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As we continue toward the end of the liturgical year, as we draw closer to the cycle once again starting over at the beginning of the Jesus story, we are reminded not only of all that God has done, but also all that God will do. As we touched on last week, though we are coming to an end, it is only the end of the beginning. While much has been accomplished, there is still more to do.
This is part of what I love about the structure of the church year. The church year is a circle that constantly repeats itself. We start the year leading up to the birth of Jesus. Then Jesus is born and begins to be known to the world. Then we come to another season of preparation as we focus on repentance and renewing our relationship with God before we celebrate the fulfillment of God’s love in the Resurrection. Then we settle into a time of growth as we reflect on all of the teachings that Jesus shared with his disciples and others along the way before coming full circle to start back over at the beginning.
So in November each year, we approach the end. But we also recognize that the life of Jesus and the work of those first disciples was only the beginning.
As we return to Advent, we are reminded again that not only are we anticipating the birth of the child, not only are we waiting again for the one who has already been born, but we are also waiting with hope for Christ to return. We are waiting with hope for the kingdom that has been promised. We are waiting for the ultimate fulfillment of all that God has offered.
As we read through this text from Isaiah, we are given a glimpse of what that fulfillment will look like. This segment of Isaiah was likely written in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile. The Hebrew people had returned to their own lands, but they continue to struggle politically and economically. And so Isaiah provides us with the image of a restored and healed world.
In the world that God is creating
...there will be food security, where people will be able to enjoy the fruits of the crops and vineyards they have planted (v. 21); where people will have access to adequate housing, building houses and actually getting to live in them (v. 21); where there will be no more infant mortality; and people will not be cut off in the prime of their lives by the violence of war but instead will grow to be a hundred…(v. 20).¹While the language is obviously different, the eschatological hope here is the same one we find in U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” In areas of Northern Ireland, like Belfast, there was a time when the name of the street on which someone lived could tell you pretty much all you needed to know about a person - their religion, their socio-economic status, etc. In a city often consumed by violence along religious lines, violence between Protestants and Catholics, what street someone lived on could have a huge impact on how one approaches the world around them and how they interact with others. To dream of a place “where the streets have no name” is to dream of a place where those divisions no longer matter, a place where everyone comes together, a place where “wolf and lamb graze together.”
This is the world that God is promising us -- a world where our human-made divisions no longer exist and violence is a thing of the past.
For those of us that are Christians, we believe that this is the very same world that the coming of Jesus ushers into being. In Jesus, God comes fully into the world, becoming flesh and living among us. Jesus makes God’s kingdom, the kingdom foretold by Isaiah, present.
And yet…
As we see in the song by U2, we are still awaiting that kingdom. We are still awaiting the ultimate fulfillment of those promises. We are still watching for the vegetarian lion and the unnamed streets.
We are caught in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” The kingdom of God is here, but it has not yet been fully realized. The world still waits.
And yet…
We continue to live in God’s promise. It is not that Jesus accomplished nothing. Jesus showed us the way to live. He showed us what unconditional love looks like. He showed us that the love of God has no limits. And then the Resurrection shows us the depth of God’s love for us -- death is not the end of the story for God defeats even death itself. As Westley tells Buttercup in The Princess Bride, “Death cannot stop true love. It can only delay it a while.”
And so we are called to live in the kingdom that God has promised. We are called to live in the kingdom that Jesus ushers into being, the kingdom he modeled for us in his life, his death, and his resurrection.
We are, after all, an Easter people. We are a resurrection people. We live in the joy of newness of life. We live in God’s kingdom which exists alongside this world but does not look like this world. In the kingdom of God, we are not judged by our financial wealth, by our political power, by our self-sufficiency. We are judged by our love, our compassion, our mercy, our grace. This is the world that God promises us. This is the world that Jesus showed us how to live in. This is the world we are awaiting, the world we are called to live in even today.
Even though we are coming to the end of the church year, even though we are soon to celebrate again the birth of Jesus, we also look ahead to the life promised to us. As we look ahead we acknowledge the pain of the cross, but we cannot let ourselves get stuck there; the cross is not the end of the story.
That doesn’t mean there is an absence of pain. The resurrected Jesus continues to bear the scars of the cross. When he appears to the disciples, he shows them the marks in his hands, the wound in his side. Those marks remain. But the risen Christ is defined by newness of life, not the scars of death.
As I thought about this image, the promise of life that God gives us, the joy of new birth even as we carry the scars of death with us, I was reminded of the recent Marvel movies. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, half of all living things in the universe cease to exist. We see images of people disappearing, turning to dust. We see the pain on the faces of those still living as friends and loved ones simply cease to be. Maybe we miss it on first viewing, but the world also gets quieter as half the animal sounds in the world cease as well.
As we come to the next move, Avengers: Endgame, we find a world struggling five years on to come to terms with this loss. We see a world that has not yet recovered. There are still signs of the destruction and loss everywhere -- abandoned cars piled in parking lots, a baseball stadium that looks all but abandoned, people still dealing with the shock of loss. But the movie centers around a plan to bring everyone back. This would be resurrection on a grand scale. And at the end of the movie, the Avengers succeed. Everyone is brought back, restored to life.
And yet, as Spider-Man: Far from Home makes clear, the world must still deal with the repercussions of what happened. They still bear the scars. The people are returned to life, but it is not life as it was before. They must figure out how to continue forward while acknowledging all that has happened.
This is the world we live in now. We live in the world of the Resurrection, of new life. A world in which death has been defeated.
And yet…
The scars remain. The trauma is still there. God raises us to new life, destroying death in the process. But God never promises to make things exactly as they were before. In fact, exactly the opposite. God raises us to new life in a world that is not like the one we have known.
The kingdom of God does not look like the kingdoms we are accustomed to. We have no concept for understanding a world where weeping no longer exists. We have no frame of reference for a world in which all live a full life well into old age. We cannot conceive of a world in which violence ceases to exist. We find laughable the idea of the lion eating straw, of natural enemies eating down together without fear.
And yet…
This is the very world that God has promised.
This is the very thing that God is doing.
This is exactly what God will do.
Thanks be to God!
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¹L. Juliana M. Classens, “Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship: Year C, Volume 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 479.