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Isaiah presents to us a vision of what God wants for the world.
All the people of the world will come to God,
and Isaiah speaks of everyone coming to Jerusalem,
For if God had a house it seemed that it would be in Jerusalem.
Everyone will learn God’s ways
and God will arbitrate all disputes.
Because God will settle all disputes, and there will be justice for all,
there will be no need for war or the weapons of war.
John the Baptist twists the vision of Isaiah a bit.
Isaiah says God is going to bring all people together, in peace, in Jerusalem.
John the Baptist says that God is coming to judge the world
make war against evil and destroy all the hurtful evil people in it.
That’s how we will get justice.
This is contrary to Isaiah’s vision in which all people will be saved.
Isaiah was what we call a Universalist.
All people who responded to God would be saved.
If you didn’t respond,
you were simply excluded from all the good things of life.
[This is the same message as everybody’s favorite in the Gospel of John 3:
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Those who believe in him are not condemned;
but those who do not believe are condemned already....
This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world,
and people loved darkness rather than light....”]
[I should note that the Gospel writer John was not the same as the Baptist.
There is yet another John, writer of the Revelation at the end of the Bible.]
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Here is what many scholars now think happened:
Jesus became a disciple of John the Baptist but for a short time.
John preached that God was coming in the future to judge all people.
The only escape was to commit to God,
and show that commitment through baptism.
Jesus joined John by being baptized.
Have you ever noticed that Jesus didn’t baptize anyone?
This is puzzling because one definition of a sacrament
is that it is an action instituted by Jesus.
But Jesus didn’t do it; John did.
Jesus didn’t baptize because he abandoned the teachings of John.
Jesus didn’t demand of people that they repent the way John did.
Jesus didn’t ask people to repent or to change
because his message was different.
Jesus preached that “The kingdom of God has come near;
He probably didn’t say “repent, and believe in the good news.”
I think the word “repent” was added here to connect him to John.
So John said that God was coming soon.
But Jesus said: “the kingdom of God has come near.”
Or he says the kingdom is in your midst or among you,
or he tells parables about the Kingdom
comparing it to various things in nature
or the ways people can treat each other with kindness or mercy.
Live as if the Kingdom were here now,
as if God and not the Romans were in charge, now.
God is ready to intervene in our lives anytime.
Jesus appears not to have worried much about the future.
Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God was a lot like Isaiah’s.
People living under the rule of God in peace.
People gathering around a table, sharing the gifts of God.
Jesus had been a disciple of John, but left John and started his own group.
He only asked fishermen to become fishers of people, not to be baptized.
What happened?
The gospel writers conflated or meshed
the messages of John the Baptist and Jesus.
The result was adding new endings to some of Jesus’ parables
that put into his mouth the ideas
about God coming to judge in the future;
ideas that really belonged to John.
Between the time that Jesus was crucified and the gospels were written
the followers of Jesus experienced frightful, destructive times
in which many thousands died at the hands of the Romans.
Jerusalem was destroyed and many who were not killed
fled elsewhere for their lives.
The experience of this devastation meant that the new Christians
saw everything differently.
Jesus’ message of living the love and peace of the Kingdom
now looked – weak.
So – The gospel writers included in their narratives about Jesus
speeches attributed to him that sound like John
Things like “Two will be in the field; one will be taken; the other left.
Two women will be grinding meal together;
one will be taken and one will be left.”
The stories about Jesus coming again are mostly a message of FEAR.
Many scholars do not think that these are the words of Jesus,
but that the early church wrote them
searching for ways to deal with their dire situation after Jesus had died.
Jesus was gone and had left his followers with teachings
to live in the Kingdom of God now, as if God ruled the world.
We all know how hard that is to do.
One way to express the hope of that better world to come,
was to say that Jesus, because he was the Christ, would come again.
But in the story of the first coming of Jesus, we still find
peacemaking and non-violent resistance to the powers that be.
Jesus’ message wasn’t entirely lost,
but something had gone terribly wrong with the Christian vision
and we are still suffering from it.
Christmas is not about John’s message
of judgment, punishment, and destruction.
Christmas recalls Isaiah’s vision of right living under God.
Christmas is about Jesus’ vision of a better world growing out of our hearts
in communities of trust where people share a meal around a table.
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A better world for all is not a perfect world.
A perfect world is not what life is about.
If we think of all the issues before us, we can find solutions
if we hold to a simple, common vision of a better world,
but with compromises.
So for example, In a perfect world there would be no war,
but this is not a perfect world.
Therefore, we need to be careful what wars we get into,
and we need to restrain ourselves when we go to war,
which is now a stated goal of our military
even though such restraint fails again and again.
Another example. In a perfect world, it is logical to think
that there would be no homosexuality or transsexual changes.
There would be only people who know themselves clearly
as men and women, who are attracted to each other.
But this is not a perfect world, and so we have to find ways
to live with the reality that a small percentage of God’s children
are differently oriented in their sexuality.
It used to be that almost no one would admit to that reality,
but now we mostly all do.
Another example. In a perfect world there would be no abortions,
and no unwanted children, – but this is not a perfect world.
We need to improve the abilities of parents
to raise and educate their children.
We need to help people reproduce responsibly,
And some abortions will be allowed, because it is not a perfect world.
You get the idea.
The question always before us is
How will we live with the realities God seems to have given us?
Only God could bring a perfect world.
The better world is our responsibility.
There are no absolutes.
Only difficult ethical decisions on a case by case basis.
The better world is possible because
we have been given the abilities to make a better life for everyone.
The better world will require hard work, difficult conversations,
compromise, and continual modifications
of laws and policies until we get things not right, but better.
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In order to have a better world, we need a vision of a perfect world.
Sadly I see that there are many people in our country and elsewhere
who have no vision for a better world
or they don’t want a better world, except for themselves.
Or they only want to tear down the world we have carefully built
to improve the lives of as many as possible as much as possible.
“Let those who have ears, hear,” as Jesus used to say.
Dominic Crossan, a great student of the historical Jesus, has in retirement
traveled all over the Biblical world, and he discovered something.
He says: “We know that the prophets and Jesus had a goal and vision
for life that can be summarized as ‘justice’.”
They spoke of the household of God and the Kingdom of God,
where God rules by justice for the poor and oppressed.
But all of the temples, and monuments, and tombstones of ancient Rome
tell us that their goal and vision for life,
that the purpose of their empire was VICTORY.
It was winning. Nothing else, If you won, you had achieved the ultimate.
That was the purpose of life in the Roman Empire.
The vision of Isaiah, and the vision of Jesus is for justice
for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry and thirsty.
Jesus tells us how to get there.
He says: Live now the way you hope things will be in the future.
The Empire of God is in your midst; it is among you.
Make the future present just as we have made the past present
in our celebration of the birth of Jesus.
When we see Jesus in the poor, sick, in prison, or hungry and thirsty,
that’s when the Kingdom of God comes near to us.
In Christmas we celebrate the birth of a king born into poverty,
forced to be a refugee, a member of an oppressed people.
In Christmas we proclaim a king who does not command,
who does not lead armies or make war, but is the prince of peace.
How best should we observe his birth?
