The Hard Work of Hoping

The Hard Work of Hoping--October 3, 2017

"The 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.

 The cow and the bear shall graze,

     their young shall lie down together;

     and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

     and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

 They 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." [Isaiah 11:6-9]

Don't forget this picture.  Please. 

Don't forget, don't ignore, don't dismiss this vision of God's future...because God's future pulls us toward itself.  It pulls us, draws us like a magnet, leads us in a particular direction toward a particular future. 

And if we forget this vision, we will have let ourselves grow accustomed to headlines where fifty-nine are shot dead in another (what does it say that we even use the word "another"?!) mass shooting. 

If we dismiss this vision, we will have given up on the possibility that there could be another way, and we will have sent the message to our children, "This will never change.  Just get used to it.  This is how the world is now."

If we lose this dream of an ancient prophet, we will have let ourselves off the hook of the hard work of hoping, of stepping into a promised future by living like it is true and real.

If we forget the picture Isaiah of Jerusalem offers us, we will have resigned ourselves to being numb as statistics wash over us, saying, "500 injured in the shooting," or "3.5 million without power or drinking water in Puerto Rico" or "countless kids went hungry last night" or "one more family in our county slept in their car last night while the frost covered the windows and they shivered themselves to sleep."  If we forget Isaiah's vision--and the many similar visions that the Spirit has whispered through prophets and poets and erstwhile-tax-collectors-turned-apostles--we will have given ourselves over to apathy and complacency.

You have to ask yourself, if you read a passage like these surprising words from Isaiah, why he spoke them.  Sometimes we forget, we religious folk, that there were and are reasons for the words that we have come to hold dear.  We forget that the Spirit does not simply inspire oracles at random, but that these words and this vision are meant to do something to us.  We need a vision of God's promised future like this, in order to remind us that the reign of death is not OK.  We need Isaiah's wild-eyed scene of wolves and lambs to remind us that we have come to accept death and violence as "natural"... as "just how it is" ... as "the price of our way of life," but that the living God does not accept these assumptions so readily.  God insists on life--as unnatural as it may sound to our ears and hearts and imaginations, with lions and oxen sharing a manger, or cows and bears lying side by side.

The old order of "you-gotta-look-out-for-yourself-and-protect-your-own-cuz-it's-a-dog-eat-dog-world-out-there" is a lie, but it is a lie we will believe if we do not hold onto words like Isaiah's.  Such visions are hard work to hold onto.  It is hard anymore to hope, when we now expect, every ten to twelve weeks (or less?), to hear another national news story about a shooting... or another global headline about a bombing in a public place... or to hear on a daily basis the latest rumblings of bellicose threats from North Korea, or the latest casualties in Syria.  It is hard anymore to hope, because hope makes one vulnerable to being letdown, disheartened, disillusioned, and disappointed when the world eventually fails to live up to our hopes.

It is hard anymore to hope.  It requires a vision worthy of hoping for, a vision worthy of holding out against the tragedy of the day and the travesty of our passive numbness to it.

That is why God breathes visions like Isaiah's--so that we, even some slim minority voice, even some slender thread within the greater social fabric, we will remember there is an alternative to unending death and unchangeable violence. 

We do not have to accept "Hey, what are you gonna do? It's a dog-eat-dog world" as the ordering principle of the universe. 

We do not have to teach our children that the only way to get by in this world is to hit the other guy first because he might just hit you otherwise.

We do not have to settle for the same old cycle of trotting out our old saws about offering our "thoughts and prayers" for a minute or two and then just going back to life as usual while bracing ourselves for another eruption of death before Christmas time as though there was nothing to be done. 

We do not have to accept the lie that we are powerless to change the way we treat one another, here, right where we are on this day, wherever we are.

We do not have to believe the conventional wisdom that wolves are always gonna eat lambs, and that lions are always gonna eat oxen, so we'd all better be sharpening our own teeth because we should assume that our neighbor is sharpening his.

We need visions like Isaiah's, as preposterous as it sounds to imagine leopards and goats curled up with each other for a nap, to startle us into hope--not as the passive wishful thinking that "maybe it will just all be better in heaven" but hope in the biblical, prophetic sense, of daring to live now as though God's promised future were real.

If you have never been to the beach before, you need someone to tell you, to describe for you, the warmth of the air and the vastness of the ocean, so that you will not think you have to pack your winter coat and clunky snow boots in your suitcase.  You need a vision of where you are headed so that you will know what you can leave behind in the present.  For us, who have never lived in that country of Isaiah's vision, where wolves and lambs and snakes and toddlers can live in peace, we need God to have Isaiah tell us, to describe for us, what God's promised future is... so that we will know we can lay down our hatreds, our apathy, and our complacency.  We need Isaiah's vision of where we are headed, so that we will know what we can leave behind.

So, please... don't forget this picture: "... they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain."  Such a vision will help us today to do the hard work of hoping.

Lord of lambs and wolves, keep speaking to us your promised future, so that we will not settle for accepting the order of the day as the only possibility.