Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 28, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and you may have noticed a few changes this morning. We did include a children’s time in this morning’s service. That’s a big change for us and a wonderful thing, but it’s not one of the changes I’m talking about. I’m talking about smaller changes. The flags above the church door are a different color. They’re purple now. For the last five or six months they’ve been green, mostly. We have a fancy, preprinted bulletin cover. It’s mostly purple too. And the Advent wreath is set up. Most of its candles are purple too.

Why all the purple? Well, in Christian liturgy, purple is the color of waiting, of anticipation, of expectation. Advent is a season of waiting, of anticipation, of expectation. So the color of Advent is purple. Advent stretches from the fourth Sunday before Christmas-today-through Christmas Eve. It is a time of preparation for Christmas. It is a time of anticipating the birth of Christ. And because for us Christians the birth of Christ represents the coming into the world of God Incarnate, God made human, Advent is, for us, a time of waiting for God. It is a time of waiting for the unique coming of God into the world and into our lives that we celebrate at Christmas.

I’ve been thinking about Advent a lot over the past few weeks, and a question popped into my head that somehow just won’t go away, namely: Where to we need God to come into the world today? So I’m going to devote my sermons this Advent to that question. Where does the world need God today? Where do we as a congregation need to God to come into our lives? Where do people generally need God to come into their lives? Where do I need God to come into my life? These are some of the questions I hope to address in my sermons during Advent.

So when I read the lectionary passages for this first Sunday of Advent, I approached them with these questions in mind. And bang! Right off the bat, in the very first reading, I was hit with one perhaps obvious but nonetheless profound answer to my question about where the world needs God today. That’s the passage from the second chapter of Isaiah, the famous swords into plowshares passage that appears also in virtually identical form in the fourth chapter of Micah. It is one of my absolute favorites in all of Scripture. You’ve heard me quote many times when prayers for peace are offered during our prayer time after the sermon. I used Micah’s version of it as one of the Scripture readings in my ordination service. I think it is one of the most powerful and one of the most beautiful passages in all of Scripture, and it certainly addresses the question: Where do we need God to come into the world today? Let’s take a closer look at it.

In form it is, in the Isaiah version, a prophecy of the prophet Isaiah about the future of the Jewish state of the day and of its capital city Jerusalem. It is a vision of all the people of the earth streaming to Jerusalem and to the Temple of Israel’s God for instruction in God’s ways. Isaiah tells us that when all the people are instructed in God’s ways, there will be no more war. Rather than resolve conflicts through war, people will submit their disputes to God for arbitration: "He [that’s God] shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples...." It is a vision of the people discerning God’s will together and then working to do God’s will in the world. When the people do that, they will have no more need for weapons: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." The instruments of war will be transformed into the instruments of peaceful cultivation so that all may be fed in peace. There will be no more war: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." The faculties of the world’s military academies will be out of work, for there will be no more need to learn the ways of war. Maybe they can find work wielding those plowshares and pruning hooks. In any event, this passage is Scripture’s promise of a world at peace, a world in which the military does not have first claim on our human talent and our material treasure because people have come to their senses, turned to God, and repudiated war.

It sounds like a pipedream, and maybe it is. But I have to tell you this morning that in my opinion there is no more pressing issue in the world today than the issue of war and peace. Saving the environment comes close; but if we can’t get war under control, we won’t need an environment because we won’t have a future. War and military expenditures threaten to eat us alive, and by "us" I mean us Americans. We are currently engaged in a war that many of us believe is unjustified and unjustifiable. That’s perhaps a matter of opinion, but let me give you some statistics on American military spending that are not a matter of opinion that you may not be aware of. This year, 2004, American military spending in the Defense Department and Energy Department budgets was projected to $400,100,000,000.00-4.1 billion dollars. That amount is 50.1% of the discretionary spending over which Congress has control. It is nearly one half of all global military spending. It is six times the military expenditures of Russia, which ranks No. 2 in such spending worldwide. It is more than the expenditures of the next 25 largest military spenders combined. At this rate, our country’s military spending just during the course of this sermon will be more than $11,387,175.00. That’s your money and it’s my money. It’s all of our money, more than any of us will ever see in a lifetime, probably more than everyone in this room combined will ever see in a lifetime, spent on war in only 15 minutes.

Now, maybe those numbers don’t shock and appall you as much as they shock and appall me. Maybe you’re saying: All that military spending is necessary because we live in a dangerous world. Isaiah’s vision is nice, but it is indeed a pipedream. Maybe God will bring it about some day. After all, you just said we’re waiting for God; but we can’t do it. While we wait for God, we have to armed and dangerous so that the other armed and dangerous people in the world won’t mess with us. In the world’s terms that argument makes sense. This morning, however, let me ask you to hear me out as I try to present another point of view, one that I think is more faithful to the Bible’s vision of a world without war.

We are followers of Jesus Christ whose birth we are now anticipating, and being followers of Jesus Christ has consequences. The major consequence is that we are called to follow his way in the world and not to follow the way of the world. Jesus’ way was the way of peace, it was the way of swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. He preached nonviolence. He did not preach passivity, however. He preached creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. The Church of the Brethren, one of whose local churches my wife Jane serves in Wenatchee, puts out a bumper sticker that reads: "When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he meant don’t kill them." Self defense may or may not be justifiable in Christian terms, but the massive spending that we do on the military, spending that is so massively disproportionate to any conceivable threat we face, does not reflect any legitimate need for self defense. Maybe we can accept military spending for self defense. We cannot accept the military spending we are presently doing. That spending forces us, metaphorically at least, to turn plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears. It is the opposite of Isaiah’s vision, and of Jesus’, the one whose birth we can’t wait to celebrate. That’s my take on it. I ask you at least to consider it.

Now, whether you agree with me about these things or not, this discussion begs one very important question: What does it mean to wait for God? Waiting can mean a couple of different things. It can mean sitting and doing nothing. When we sit in a doctor’s waiting room waiting to be called in for our appointment, we’re probably doing nothing except perhaps reading some two or three year old magazine article about something we aren’t really interested in. We wait until the doctor acts and calls us in. Sometimes it feels like we wait forever, but usually we just wait. But I don’t think that’s what waiting means in the Bible. God does not call us to passivity. God does not call us to inaction in the face of injustice, in the face of policies that deny the Kingdom of God, that are grounded in fear and not in trust in God’ vision of peace and abundant life for all God calls us to active waiting. God calls us to lives devoted to helping prepare the way, to prepare for the promised day and to help in its birthing. We need God to come into the world and into our lives, but we can’t wait for God to do it. God needs us to act. God calls us to act. We need us to act, live in trust and hope the way God calls us to live. Our waiting for God must be active, assertive, nonviolent waiting, waiting that prepares the way, that furthers the coming of the promised day. We need God to come into the world and bring us peace. In this Advent season we wait for the coming of God into the world. What are we prepared to do about it? Amen.