Advent I – Isaiah 2:2-4 - 29 November 2019

Rowan Williams says that in Advent we all become Jews once more.[1]  If all we do during Advent, then, in life and in worship, is sentimentally anticipate Christmas, we are missing a wonderful season… the sounds and songs of Advent.  So I thought it was time for some sublime Hebrew poetry – indeed, the four passages from Isaiah the Prophet set down for Advent readings this year.  Here is the first:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established…

and will be raised above the hills;

all the nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths.”

…They will beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation will not lift up sword against nation,

neither will they learn war any more.[2]

This is some seven centuries before the time of Jesus.  Even back then the Jews are waiting, seeing in their hearts a better day, a reign of peace, an abandonment of cruelty and violence – and it must have seemed then, as it does now, a hopeless dream.  What they knew was, as Rowan Williams expresses it, a hunger to be spoken to, to be touched, to be judged and loved and absolved.

But, says the prophet, the first Advent requirement is that we take leave of our idols.  Idolatry is worshipping, giving ultimate value to what is not God.  Jesus called it, where your treasure is.  Isaiah in this same chapter says: On that day people will cast their idols of silver and of gold, which they made for themselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats.[3]  And so in contemplative prayer and life, in what may be a long and demanding process, our idolatries are being removed from usurping the place that belongs to God.
  

Notice too that, in Isaiah’s vision, the Lord’s House is open to all.  The Jerusalem temple wasn’t.  It is an end to Jewish exclusivism: all the nations will stream to it… many peoples will come… And what will happen at the Lord’s House…?  …They will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more.  Advent then is when we listen to Isaiah – we call our idolatries again into question; we question whatever in our faith excludes rather than includes; and we question the violence that may lurk in our actions or speech or our attitudes.  To borrow a modern trendy phrase, in Advent we are invited to live the dream.  It changes us, which is always what has to happen first.

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[1] Rowan Williams: A Ray Of Darkness (Cowley Publications 1995, p.5)

[2] Isaiah 2:2-4

[3] Isaiah 2:20