“Change Is Coming”
World HIV/AIDS day was December 1st. The first global World HIV/AIDS day was in 1988. A lot of things have changed since 1988, but according to the experts there are still 38 million people living with the HIV virus in the world today. In many places they have to deal not only with this terrible disease but with the social stigma that comes with it. As I was preparing for this morning, I knew that I wanted to remember World AIDS day. AIDS and other pandemics and epidemics remind us that we are all connected in a web of mutuality. Gender, race, nationality, income, it does not make any difference where you live, you are not immune. What happens somewhere in the world is connected to everywhere. We are bound together in a sacred web of mutuality.
I also wanted to say something about Nelson Mandela today. He was the first President of South Africa. He served in that position from 1994 to 1999. Tomorrow, December 5th, would have been his 95th birthday. On this Second Sunday in Advent, we light the Peace Candle. Nelson Mandela was a peacemaker. He and Frederik Willem de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. De Klerk was the embodiment of apartheid. He represented everything Mandela stood against. As a peacemaker, Mandela said, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy, then your enemy will become your partner.” The means have to be consistent with the ends we hope to achieve. If we want peace, we have to make peace.
So, I want to remember World AIDS day and Nelson Mandela today, on this Peace Sunday. Now that I have done that, let me turn to the text from Isaiah and the image of the Peaceable Kingdom. In a world scared by AIDS, plagued by militarism and homophobia and sexism and poverty and all the other ills of our age, we need positive images of peace. Sadly, the prospects for peace are not bright. One of the lessons from the war in the Ukraine is that nations need to be armed with nuclear weapons if they don’t want to be invaded. We are entering into a new Cold War. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction will soon replace the current notion of pre-emptive and perpetual war. Unless political leaders make better choices, the world will be once again knit together with nuclear tipped needles commanded by unmanned drones. Bob Dylan’s question, “How many deaths will it take, ‘til too many people have died?” is our question.
Isaiah was not naive when he imagined the Peaceable Kingdom. He was a political insider. King Uzziah was his cousin. He understood political realities. The backdrop to our reading in Chapter Eleven is found in Chapter Six. In this chapter we learn that Isaiah became a prophet in the year that King Uzziah died. In my reading of the text, after Uzziah died, Judah fell into a civil war. Isaiah describes it as a time when people could see but not perceive, hear but not understand. After he witnessed the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “Life is mean, brutish, nasty and short.” People could see but not perceive, hear but not understand. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah turned to the Lord to ask, “How long will this go on?” And God told him that the chaos will continue until the cities lie in waste without habitation, the houses are empty, and the land is utterly desolate. There will be nothing left but the sump of a tree. But this stump, this remnant is a holy seed.
Chapter Eleven picks up where Chapter Six ends. In Chapter Eleven we read, “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse.” The new leaders will be unlike the leaders who fought in the civil war. They will lead with wisdom and understanding. They will know that life is an interwoven web of mutuality. The wolf and the lamb, the lion and the sheep shall lie down together.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a political philosopher who was troubled by Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom. He believed that the organizing principle of society was the will to power. To the victor belongs the spoils. The strong should write the rules of the road. The powerful and the privileged should govern the weak. He said that the only way to achieve the kind of society Isaiah envisioned was if the weak wrote the laws, because then the laws would restrain the powerful and protect the weak. In Isaiah’s vision, the organizing principle of society is not the will to power; but the strength to love.
To achieve this society, Isaiah said, “a child shall lead them.” Children are the canaries in the coal mine. The well-being of the children is the measure of a good society. A society that cares for and provides for the children is morally and spiritually strong. Alas, by this measure our society is neither morally nor spiritually strong. The proposed 2023 budget is a moral document that allocates more than $800 billion to the Pentagon. This budget includes money for the next generation B-21 bomber–the Raider. Each of these bombers will cost $750 million. At least twenty of them are scheduled to be based in South Dakota. Eight hundred billion dollars, seven hundred and fifty million dollars, but we cannot afford 7 days of paid sick leave for railroad workers. We cannot afford decent housing and adequate accessible healthcare for all. Every day we hear about the threat of wage inflation, but nary a word about war inflation. Eight hundred billion dollars.
After the war, after the houses are empty and the fields are desolate, a new shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse. A remnant will rise up. A new society will begin. In Matthew’s gospel, John the baptizer says, “Repent. The kingdom of God is a hand.” What does this kingdom look like to you? What is this “stump of Jesse?” What is the shoot of newness? A few years ago, a television personality announced that for her Jesus was a White male. She was roundly criticized for that statement. But I give her credit for imagining a Christ who touched her life. Some years ago, I visited a church in Cabrini Green. It was then a housing project in Chicago. It was the worst, most violent, housing project in the nation. It was so violent that neither the police nor the fire department wanted to go there in response to a 911 call, because they feared it would be an ambush and they would be killed. But I was there, crazy as it was. Walking through the bombed-out buildings. I was there with a church group. All around Cabrini Green there was nothing but liquor stores and gun shops. But in the center of the project there was a church, and in the church there was a Black Jesus and a Black Joseph and a Black Mary, afros and all. They were there and they spoke to the people about God’s love and holy hope. A shoot from the stump of Jesse.
I ask it again. What does the shoot from the stump of Jesse look like to you? Can you imagine a transgender Jesus? A female Christ? An Asian Christ? An HIV/AIDS Christ? Can you imagine a Christ who is not only an advocate for the poor, but a Christ who is truly poor, born in a barn? John the Baptizer calls us to repent, to imagine a society that is different from the society we live in today. We can imagine this society not just because we want it to be so, but because we believe that in the beginning God created the world as an act of love, and love remains the basic law of life. Love is the DNA of creation. And this love became a human being and dwelt among us full of grace and truth, and we have beheld its glory. Let me close with these words from Mandela, “Keep your head pointed toward the sun, and your feet moving forward. Change is coming. Change is coming.