Sermon December 7 2014

Isaiah 40:1-11

Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Mark 1:1-8

“A New Social Order”

Comforter, you speak to us tenderly, revealing to us paths of restoration and peace. You show us the path of righteousness and peace. We trust in your steadfast love and faithfulness. We find your salvation in repentance for our offences, seeking forgiveness from those we have injured, and amending our ways. May my words and our thoughts be acceptable to you, God who strengthens, who redeems. Amen.

At the time when Jesus was born, in what we now call 4 B.C.E., the lands of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the lands of Samuel, David, Solomon, and Isaiah had been under the thumb of the Roman Empire for a while. It was long enough that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would have known nothing but Roman occupation, nothing but Roman oppression, nothing but what could be called Roman peace through violence.

Rome, by this time had spread its influence through most of the known world by bringing in soldier engineers, as one author called them, to not only defeat the native inhabitants of a land, but build the infrastructure necessary to remain there indefinitely and drain from that land any and all resources, human and otherwise. Rome regularly and violently put down any resistance to its governance. Rome had realized in the previous generation that it could either be a Republic governed by the people (or some of the people, representation was limited to free, male citizens of Rome) or it could be an empire spreading out over the known world. Empire and the amassing of land, wealth, and power do not go together with democracy and human rights—then or now.

Whenever any group of people gathered up a few people within a resistance to push away the violence and corrupting wealth of Rome, Rome simply killed them—well, not simply. Rome violently and publicly killed people and often left behind, in the place of a thriving, but rebelling village, the peace of a desert. Rome violently and publicly killed individual leaders of rebellions by crucifixion—They didn’t mess around with negotiation, they quashed any defiance.

Jesus’ birth was into this world; Jesus’ life was pressed into service in a world where his people were under threat if they chose to speak up against the injustice and violence that was everywhere around them. The peace of Rome was the peace of violence and fear. The peace of Rome was ever and always threatening to break into rebellion and violence—and that rebellion was justified and some of the violence could be understood as justifiable anger at unforgivable oppression. Few of us in our social and racial identities can relate to that kind of anger—but I think Jesus could. The anger of daily injustice, the daily grind of being told about your inferiority, and the daily words and actions that enforced that kind of oppression. [1]

That is the world where Jesus was born.

The world of Mark 1:1-8 is the world of John the Baptist—a world grown even more volatile in the 3-4 decades that have passed since Jesus’ birth. And this world would have been familiar to the world where Isaiah prophesied.

Several hundred years before Jesus was born, someone continuing the prophetic tradition of the author of Isaiah’s first 39 chapters began another set of prophecies many scholars call Second Isaiah. Isaiah 40 is the first word of the Lord that has been spoken to Israel in about 48 years.

Forty eight years prior to this text, the Empire of Babylon had taken the southern kingdom, Judah, into captivity. They had killed all of the king’s sons, then blinded and finally killed the king. Almost 200 years before that, the northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrian empire and for all practical purposes, those people disappeared. Judah and its people were the people who held God’s promise and they have lived in Babylon after the temple and Jerusalem were destroyed.

The word came, just before Second Isaiah began to prophesy, that Cyrus, the Persian emperor was going to send the Judea people back to their home, back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple. It hadn’t happened yet, but soon. Isaiah’s word of comfort reinforces this good news.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term and that her penalty is paid—that more than that, she has served double anything that was ever intended.

Isaiah’s word of comfort comes with great upheaval. Isaiah’s word of peace comes only with great change. Isaiah’s word, accompanied by the word of the psalmist reminds us that the road to peace, faithfulness, steadfast love, and good news is exactly that, a road, a way, a journey to travel. And that road, as the mountains, hills, valleys and potholes are evened out will take time.

The peace of violence quashing of rebellion is swift. The peace of Empire, Assyrian, Babylon, Peria, Greece, and Rome comes with parades, soldiers, and fortification. The peace of God’s justice, the peace that transforms human avarice, greed for stuff and for power, into a divine generosity that comes only in God’s presence—and our constant awareness of God’s presence.

The peace of God’s justice comes as God gathers us together in our mutual vulnerability rather in our show of strength, our wielding of physical power and prowess, or our ability to overwhelm one another. God’s peace comes by our dependence upon God’s way toward justice for all people—not a violent force upon people to live according to some human standard. God’s peace comes to us as Christians through Jesus, who called people toward God’s kingdom, an empire characterized by justice, not violence.

The world into which Jesus was born was created by the Roman Empire—and God gave the world in Jesus’ Way to reveal how we are to be at peace with one another. The way comes through the wilderness of our violence, so that God’s peace will come, through the valleys and over the mountains, recreating and creating in us a peace that is evident to all peoples, all nation, all creatures, and all creation.

We are called, in the life of Jesus, who was born into the peace of Rome, the peace of violence, to hear the good news proclaimed, that it only justice creates Gods’ peace, slowly, incrementally, and that that kind of peace changes the world. That peace, the peace of God’s presence, the peace of Jesus’ life of resurrection, the peace that can stand forever.

To the glory of God. Amen.

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[1] The peace of violence and the peace of justice, from The First Christmas, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan