In the face of hopelessness: a Sermon on 9 December, 2007

by Vic Thiessen

The lectionary reading for today comes from the book of Isaiah, the first ten verses of chapter 11. It’s a relatively familiar passage but it’s the kind of passage we tend to take for granted rather than giving it the deeper reflection it deserves. Having said that, I am not intending to do a thorough exegesis, but simply to offer my own reflections, with hopefully a few unique twists and turns. Read Isaiah 11:1-10.

When I read this passage a week ago, I was reminded of a U2 song I had just been listening to, “Peace on Earth” from the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Not the most joyous of Christmas songs! In fact, it conveys, to me at least, a sense of hopelessness: Hope and history won’t rhyme, so what’s it worth, to say “peace on Earth”? And yet it was precisely its sense of hopelessness which made me think of this song when I read the passage in Isaiah. This passage was written at a time when the words written by Bono also described the situation in Judah. If we look back at the preceding chapters of Isaiah, we see that God is judging Judah for its many iniquities, especially its failure to do justice; to look after the poor and the oppressed.

As an example, let me read a few verses from the first half of Isaiah 1 and the first three verses of Isaiah 10 (read Isaiah 1:4,7,11,14-17; 10:1-3). The result of Judah’s failure is that its enemy (in this case, Assyria) will lay waste to the land of Judah. There will be nothing but stumps left. As Bono says, there weren’t many trees to begin with, and those that were there have been cut down and used as weapons of war. A lack of justice, of care for the needy, has led to war, destruction and desolation. This is the context of Isaiah 11 and, unfortunately, it is still the context of our lives today, as Bono reminds us. Failure to look after the Earth and its people leaves us still expecting nothing but war and devastation; a hopeless situation.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of a recent newspaper article referring to the UN climate change conference happening in Bali, Indonesia. The article stated that it is already too late to prevent many of the devastating consequences of climate change (like those caused by an 8-degree temperature rise in the Arctic over the next fifty years) and that all we can do now, if we act quickly enough, is try to limit the devastation. It sounded pretty depressing and hopeless to me.
And reading Michael Northcott’s brilliant A Moral Climate, which links climate change to our neoliberal capitalist economic system (with the poverty it produces) and the negative effects of globalisation (including increased usage of non-renewable resources which fuel climate change), doesn’t help.

What it does do is reinforce the prophetic words of Isaiah that predict destruction as the consequence of not looking after the earth and its people. We, too, seem to be living in a land of stumps. Watching recent popular TV shows supports the impression that people, especially young people, feel almost paralysed by fear, hopelessness and despair as they contemplate terrorism, war, poverty and environmental disaster. There is apparently no confidence in humanity’s abilities to intelligently work its way out of this mess. The only solution seems to be developing superhuman powers that provide a quick fix. Where are Clark Kent or time-stopping Hiro or the X-Men or the 4400 when you need them? Despair seems to be the only reasonable response left to us.

And in the world of Dawkins and Hitchens, a world with no God, perhaps that would be true. But it is precisely to a context of hopelessness and despair, to a land of stumps like ours, that Isaiah writes: "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." The land is not dead; Judah has not been forgotten forever. From the line of David, son of Jesse, there will come a Messiah who will bring life back to the land, who will show us the way out of this devastation and into a kingdom of peace and justice.

Isaiah goes on to describe this Messiah’s character, the nature of his rule and the nature of the kingdom he will usher in. Let’s take a closer look at these.

The foundation of the Messiah’s character is the guidance of God’s spirit. Isaiah says, "The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him." As a result of being guided by God’s spirit, the Messiah will have six other spiritual features: wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge and fear of the Lord. I will return to these later.

The second feature of Isaiah’s description focuses on the nature of the Messiah’s rule or the principles by which he will judge. In verse 3, we read: He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear. What does that mean? Well, the clue to interpreting this is found in the next verse: But with righteousness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. This suggests that, in the time of Isaiah, the common way to judge in Judah was by the appearance of wealth and the arguments of high-priced lawyers; in other words, people successfully justifying their behaviour toward the poor and oppressed.

This is not the way the Messiah, God’s chosen representative, will judge. The Messiah will have a preferential bias in favour of the poor. As followers of God’s chosen one, we are to have the same preference, the same bias and compassion, for the poor, the weak, the humble and the meek. Note that the violent images in the second half of this verse relate to the mouth and breath of the Messiah, suggesting that the words of the Messiah will condemn the oppressors as he judges on behalf of the poor.

In verse 5, it is interesting that Isaiah uses the image of righteousness and faithfulness as the undergarments of the Messiah: the belt or loincloth around the loins and the waist. It was a way of saying that nothing would be closer to this ruler than righteousness and faithfulness to God and God’s way. Righteousness and faithfulness are equated with justice for the poor and weaker ones in society. Equity does not then mean treating all people the same, whether rich or poor, but acting in favour of the weaker ones.

We are approaching the tenth anniversary of a massacre that occurred when a government did the opposite of this, deliberately mistreating and even killing the indigenous poor of its country. I am referring to what happened in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. You’ll recall that in the mid-90’s the Zapatista Army of National Liberation led a defensive violent rebellion in Chiapas against this mistreatment.

At the time, there was a group of pacifist Christians in Chiapas who agreed with the goals of the Zapatistas but disagreed with their means. They called themselves Las Abejas (The Bees) and their goal was to non-violently confront injustices against the indigenous communities. One of these communities was called Acteal. On the 22nd of December, 1997, the members of this pacifist Tsotsil Mayan community were praying for peace in their Catholic chapel when a group of state-trained paramilitaries surrounded the chapel and proceeded to slaughter every member of the community they could find. In the end, 45 people, including 21 women (four of them pregnant) and 15 children, were killed.

Government soldiers apparently looked on from just a few hundred meters away and may even have supplied the weapons for the massacre. The Mexican government had hoped that the slaughter would be so thorough that no one would ever hear of it, but some members of the community survived to tell the tale. The government then had to find ways to cover it up by attributing the massacre to an internal quarrel between members of the same Mayan peoples. Given the number of Mayans Mexican soldiers had already killed between 1995 and 1997, for supporting the Zapatista movement, this lie was never taken seriously within Mexico, but the world at large took relatively little notice of the horrific massacre.

But I am not reminding you of this atrocity to depress you further. A film about the massacre, called A Massacre Foretold, directed by Nick Higgins from Scotland, was released this summer. I was sitting beside Nick all day at the ecumenical Peacemaking in Film conference at the University of Edinburgh in July and had a chance to talk with him about the film. He was living in Mexico at the time of the massacre and was one of the few western observers allowed at the scene. When his doctorate on the massacre failed to get enough exposure, Nick became a documentary filmmaker just to spread the word about this atrocity and expose the complicity of the Mexican government.

The current Mexican administration recently indicted 18 Tsotsil men for the slaughter who are now serving 25-year sentences, but the government leaders of the time, who covered up the massacre and probably had a hand in planning it, have not been touched. Nevertheless, this film, which you should make sure you see when it comes on TV, exposes the government complicity and is spreading the word of this complicity all over the world.

Film and the internet, for all their flaws, are making life more difficult for those who want to oppress people and cover up their crimes. That is a sign of hope. Another sign of hope is the response of the 3000 members of Las Abejas after the massacre. After the Christmas Day funeral, they met to decide whether to continue in the way of pacifism. They struggled with the question but kept coming back to one foundational truth: “Jesus would not want us to hurt anyone.” Today, Las Abejas is composed of people from 48 indigenous communities in the highlands of Chiapas. They continue to work for peace and to demonstrate their solidarity with social struggles by issuing statements that denounce violence and through actions centered around fasting and prayer. In November 2006, 100 men and 100 women, members of Las Abejas, organized a peace and justice caravan to Oaxaca, to show their support for the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan People (APPO) and denounce the repression and violence perpetrated by the state and federal governments, delivering at least three tons of food, water, and medicine to the APPO.

This sign of hope, intentionally following the way of Isaiah’s Messiah, points us toward the future envisioned by Isaiah in the last half of the passage we are looking at today. It is a vision of the future with which we are all familiar. We have pictures of wolves living with lambs instead of eating them, leopards lying down with kid goats instead of devouring them and so on. And all of these wild things will be led around by a little child - without it getting eaten either. Even deadly snakes come into the picture, with infants and toddlers playing fearlessly over the holes in which they live.

Is this idealistic vision supposed to remind us of the Garden of Eden, of a time when there was harmony between people and between people and God and between people and the animal kingdom? The proclamation of the prophet here is that with the Messianic kingdom of peace and justice, such harmony can be restored. Humanity can return to the peace and harmony of the Garden of Eden by following the way of the Messiah, this representative of God’s peace and justice.

The Garden of Eden was a peaceful place. Tradition has often held that the Garden of Eden was located in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and that the cradle of civilization was located there. Is it not tragically ironic, then, that people claiming to be God’s representatives and representatives of God’s Messiah have devastated that land and caused untold suffering of its people for the past sixteen years?

In verse 9, we read: "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." What a beautiful vision. There will be no more violence on God’s holy mountain, by which is meant all the land of Yahweh, because the earth will be full of the knowledge of God. Having a knowledge of God means understanding that violence is not the way forward. It’s so simple and yet people who claim to have knowledge of God continue to think that there can be a way forward which involves violence. Where God’s knowledge is present, there is peace and, based on the words of Isaiah which preceded this verse, there is justice.

The depressing things I have talked about today suggest that there is not much knowledge of God in our world. So is there really hope for the future or is this "return to Eden" vision just a prophet’s delusion? Are those who dream of, and pray for, a world of peace and justice destined to be massacred?

Perhaps they are. But if we believe in God, in the God of Isaiah and of the Messiah he foretold, then we know the day will come when the earth is full of the knowledge of God, when the lion and the lamb will lie down together. Knowing this, we can persevere in hope, but it is not the kind of hope in which we wait passively for that great day to come. It is the kind of hope in which we see ourselves, like Las Abejas, being part of the process of educating people into the knowledge of God. This is what Jesus, who, as we read in verse 2, possessed the spirit of knowledge, was all about. We are called to follow the wisdom, understanding, counsel and knowledge of God which Jesus passed on to us.

I think it is significant that Isaiah’s vision of the future only mentions children. As those of us watching Sleepless in Seattle heard last night, from an 8-year-old in the film, children are still pure and more in touch with cosmic forces. That is almost the sense of these verses: that returning to Eden requires the innocence of children, of humans who have not yet been tainted by failure and despair. It is in our children that we can nurture the hope for the future. It is our children and our children’s children who will lead us into the future envisioned by Isaiah. But only if they have a knowledge of God, not just so they can have hope in the future but also so they know how to turn that hope into reality. The responsibility to pass on that knowledge lies on those of us who are no longer children.

I heard recently that children today are even more stressed and afraid about the future, because of things I have already mentioned, than my generation was when we were practicing hiding under our desks in case of a nuclear strike. As Michael Northcott reminds us, the politics of fear, even seen in important educational efforts like An Inconvenient Truth, is not the way forward. The way forward lies not in fear but in Jesus and the knowledge of God, the kind of knowledge which will make the care of creation an automatic reflex in the heart of all people.

To Bono, I say: Jesus has thrown us drowning people a line. He has shown us the way of love and compassion, of peace and justice, of the reign of God, that is a very real hope for us all and that can indeed bring peace on Earth.