Five Advent Perspectives: The Prophet

My name is Isaiah. I am a prophet in Jerusalem.  A city just like Seattle; a complex web of cultures and sub cultures; everyday people with hopes and dreams, joys of new life and sorrows of life’s let downs, raising families, repairing relationships, buying groceries, fixing leaking roofs, changing diapers, burying the dead, expectations both met and unmet. My city, like yours, is filled with the hustle and bustle of commerce, politics, economics, and people.  Both of our cities contain diverse peoples from all over the world.

I am from an upper middle class heritage. I have access to the political and religious leaders of the day. My task as a prophet is always a perilous one. I fulfill two roles as prophet in my day and in yours. My first role is to encourage the people of God to remain in God, stay in God or return to a relationship with the GREAT and MYSTERIOUS ONE. Secondly, I speak reform and justice into unjust political structures of the day at the secular level. These twin objectives make me unpopular at all fronts, both with the sanctuary and on the state steps. You will not see me on Entertainment Tonight or David Letterman. I will not win an Oscar or an American Music Award but I still have a tale to tell.

  As a prophet the MYSTERIOUS ONE has allowed me to peer into the future to see immediate historical realizations and future events as fulfillments of my spoken oracles. What makes these visions unique is that I can see them down through the ages simultaneously. I have the ability to stand on Mt Baker and see the future fulfillments on the twin peaks of Mt Rainier and Mt Hood all at the same time. I can see the fall and restoration of Jerusalem in my day on the peak of Mt Baker. I can see the future hope in a promised Prince of Peace that is laying in a manger on the peak of Mt Rainier. I can also see another return of this great Messiah in your future on the peak of Mt Hood.  Academia refers to this as a “telescoping of events.”

  The Scripture this morning I wrote to satisfy three great concerns that I have for people in all places and all times. The world is full of conflict and violence. Is it possible that, as I write elsewhere, for the wolf to lie down with the lamb?  This is the promise of the peaceable kingdom. In our unpeaceable world, we long for the fulfillment of my promise. In a time of war---remembering that every moment of history is a time of war---I watch a young woman holding up a sign near South Center Mall with her poignant placard, “Peace is Possible.”  She is correct, although probably not in the way she intends.

This morning, I offer three mountain peak prophetic perspectives that converge to form a simultaneous seasonal summit. I give them now to orientate you to our journey. Mt Baker, the sovereignty of God. Mt Rainier, the birth of Jesus the Prince of spiritual Peace. Mt Hood, the second return of the political Prince of Peace to right side up the world and usher in a supreme multi-layered justice and shalom—peace on earth.

Summit ONE; Mt Baker and the Sovereignty of God.

What I see from the summit of Mt Baker is that God is in control! There is no event that stands outside of the providential control of God. In your contemporary culture it is common to see bumper stickers with the phrase, and I will edit it, as my prophetic office will not allow me to repeat the actual word, the sticker says, “Stuff Happens!” In a world of free will, people will hurt one another; murder them with guns, roadside bombs and with words. They always have and always will until the second and final return of the prince of peace. You see God is able to remain in control by giving people choices and freedoms to act. When they act in horrific and unspeakable ways God is able to work the mysterious peaceable kingdom in the midst of such unpeaceable-ness! God therefore, is all-powerful and ultimately more God than one might think.  God is in control even when we spin totally out of control. The cosmic sovereignty and providence of God will not be undermined even by the minuute freedoms of God’s creatures. It may not always feel like God has our back but we are living in the chaos of the “in between time.”  I came to encourage you this morning with these words, “God is in control of the mountain tops!

Summit TWO: Mt Rainier and the Birth of the Prince of Peace

  I wrote in the text this morning of the one to come as the Messiah, the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father and the Prince of Peace. But to what degree are we currently experiencing this Prince of peace?  We experience this peace inwardly as a personal peace of faith. It is the spiritual realization of this Messiah that you now currently live. It is not fully a political realization. My Jewish people missed this point. They were looking and expecting a political Messiah that would over throw the unjust political powers of the day by establishing Gods rule on earth. This is important for you this morning. Do not come to the word with your own expectations seeking to be fulfilled. Come to the word with an open mind and heart ready for the wonderful Mysterious ways of God’s mountaintop.

  Born into a world of raging conflicts, this little child who leads us is called the Prince of Peace. Above the rolling and dusty hillside of Bethlehem, heavenly beings of all shapes and sizes sang out cosmic praise to his birth, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men and women with whom he is pleased.” Yet to your naked eye, living in the crowded urban valleys and not the majestic mountaintop summits, what a strange peace this truly is. Jesus said as an adult, “Woe to those who cry peace when there is no peace.”  “Peace I leave you; my peace I give to you; NOT AS THE WORLD GIVES DO I GIVE TO YOU. LET NOT YOUR HEARTS BE TROUBLED!” There is a peculiar peace that is available to us right now.  Available to us is the inner spiritual peace of faith. Peace is not only possible; it is a gift currently given. Jesus gives us his peace by giving us himself, for he is the Prince of Peace.

This morning, this advent, from this prophet’s perspective make room---make room for the peace that is available now-the Peace of faith—in Jesus and in Jesus alone!  For political peace in the world we must fervently pray and earnestly work. But do not be troubled or frightened by the wars around you and the wars within you! I am keenly aware of those struggles. The peace that is ours is not a peace of pretending that things are not as they are; nor is it a peace of leading a blind and naïve eye to conflict. It is the inner peace of a personal faith, in the peace child born to an unwed mother.

  Faith is trust in this Prince of Peace. We neither hold ourselves aloof from the anguish of a conflicted world nor do we delude ourselves that the resolution of all global conflict is within our humanistic powers to remedy alone. Our global neighborhood is much too complicated for simplistic ideologues. In the child of the Bethlehem manger, in the fragility of a powerless baby, God entered our conflict, our struggles, our wars; personal and corporate. The powers of darkness raged the best that it can throw and it ended in a crucified God on a cross. But that is Friday and Easter Sunday proclaims in the miracle of an empty tomb that death is conquered and inner peace is available by faith right now.

 

Summit Three: Mt Hood and the political return of Christ

Thirdly, this morning, I am here to give you hope, from this prophets perspective, he will come again! And when he comes the peace he brings will be total, wonderful, mighty, everlasting, Princely, absolutely just, complete, cosmic, mysterious, and finally upside down, to the point where your great and majestic mountains, the Cascades and the Olympics, will melt in his presence.  The sky will shine with the beauty and glory of holiness that blinds so beautiful, restores so redemptively, and re-transforms a creation to its once perfect posture.

By faith in this Jesus and the victory that is already won, we now live a small taste, a tiny morsel, of the peaceable kingdom that is to be. I am here to tell you that it has happened, it is happening and it will happen! Believe it by faith and allow advent grace to flood your life with peace in your hectic and burned out self.  Be-live it to those around you as a preview of the political realization of the future shalom for every person in every city forevermore. A-men! Let it be!