Making Peace! An Advent Sermon: Isaiah 2:1-5

Making Peace! An Advent Sermon: Isaiah 2:1-5

By Austin M. Dennis,
Pastor, FBC, Mt. Gilead, NC

            Less than a decade after WWII, as the world continued its struggle to rebuild, the decorated General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a speech in which he said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”[1]

            Eisenhower said the cost of one modern heavy bomber equates to a half million bushels of wheat, or homes for 8,000 people, or two fully-equipped hospitals, or a brick school in more than 30 cities.

            Today, the military-industrial complex Eisenhower prophetically warned Americans against is a juggernaut. The United States accounts for 48% of the world’s total military spending. Nearly half of each of our personal tax dollars went to war in 2006. The U.S. spends more on swords and spears than the next ten most militarized countries combined.

By diverting the cost of one day in Iraq, we could feed four meals to every child in the world suffering from acute malnutrition.[2] The cost of one day in Iraq equals the full cost of attendance for one year at a public college for more than 17,100 students.[3] The cost of one day in Iraq equals health insurance coverage for one year to 380,900 uninsured children in America.[4] This is what is lost by beating plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears.

            We assume Isaiah’s call for making peace is not directed at us. We assume Isaiah isn’t calling us to do anything. We assume Isaiah’s vision is too idealistic to become a present reality. We assume Isaiah is describing something unrealistic, far away, possibly taking place well into the future. We treat his words as nothing more than romantic poetry. Read quickly and carelessly, this text calls forth images of a smoky mountain in the distance, bright light pouring all around, people skipping down paths together, hand in hand, smiling and laughing as they beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Like a scene from Sesame Street, narrated by Mr. Rogers.

            By making such assumptions, we trivialize Isaiah’s vision for peace. Instead of allowing Isaiah’s words to mold and shape us into habitual peacemakers, we allow ourselves the privilege of molding and shaping Isaiah’s words to serve our own violent habits and practices. Read carelessly, we never see the blacksmith in this text, hunched over his anvil, heating and hammering, reshaping and recasting the weapons of war into weapons of peace.

This is where we fail. We assume that what Isaiah is describing is a vision of heaven, not a vision for how the earth will be under the reign of the Messiah. But this text isn’t describing what we’ll see once we’re dead and buried and safe in the arms of our heavenly Father. This text is describing a way of life for those who will call Messiah their Lord. That means the church. That means us, today.

When Isaiah says, “In the days to come,” he’s prophesying about today, because today we are under the reign of the one whose coming was foretold. Jesus Christ is Lord and King today. Jesus Christ has come and is coming again to judge between the nations. He is the Master who teaches the way of peace, who calls for the tools of war to be melted down and transformed into tools for peace by Holy Spirit-led artisans and craftsmen. So the day is not to come when we rid ourselves of tools for war. The day has come because Jesus Christ has come. His instruction has already gone forth from Zion. The word of the Lord has already come from Jerusalem. But we haven’t been listening.

            In fact, we’ve long ignored our Master’s instructions for making peace. Instead, we’ve placed our hopes in the military functions of our government to bring peace. We’ve not only failed our Master by leaving peacemaking up to the State, but we’ve also failed to show the State an alternative vision of true peacemaking. In doing so, we’ve failed to serve as a moral conscience for the State’s astonishingly misguided immoral actions.

We must find a way to show that violently pursuing national interests under the guise of removing tyrants is immoral. Bribing our nation’s poorest and least educated young people with scholarships for military service is immoral. Teaching our young men and women to shove bayonets into dummies while yelling, “Kill! Kill!” is immoral. Teaching them to sing songs about mutilating their enemies is immoral. Leaving returning veterans to fend for themselves, neglecting to help them when they become homeless, cooping them up in dilapidated hospitals, often rejecting their pleas for psychological and medical care is immoral. Calling dead Iraqi children “collateral damage” is immoral and demonic. And not only have substantial numbers of American churches ignored these immoral actions, many continue to defend and applaud the Masters of these murderous arts and crafts.

            The documentary, Why We Fight, shows how prevalent our country’s military contracts have become in the everyday lives of Americans. In one scene a reporter visits the Raytheon bomb factory and interviews one of the workers, an older woman. As they interview her, she is guiding a huge bomb down an assembly line. She says, "When I see something explode," she admits, "I think, `Did my hands help make that?`" Then she says, "I guess I’d rather be helping Santa make toys."[5]

            It’s as though we’re such good students of the master crafters of war, even we Christians can’t imagine an alternative kind of life, one in which we don’t have to work for a bomb factory.

Professor of preaching at Duke Divinity, Richard Lischer, said in his Lyman Beecher Lectures that during this period of war with Iraq “we have learned more from media analysts about strategic weaponry and military tactics than we can possibly absorb. But morally, we have learned nothing. We know what we can do but are ignorant of what we ought to do. We don’t even have a language for discussing our ignorance.”[6]

            I believe we don’t have the language because we’ve chosen the wrong Master. Without the true Master’s language, we can’t imagine alternatives to violence. Without learning the word of the Lord, Christians can’t have “minds worth making up.”[7]

If we allow the State to be the masters of our imaginations, we forfeit the ability to have our imaginations shaped by the words of the prophets and the words of our Savior. If we leave it to the generals of war to be our masters, we end up rejecting Jesus as our true Master. We can’t worship two Masters. Remember, Matthew says we will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other (6:24). We cannot serve the Master Jesus and the masters of war.

So who’ll be our master craftsman? The one who harnesses our fear of terrorists, or the One who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers”?

            When I was in Israel in 1999, I toured glassblower shops in Jericho. Extraordinarily complex creations adorned the walls ready to be sold. Multi-faceted, crystal-clear (or beautifully colored) cups, plates, figurines, vases. These glass smiths would sit on benches with long pipes extending into kilns burning upwards of 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, exhaling expertly into the molten glass hanging delicately from the ends of their instruments and tools. But what was most impressive about these craftsmen was that their work has remained virtually unchanged since glassblowing was invented two millennia ago. The earliest blown glass discovered was found near Jerusalem. Glassblowing began in the Middle East, and Arabs are still among the experts in the world in their craft. They’re the original master craftsmen of this beautiful art.

            But the reason they’re masters is because they were first students of a master. For years or even decades, before they could become a master, they had to sit beside the master and learn how to use the tools. How to inhale and exhale into the molten glass. How to mold and shape the glass. How to purify or color the glass. And even how to use the words and name the instruments and methods of their craft.[8]

            It’s the same with all arts and crafts, all subjects and sports. We can’t master anything unless we sit beside a master first. We allow this form of learning to inform nearly every aspect of our lives. We know we can’t learn how to read unless someone first teaches us the alphabet and reads to us. We know we can’t learn how to dance unless we have a choreographer and an instructor. We know we can’t learn to throw a football until someone shows us how to place our fingers over the laces.

In the same way, we can’t learn to be peacemakers unless someone shows us how to follow the One who said, “Love your enemies,” the master craftsman who teaches us to use the words and name the instruments and methods of making peace.

            Many of you are thinking, “Of course, we all want peace. But this is the real world, and what you’re saying isn’t realistic.” But I believe we can’t do anything realistic until we do something eucharistic. We can’t learn how to commune with one another in peace until we take communion and pass the peace. If Jesus is the real master craftsman of peace, how can our communion with him not teach us how to do something eternally realistic?

            The first way we learn how to do something realistic is by sharing the Lord’s Supper. The Eucharist—its language and choreography—is the central formational practice by which we learn to become peacemakers.

Like a blacksmith hunched over an anvil, the pastor leans over the altar table to bless the bread and the cup. The pastor breaks the bread, which is Christ’s body, and pours out the wine from the cup, which is Christ’s freely, non-violently given blood. In this act of breaking and pouring, we imitate our Master, Jesus, who did this for his first disciples on the last night of his life. By imitating him, we perform a sacrament that teaches us what it looks like to be formed into the likeness of Christ.

But it is what happens next that completes the change in us from the outside in. We ingest the broken body, thereby becoming joined to it. We ingest the poured out blood, enabling it to flow in our own veins.

            Do we know what this means for us? It means we become part of the Body and Blood that would rather be broken and poured out than resort to violence to get its way. It means we become part of Him who doesn’t resist when his enemies arrest him, beat him, mock him, and crucify him. It means we come under the direction of a Master whom God raises from the dead in spite of the world’s attempt to get rid of him. But it also means if we’re joined to such Body and Blood, we can do no other, if we are faithful, than imitate its brokenness and its willingness to be poured out, even if our enemies are the ones shedding our blood. To live any other way is to reject communion with Jesus. If we live any other way, his Body rejects us. Then the only way to be rejoined with him is through confession, repentance, and a return to the Table to ingest again the broken Body and poured out Blood.

            Certainly this way of life is hard to bear. But we see everyday the terrible costs that the artisans of war inflict on the world. The hardness of these costs are unbearable.

Our calling as Christians to embody Isaiah’s vision of artisans of peace is one of urgency. Listen, then, as the Master Craftsman invites us to his table. Come eat the bread, his body, and drink the wine, his blood. Practice again the art and craft of peacemaking, under the tutelage of the crucified Master we’re called to love and to follow.

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