Peace in the Kingdom

Text: Matthew 3:1-12
Other texts: Isaiah 11:1-8

There is a measuring device out on the street next to the church, down on Tremont Street. The device is called the Discontent-O-Meter. It measures anxiety. It measures how worried people are about the state of the world. It works through trash. If there are hardly any scratch tickets, empty pints, or styrofoam coffee cups in the gutter or on the sidewalk, then things are pretty good. People are feeling more or less OK. But if the street is littered from end to end, and little nips are stashed in the flower pots, then things are tough. I read the Discontent-O-Meter every day as I walk between my house and the church. Right now, things are tough. And have been for a while.

John the Baptizer preaches about repentance. Repent, he says, for the kingdom of God has come near. He takes people down to the river, where they confess their sins. It is hard to tell exactly what happens to those people next. The baptism of John resembled a rite of conversion. People were changed by it. Baptism both cleansed people of the old and initiated them into something new. What was new for them was not, it seems, a kind of restored soul. What was new was that they had become partners, or agents, or members, or citizens, of the kingdom of God. Which was near, though not entirely here.

The nature of the kingdom of God would have been clear to the crowds that gathered around John in the desert. It would have be a realm of this world. But in God’s kingdom, the poor are not abandoned, one nation does not occupy another as Rome had, the powerful leaders of the church and state do not strut around in fancy outfits while the people wear rags, the many do not starve while a few feast. Pretty much what you would expect. What we pray for every day here.

When the Pharisees and Sadducees come to John to be baptized, he calls them the brood of vipers. Children of snakes. Not because they are individually bad folks—maybe they are, but probably not, just regular folks in power—but because as a group they have not been welcoming of God’s kingdom. What have they as a group done to even things up between people on the outs and the people who are in? Will they repent? That is, will they turn to a new kind of life? Will they change their ways? It sounds like John does not think so. They come for show and perhaps for solace, but they probably do not come looking to be empowered to change the world. They are not discontent.

What we hope for in the kingdom of God is food, shelter, care, compassion, fellowship, fairness, and all the blessings of life. Those are the things that we can do something about, and the prophets have told us for millennia that God calls us to do something about them.

But what we long for most in the kingdom of God is peace. Peace is the sign, peace is the marker, peace is the reward of God’s kingdom.

People walk down Tremont Street with a lot on their minds. An appointment, a family problem, some issue at work, how to make ends meet, how to be safe, whether to buy something, how their clothes feel, where they’ll be next year, sorrow at some recent loss. These things occupy the front of their minds. Each day there is something new to ponder about. But I think that in the back of their minds, in the hidden and dark, deep anxious thoughts, in the constant background, is war. War today and the threat of war tomorrow and the sorrow of war in the past.

There are people today who remember World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq. Plus the first Arab Israeli War and the Suez War and the Six Day war and the Yom Kippur War. Plus the Russian war in Afghanistan and the war in the Balkans and the war in Somalia and the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the war in Rwanda.

For over half of my life the U.S. has been actively at war. And in every year in the life of each of us here, somewhere in the world there has been active fighting, destruction, and death from war. There has not been a single year in any of our lives in which the world has been at peace. War is not new.

Maybe this is old hat. Everyone knows that wars go on always. But if it is old hat, it is a sad old hat, one that ought to be retired. Each day that war rages makes us more tired. Moves us high on the Discontent-O-Meter. It is a worldwide discouragement.

It is not meant to be. It is not what God has in mind. The design of the world is for peace. The story of creation in Genesis is a story of creaturely harmony and peace. The story of the fall is the story of the world broken. The prophecy that we just heard in Isaiah is the promise of a world restored. It is a radical promise. A time of unending peace is so strange that it will be as if natural enemies—leopard and lamb, lion and calf—will live together. As if predators never preyed on the young and weak. As if our fears for ourselves and those we love had no basis.

We might pray, as I think John the Baptizer must have and that people who came to him must have, that the oppressors become the oppressed. We might pray for victory of the righteous over the unrighteous. We might hope that the lion and the calf switch places, and pray that the lamb puts fear in the heart of the leopard. That would be a change. Sort of.

But I don’t think it would do much for reducing the reading on the Discontent-O-Meter. We think sometimes that what we want is victory, when what we really long for is the end to all battles.

If the kingdom of God is near, we are all in this together. Can just one of us be healed while all the rest are broken? Can just one of us be comforted while the rest suffer? The notion that John likes, that some are wheat while the rest are chaff, is not born out by the actions of Jesus nor by our own experience. We are each of us a little wheat and a little chaff. I speak, at least, for myself.

Even so, we could pretend that we know who is wheat and chaff. We could pretend that is is we who are authorized to separate the wheat from the chaff. We certainly have tried that tactic over and over again. People did that long before Jesus was born and sadly, have continued to do it long after he was crucified. But the results do not seem so great. It has not done much for the state of the world.

Things are not so good so far, as my son used to say. It is not good for the people who walk down Tremont Street, it is not good for you, to live in a world in unending battle. It drives us crazy and sad and moves each of us up on the Discontent-O-Meter. I bet it moves God up on that scale, too.

Advent is a time for reconsideration, which is another word for repentance. I’m not saying this is simple. But maybe it is time to consider. Jesus, the one we follow, did preach another way to live. He came to heal the world, he said, and in doing so to heal that part in our minds in which resides dark sorrow. And replace it with the light of God’s kingdom.