeredness as the last word. And just at the point where we are all collectively willing to accept that death and violence are "just how it is," just at the point where we are all getting oddly comfortable with tuning out our attention from news reports about ethnic cleansing in southeast Asia, or saber-rattling on the Korean peninsula, or terrible violence in our own country, God keeps saying, "There is coming a day--and you can dare to step into it now--when swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks." The living God keeps saying, "There is a life of peace and wholeness, a life beyond being ruled by fear, on the other side of swords and spears and missiles and rifles. There is a way to live with one another the way I intended all along." The same living God keeps interrupting our war lessons to our children and saying, "You do not have to see yourself as more important than everyone else on my green earth. And you do not have to be threatened or afraid that I love your neighbor as much as I love you. You do not have to feel insecure that they can have their own life under their own vines and fig trees while you have yours. You do not need to be ruled by fear any longer."
If we are honest, there is much inside us that doesn't want to listen to such words from the prophets. But here is good news on this day: God doesn't stop speaking what we need to hear.
There is a good life beyond our bloodthirsty self-centeredness, beyond our swords and spears and everything else. And God invites us on this day to be a part of letting it begin among us now.
Lord God, pull us into your future, beyond our self-centered indifference.
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