The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples 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.” (Isaiah 2:1-3a)
It's scandalous--isn't it?--and yet it's completely right.
It would have been shocking to the first ears to hear these words, and yet somehow they are also exactly what we are aching for.
This passage, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, would have been simultaneously mind-blowing and soul-comforting when the prophet Isaiah first spoke these words. Isaiah envisions God gathering peoples from every land and nation, crossing boundaries and borders, all to be welcomed into the very heart of Judah. There are no quotas, no check-points, and no turning people away because they come from a poor country or a nation that is in distress. And God draws them into an unlikely cohort to learn the ways of God's justice, mercy, and goodness.
It would have been startling enough for Isaiah's listeners in Judah to hear that there was coming a day when people from all the surrounding nations would come into their own land, not as a threatening invasion of foreign armies, but as welcome immigrants and eager students who are seeking to learn God's ways. But Isaiah goes further than that. He insists that all these people will come streaming in to the very center of Judah, in its capital, and beyond that, to the very Temple of God, to "the house of the God of Jacob." That was revolutionary! The Temple was supposed to be holiest place among the holy people of God! In the inner courts of the Temple were chambers that only the high priest could enter, and only on certain days of the year, at that! For many in ancient Israel and Judah, the exclusivity of the Temple was part of that holiness--it was the space where no impurities, no corruption, and no foreign gods were allowed. By extension, many assumed that also meant no foreign people were allowed in, because they would come with their pagan cultures and heathen ways and would infect the "good" and "godly" Respectable Religious people of Israel and Judah.
For many in Isaiah's time, the default setting for their piety was fear of outsiders--that the pure and holy things and people needed to be kept away from "the other," so as to avoid "contaminating" the good people and the sacred objects. But Isaiah flips the script and imagines God deliberately gathering those "outsiders" precisely for the purpose of welcoming them into the very holiest place to be taught by none other than The Holy One of Israel. The picture of God's promised future, in other words, is not of God whittling away the less desirable or the unacceptable ones until a pure group of spiritually elite people are left, like when you are cutting an onion and throw away the outer layer. Rather, the image is of God bringing people inward, gathering outsiders into a new kind of community whose worthiness doesn't depend on where they came from, and whose acceptability is authorized because God says they are accepted. When Isaiah envisions countless crowds of people coming from across every border on student visas to learn the ways of God, he isn't afraid or threatened--he is hopeful. If there are limits, caps, or criteria of worthiness for who can come in, the prophet Isaiah doesn't know about them. This wide welcome is God's doing, he says.
I find myself grateful this year that Advent begins with this kind of an image, because even if it sounded outrageous to the first ears who heard Isaiah's words, this is really our deepest hope. We long for this world that is fragmented and divided to be put back together again. We wait for the fault lines between groups, nations, cultures, and peoples to be repaired. We hope for this fractured humanity, which is all we've ever known, to be healed and reconciled. And for us who have been outsiders--we who come from Gentile background ourselves--our reason for belonging is that God has chosen to do exactly what Isaiah announced. God has brought us into the new community of God's people, regardless of where we had come from or what our stories had been, and God has declared that we belong in Christ. That belonging was never on the basis of our goodness or our sameness to other people. It has always been because it is God's good pleasure to create a people from every background, language, and culture. It has always been God's design to make of us a found family--defined not by DNA and shared biology, but by God's mercy.
I'm reminded of the insight of theologian David N. Field, who wrote, with our own day in mind, "Migrants remind the church that it is the eschatological people of God which transcends, critiques, and subverts the dominant values of society by including the strangers, the excluded, the exploited, and the oppressed. The church should be a community whose identity is defined by its preferential option for strangers, migrants, and all whom the dominant society excludes, scapegoats, oppresses, and exploits--racism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism are incompatible with this community." I think he and the prophet Isaiah are on the same wavelength, even though they are separated by some twenty-seven centuries. Both Field and the biblical prophet are saying that God is creating a deliberately different kind of community, one which brings in people from every place and language, especially those who are looked down on or pushed aside, and that our calling as the people of God is not to be ashamed of that surprising mix of people, but to call attention to it. The diversity of peoples who have come to belong in Christ is how you know this isn't just another human club or society of the likeminded! The differences in where we have come from are part of how you can tell something divine is going on here!
Isaiah is teaching us what to hope for in this ancient vision of his--and it's not for a future in which "our group" is kept hermetically sealed off from "those people." Isaiah is teaching us to hope for a day when doors and gates are flung wide open so that all people can be welcomed into the presence of God. He is teaching us that God will really accomplish what, deep down, we have truly been aching for: a place for all of us to belong, no matter our backgrounds, stories, or differences. Isaiah's message is scandalous at first blush, because it flies in the face of our gut impulse to fear "the other" and turn them away in the name of godliness and good order. But it is also exactly what we need to hear, because it reminds us that God will indeed heal the divisions that artificially separate us and gather us into God's own presence at the last. And if that's where human history is headed, it is worth being oriented toward that kind of future now.
Lord God, draw us along with all peoples into your presence, and teach us your ways.
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