December 7, 2025

My Friends, I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

This morning’s Gospel reading is itself a sermon – John the Baptist giving us an urgent message that now is the time to pay attention – that now is the time to change.  It’s a great sermon, and I’m going to let his words stand for themselves today.

Instead, I want to break open our beautiful Old Testament reading from the prophet Isaiah – who looks ahead expectantly, just as we are in this season of Advent.  And the question I want us to be thinking about this morning is: what are we hoping for?  What are we hoping for?

Isaiah paints an iconic portrayal of a peaceful future for us.  Through poetry and images, the prophet takes us back to the very beginning – to the first chapter of Genesis.  In that text, the ancient Hebrews spoke about God’s desire that all living things in creation coexist in harmony.  God originally created a world where animals don’t have ravenously violent instincts.  Even the most toothsome of creatures eat nothing but plants.  It’s a place where you and I could live without fear.  If we search our hearts, it’s thrilling to think that such a place could actually exist.

So what kind of leader does Isaiah think will bring about this kind of peace?  That leader will be a king who establishes justice – because the reality is, justice and peace can’t be separated.  You can’t have one without the other.  But Isaiah is calling for a specific kind of justice.  He calls for a king who will lead with “understanding and wisdom”.  With “counsel and might”.  With “knowledge and the fear of the Lord”.  These aren’t common qualities.  They’re gifts given by God.  The justice Isaiah yearns for is a divine justice – a justice that can be give by someone bearing the spirit of God.  Isaiah isn’t foretelling a run-of-the-mill king.  This will be someone special.

The key to tying these two things together – justice and peace – is power.  But only someone who understands how God intends for power to be used can bring about Isaiah’s vision of a peaceful future.  The one who’s filled with God’s spirit will know when to wield power, and when to give power away.  The Just One will model how to use power-WITH-others in service to the world, instead of power-OVER-others in service of the self.

As it turns out, this is exactly how Jesus – that special someone – operates.

Isaiah might be a prophet, but his words likely seem more like a fantasy than a prophecy to us.  He paints a dreamscape completely at odds with how the world “really works”.  For anyone who’s been scarred by life – and let’s be honest, that’s all of us – the world Isaiah imagines seems, frankly, too outrageous to believe.

It would have sounded outrageous to Isaiah’s audience, too.  Through the Law and the Prophets, God had charged Jerusalem’s elite with deep ethical responsibility for those they governed.  But over time, they had turned their backs on the poor and the powerless.  They forgot what was important to God.  And when Israel was defeated and dominated by its neighbors, many in Isaiah’s time saw this as a rebuke of their society’s hollow, selfish actions.  Conflict and the misuse of power crushed the peoples’ dreams – crushed God’s dreams – of a united and peaceful Israel.

What Isaiah’s readers needed to connect their lives to this vision – what we need to do the same – is hope.

And hope can be in short supply, whether you’re Isaiah the prophet, or us.  Because time and again we’ve learned to despair over the injustices of the world, as those with power misuse power.  Learned to despair over the conflict we find on a daily basis.  Despair over the power of violence to destroy lives.  What lions have ravaged the communities we’re a part of?  What snakes are coiled and ready to strike in our own lives? 

There are reasons that despair is so pervasive, and so powerful.

And, my friends, that’s why we need to ground ourselves in hope.  But not in the hopes that the world offers.  The kind like: “I hope the ‘insert your favorite sports team’ wins today.”  “I hope it doesn’t snow.”  “I hope I don’t catch what’s going around.”  Don’t get me wrong.  Those are all fine things to hope for.  But they’re all pale shades of the true hope God gives us.  Because, you see, we can realistically expect that all these things might happen.  And if we can expect something, it is really hope to anticipate its coming?  Or is it just expectation?

The genuine hope God offers – the hope at the root of Isaiah’s poetry today – is to dream about the outrageous.  Isaiah’s hope is of an ideal ruler who ushers in a peace so universal it extends even to the animal world.  It boggles the imagination to even try to think about it.  But that’s what God has brought into the world through Jesus.  In the midst of our despair, the birth of Jesus brings hope for a new creation – redeemed and restored at the end of time.  An unbelievable transformation we cannot begin to imagine.

In the midst of natural disasters, wars, and turmoil, Isaiah’s words remind us that God has acted in the past to make new beginnings, and inspire us to believe that God will do so again.  His words encourage to look for new life in all the unexpected places.  Where hopeful green shoots of Jesus’ reign of justice and peace spring from the lifeless stumps of whatever has been killed by those who oppress and destroy.

So – what are we hoping for this Advent?  For the baby Jesus?  For Christmas happiness?  Or, like Isaiah, are we hoping for something deeper?  Maybe the impossible dream world that God created where predators and prey live together in harmony?  That outrageous place where peace and justice prevail when power is shared?

If we’re looking for the outrageous hope that God offers, maybe we don’t need to look any farther than this:  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.

Amen.