PEACEABLE KINGDOM

December 7, 1986, 11;00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Isaiah 11:1-10
Matthew 3:1-12

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb..... They shall not hurt or destroy in
all my holy mountain;...” --Isaiah 11:6,9 (RSV)
I love this city. I love everything about it... lights and noise

and energy and art and music and sports, but I think what I love best about
the city and where I live in the city is the zoo. Who would have thought
that you could take an evening walk in the summer along a high density,
high-rise, residential neighborhood and hear lions roar? Or on a. morning
jog through the park see, a hundred yards away, a wonderful silver—back
lowland gorilla sitting in his tree-like perch, placidly and regally
pondering the traffic on Lake Shore Drive? Or during a free. hour actually
go find out what the m ic artist/poet William Blake meant...

_—

"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright.
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

"When the stars threw-down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see? .
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"
[Songs of Experience, "The Tiger," stanzas 1

5]

I have always sensed that there is something sacred going on when we
enter into the mystery and.wonder of life expressed in those amazing
animals: that the zoos - for all the wretched treatment and confinement of
life, and for all their exploitation and pandering to curiosity, ,
nevertheless offered the opportunity to know something wonderful about
creation and curselves and, if you will, about God.

By what amazing grace do we share the earth with gorillas and snow
leopards and polar bears? By what astonishing and loving creativity do we
share life with rhinoceroses and whales and wolves? By what wonderful
benevolence are we co-habitants with lambs and lions?

2,700 years ago a Hebrew prophet with a fine poetic touch, and a
knowledgeable sense of the natural order, wrote an oracle about how it
would be when God provides a perfect ruler for the people. There will be
justice for all, he promised. Knowledge of God will fill the earth and as
a result there will be so much peace that even the terrifying wild beasts
will become friendly; natural enemies will lie down together, adversaries
will share their food, and the weakest and most vulnerable of all, the
children, will be safe. Isaiah, the gifted prophet of Jerusalem, 700 years
before Christ, looked out at a world full of violence, threat of war,
oppression and exploitation by the frightfully powerful Assyrian empire and
penned a vision of a peaceable kingdom, the literary beauty of which is
breathtaking, the hope of which is stirring, and the distance from the
reality of the world so great that once we have recited the poetry and
admired the pretty picture, we are not at all sure what to make of it.

There is a famous painting of the scene by American artist Edward Hicks...
He did the scene dozens of times - wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, lion and
ox... The animals in the painting have peculiarly poignant eyes...they
look out at us with innocent, childlike vulnerability... the picture does
not represent reality - as we know it - nor does the Isaiah passage.

Woody Allen quipped that when the lion and lamb lie down together,
only the lion will get back up. "Nice guys finish last," Leo Durocher
. reminded’ us and history has been one tragic illustration after another.
Living in peace - trying to live without violence is no simple matter. J

To hold the vision of peace close to your heart is not necessarily to
be a pacifist. The great American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, learned
that and had the courage to teach it in the days before World War II, when
most of the religious intellectual community, reacting in horror to the
meaningless violence unleashed in World War I, adopted pacifism: and when
the political abhorrence of conflict encouraged the Nazis and when "peace at

any price" was hastening the conflict. In an essay on the topic Niebuhr
' wrote "tyranny continues to grow if it is not registered," and "The gospel
is more than the law of love. The gospel deals with the fact that men
violate the law of love." [The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, "Why the
Christian Church is Pacifist," p. 107, 111]

it is an issue with which the Christian people of South Africa are
stuggling. A group of representatives of South African churches, mostiy
the black churches, have met and drawn up a statement called the Kairos
Document, the essence of which is that it is time, in the name of Jesus
Christ, to resist apartheid... It is a carefully biblical statement. The
National Council of Churches and McCormick Theological Seminary held a
consultation on the Kairos Document in Chicago recently and I was invited
to be one of the American Church representatives to respond to it. Like
most white, middle class American Christians, I found myself urging
moderation, patience, non-violence... But the reality of the situation is
that it isn't that simple: that to be patient and non-violent in the past
has been to corporate with and collaborate with oppression.

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The reality of the situation, for me, was a student at the Lutheran
School of Theology, a mother of three, whose husband, a Lutheran Pastor, is
also a student. They are black South Africans. She spoke quietly and
movingly in a small group about how her children love school in America;
how they had never sat in a room with white children before. She wept when
she spoke of returning home next year. "My son will be 18, ready to be
recruited by the A.N.€. I do not want him to join because he may be
killed, but what can I tell him?"

"When we return I will have to return to the homeland. That means
that I will only see my husband two times a year when he will be permitted
to visit for holiday. He will work in the city and if my son can get a
job he will work in another city and will never see his father because
their holidays will not be at the same time."

"You tell me to be non-violent, you tell my son to be non-violent but
Gandhi was non-violent 40 years before change took place. Can I tell my
children to wait - to be non-violent for 40 years? When babies die
because of injustice, you tell us to wait?"

The trouble is that Isaiah's vision does not represent any reality
with which we are familiar. Reality is that woman's dilemma. Reality is
that the wild beasts who terrified people in the past and could be used as
a powerful metaphor by the prophet - are all but gone. The reality of
history is that the animals whose ferocity made them wonderful subjects for
an improbably peaceable kingdom will prebably not survive many more
decades: wolves, lions and leopards.

We have been created for life in harmony with creator - life in peace
with one another; and the essence of. the human dilemma is eloquently
expressed in that zoo up there. The Afghanistan Leopard,. magnificent. beast
which Isaiah has lying down with the kid, is seriously endangered, I
learned, because of the chemical weapons being used secretly in the war the
Soviet Union is sustaining in Afghanistan. There is some kind of coming full
circle in that, it seems.

; The promise of. peace is in the Bible from. beginning to end. It is
‘the hope which endures through the centuries, through the revolt in Egypt
and the wars to secure the land... through centuries of wars and the
centuries of brutal oppression: in moments of high courage when God's
people rose up against oppressors and died for freedom — to times of
desperate cruelty when they were herded into box cars to be executed by the
millions.” “THé"Hépe never died. We were made for peace. We don't have it.
We were made for that Shalom the Hebrew prophets knew to be a rich,
harmonious well-being. We don't yet have it. Why not? The question must

be asked...

There is nothing clearer, nor more disturbing, than the Biblical
insistence that political peace is related to and results from justice.
And that justice is always defined by how the poor and the weak are getting
treated. Nothing so irritates Presbyterians, I have discovered, than a
short course in Old Testament theology which always links peace with

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_f Sizing up urban violence, and would cut through all the sociological
sophistication and the political maneuvering and suggest that what the
Tribune series on public housing is really saying is that we don't have
peace because we have injustice: that we are on the leading edge of human
disaster because in the past several years we have decided that what the
poor need is less not more concern.

J seine, and justice with the poor. Isaiah would have no difficulty at all

We want our religion to be relevant and realistic and therefore one
of the major objections to the Biblical concern for peace, and these dreams
of Isaiah, are that they are too utopian, too far-out, detached from
reality, too simple. The most telling objection to the utopianism
expressed by the peaceable kingdom is that it creates unreal expectations
and diverts attention from more critical responsibilities. That's a dandy
academic question - by the way - "the uses of utopia."

What is fairly clear to me is that for a variety of reasons,
mainline, middle-of-the-road Christianity doesn't talk much about the
future. In an effort to be relevant and realistic we have relinquished the
Biblical motif of hope and and the project has been taken up by zealous
evangelical Christians and by zealous Marxists, with great success. The
evangelicals propose a utopia totally outside history, after death, the
proverbial “pie-in-the sky-when-you-die," which eliminates the need to
worry much about mundane matters like war, poverty and injustice in the
world. If history is about to end, we really don't need to worry about the a
oil running out, or the extinction of the big animals - or about who is
oppressing whom. The Marxists, on the other hand, promise a utopia, now:

a wonderful classless society in which all barriers are gone and everyone's
needs are met, and there are no more adversaries. The Marxists call the
other-worldly hope - the opiate of the masses. The religious zealots call
the Marxist utopia an idolatry which is so intent on creating utopia that
it ends up creating a new totalitarianism. Both are correct about the
other. There is no voice from the middle however. There is no voice of
realistic hope.

“Without a vision the people perish," the prophet wrote. Isaiah knew
that vision was not a political proposal. Edward Hicks knew he wasn't
drawing a blueprint for a political structure. Someone noted that a lion
that lies down and eats straw with an ox is a very sick lion.

Without a vision we perish. Without hope people wither and die.
Without hope people become desperate and do destructive things. Without
hope people begin to act in w ~bring about war, The value of
Isaiah's vision - professor Gavie Hapber suggests ‘is “an indomitable hope -
based on faith in creation' i e Goodness, the justice of God!
purposes, and the eternal love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.’ [Ibid]. —

What has resulted is an unguenchable hope which bravely emerges in
the most tragic and distressing circumstances - in concentration camps and
hospital beds, in prisons, and in fox holes, that one day there will be
peace... We need that hope desperately today.

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Robert Jay Lifton has analyzed surveys of America's hopes for the
future and has discovered that nuclear weapons and the arms race have
resulted in something called "psychic numbing." We simply cannot deal with
the future we have created for our children. And so part of the
responsibility of those who trust the vision is to penetrate the numbness.
Has the religious vision brought peace. No. No, in that it has not yet
come. No, in that one day last week, almost without our noticing it, a B-52
full of cruise missiles took off and our nation violated SALT II. No, in
that we have decided to mortgage the future in order to prepare for war...
No, in that we have been caught selling arms to sustain a war on one
continent —- and used the profits to sustain a war we have created on

another continent. No, and part of the duty of the church - is to point

it out and lament. But yes, of course it has brought peace by letting

loose in history a haunting dream, a knowledge that there is a better way.
Yes, in that people of the Bible, Jews and Christians have never been
content with injustice and war ~- because they know God's intent. Yes, in
that people who have God's peace in their hearts are free enough and safe
enough to become fearless peacemakers, celebrators of and advocates for
peace.

{ What the ancient vision of Isaiah does is express humanity's dearest
hope - life without fear, threat, violence. It gives us reason toa

“ rededicate ourselves to the Godly work of peacemaking and reconciliation,
confident that God's spirit is on the side of peace. What it gives us is
truth about the internal dynamics of peace and justice, and justice and the
poor.

And one thing further. It is a blessed promise. It suggests that in
God's good time that vision becomes reality, that God's peaceable kingdom
is not only a promise for the future, but in a sense exists now, breaks in
now. The ancient dream reminds us that God's peace is for us personally,
individually as well as collectively, politically. It reminds us that to
know oneself accepted and forgiven and loved by God — is to have peace
which is, in fact, deeper and more profound in external circumstances.

We live most of our lives looking for that peaceable kingdom in which
we know ourselves to be loved and safe and secure. We look across the
. years, you and I, for peace that passes understanding: for peace which
stands though all else falls, for peace which will survive personal tragedy
and war, sickness and the loss of our loved ones, death itself. We look -
across the years ~ for the signs that God's peaceable kingdom is here and
available to us.

And once a year we hear the story that tells us that Kingdom is here
and it is so beautiful that it sounds new each time we hear it. The story
has enormous human appeal, even to those who don't understand it from a
theological perspective, and perhaps don't even believe.

It is a story of a peaceable kingdom, a miniature as it were, a
microcosm which uses as its model that wonderful old vision of Isaiah. It
happens in the City of David, the king — whose father was Jesse. It is
about a branch from those roots. The story tells about a poor and

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vulnerable young woman, a man who is being pushed around by the most
powerful political structure the world knows. It tells about the man and
woman having to stay overnight in the barn and how her baby is born that
night. It tells how the cows and the lambs and the kids are there, and if
you understand this story you can see around the edges, the lion and the
leopard and the wolf.. Like the vision of Isaiah which preceded it by seven
centuries it is a mysterious story, about an unlikely event. But everyone
seems to know that it is true -— that vulnerability and weakness are God's
way: that the hepe for peace is so precious that we must hold it close -
and that for all of us there are promised moments when we know ourselves to
be loved and forgiven and accepted and welcomed by the one who created

us... Everyone knows the story is true because it tells how angels, God's
messengers, come to herald this tiny invasion into the reality of human
history and how a whole multitude of them filled the sky, praising God and
saying

"Glory to God in the highest

and on earth peace among all people
with whom he is pleased." Amen.

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