November 28, 2010
Daydreaming in Disneyland - Isaiah 2:1-5
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadUnless you have been living under a rock lately, you have heard that Prince William of England and Kate Middleton are engaged to be married. I think they’re shooting for a summer wedding at Westminster Cathedral. Leah and I got married eleven years ago on November 13th, and we moved into our new house in Georgetown, Texas, on Thanksgiving weekend that year. I have been thinking about newly-wed stuff recently, and I remember vividly that when I was engaged I would daydream. I would daydream about living together as husband and wife, about where life would take us, about what we’d end up doing, about the family that we would have. In between all the planning for the guest list and rehearsal dinner and showers and receptions, engaged couples spend a lot of time daydreaming.
At the very least, Prince William’s daydreaming must be very different than mine was. What can he possibly daydream about, becoming a prince or something? He’s already a prince. Would he daydream about getting rich? He’s already rich. It’s the same question that we’re all about to face. When we endure the madness of Christmas shopping, what do we get people who already have everything?
The season of Advent is somewhat about daydreaming. Originally, Advent came at the slowest time of year. In an agrarian society, in which most of the world has lived for most of the time, the crops have all been put up and it’s too early to plant. And besides, it’s dark all the time. There’s nothing much to do, then, but to reflect, or – to put it bluntly – daydream. In fact, I can’t help but think that Isaiah was daydreaming here, inspired daydreaming, but still daydreaming. The vision that he had seen was not at all the reality in which he lived.
had gone amiss in Isaiah’s country, Judah, in Isaiah’s time, the mid 8th Century BC. Israel was not the geopolitical powerhouse that it once was. In fact, the nation of Israel had split some two hundred years earlier under King Solomon. Israel was the northern Kingdom, Judah the Southern. Isaiah prophesied to Judah. By Isaiah’s time, Judah was weak. It was surrounded by enemies, Egypt to the south, Syria to the north, and even Israel to the north. In fact, Judah was even invaded by the Syrians in 735, but we read in 2nd Kings 16 that God saved them from defeat.
Now I give you that little history lesson just to tell you that Judah’s situation was a little precarious, but not precarious enough to do much about it, and certainly not precarious enough to do much with God about it. In the course of human history, after all, people typically don’t want much to do with God unless things get really bad. We (and I use that word very loosely) don’t run to God typically until we have exhausted every other viable option.
And Judah had not exhausted every other viable option. Things were just good enough for them think they were doing alright. So it was very hard, then, for Isaiah to tell them that the way they were living would lead to destruction. It was also hard for Isaiah to tell them, even despite that destruction, that God was still very much in the business of a new creation, where their swords would be beat to plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. It’s really hard to daydream when you’re content, isn’t it? If you’re content, swords into plowshares doesn’t mean much. Maybe you could look at it this way. The Washington Post estimated in 2008 that the war in Iraq would cost somewhere around $3 trillion. It confirmed that report this past September, and said that the cost might even be higher. Yet, according to the US Department of Education, we spent $536 Billion in K-12 education in 2004-05, or roughly 1/6 of the total Iraq war. Beating our swords into plowshares would be somewhat equivalent of diverting that $3 trillion to education, which – as Peter Gorman, and any parent, student, or teacher can attest – is sorely needed now.
But so is defense spending sorely needed now. That’s the world that we live in, broken and dangerous as it is. And yet it’s not really bad enough to do much, to either confess our own faults for the way it is, or even to imagine something better. America, somewhat like mid-8th Century Judah, is in a precarious situation. We’re in a two-front war, with North Korea coming dangerously close to making a three-front war. Our national debt has spiraled out of control. Our schools are broke and re-segregated. Jonathon Kozal is a prolific writer in the field of education and he reported in an episode of Charlotte Talks this past Wednesday that public schools in New York City look identical to public schools fifty years ago in Mississippi, or North Carolina.
We know, don’t we, that things are not as they should be. Things are not good in many ways. And yet, they are just good enough for us not to do much about it, or least not to imagine a day when the world will be right, when Isaiah’s prophesy will come true, when nations really won’t go to war anymore, and when the Word of the Lord is both heard and heeded by all of God’s children. It’s hard for us to imagine the Kingdom of God when our own kingdoms are pretty good. It’s a little bit like daydreaming in Disneyland. I’ve been to Disneyworld in Florida. Leah and I went with her family right after Christmas several years ago. It was seventy degrees that day, and we went to some magical world where it was snowing. Disneyworld is a daydream. That’s the whole point.
Yet, like it or not, our own little world is a day dream for most people. It is most definitely not how most of the world lives. It is very difficult for us – even if we are not Prince William or Kate Middleton – to listen very intently to Isaiah, even the good prophesies. Isaiah has a lot of doom and gloom. It’s easy to see how Isaiah wasn’t the most popular person in the world. Yet here, it is positive. And yet, because we’re comfortable, not even Isaiah’s positive prophesies affect us all that much.
That’s what Advent is for, to slow down. That’s what we do in Advent. You and your family have a wonderful month ahead of you. Or, it may be a depressing month. You may be celebrating Advent and Christmas without somebody that you loved very much. At the very least, it’s going to be a busy Christmas. You’ve got a lot of busyness to tend to. But you also have Advent to tend to. You’ve got Isaiah to tend to. If you’re going to come to Church, at least, you’re going to have to deal with Isaiah for twenty minutes every week. You’re going to have to daydream. We will take seriously God’s promise that God will make things as they should be.
There will come a day, after all, when everything is right. That day is not now, without question, but even now we can imagine it. “Dogs,” a wise man once said, “are our link to paradise. They don’t know jealously or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring. It was peace.” I love that quote. We’re supposed to hate each other, you know. Dogs are supposed to be our enemies, and we still often mistreat them, but for many of us, they really are a link to, well, heaven, to a world that is right with itself.
James Boyce Park behind my house is another link, at least for me. I take my children there as often as possible. In fact, we went there yesterday, and my two girls took their shoes off in the sand of the baseball field. They turned the baseball diamond into a sand lot, and they got sand all in their hair and smiles all over their faces. It was perfect. Maybe that’s what Isaiah had in mind. I heard a story this past week about the 1st Thanksgiving. I don’t know whether it’s true, but it sure is a good story. The new immigrants from England invited the native Indians over to share a meal with them for all of their help. And even though they would soon be arch-enemies to one another and would stay arch enemies until the entire Native American culture had been wiped off the map, that first Thanksgiving, they were friends. They were the Kingdom. They were a creation, for that day, where everything was right.
Ted Wardlaw of Austin Seminary, my alma mater, told a story of a conference that he attended. The attendees at the conference broke into small groups, and they discussed what they thought the Kingdom would be like. Everybody had their own profound ideas, but the one that stuck out the most was this tough, rusty man telling about his son. The son had been born, the man said, with physical disabilities. He had pushed his son all his life to do things that the doctors said that he could never do, but the father had to live with fact that there were some things that the boy could never do. The Kingdom of God, this man said, would be when he could play a game of one-on-one basketball with his son, and his son would win without letting him win.
That’s the picture that Isaiah paints. That’s the world that we imagine with Advent. It’s not about things. It’s not about the new gadgets that we might rack up at Christmas. It’s about accepting some responsibility for the world’s brokenness. It is about repenting. It is about getting outside of our own little world and imagining a world that God is making right now, even as we speak. It’s about not conceding to the way things are, because from what Isaiah says here, that’s actually the way they are not, or at least will not be. In this Advent season, so much of our world is comfortable. And so much of it is right. But so much of it is also wrong. Yet we have hope this Advent and from Isaiah that it won’t stay that way forever. Only God is forever, and that’s a very good thing. So may we give thanks, and may we rejoice that God is doing something on our behalf, or all of creation’s behalf, that we cannot do. And may we therefore examine our lives, and adjust them accordingly.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
