Settled in 1736

The Peaceable Kingdom

Date: December 5, 2004 – Second Sunday of Advent

Scripture: Isaiah 11.1-10

734 B.C. Not a very good year to be in Israel.

There was dangerous political intrigue. The wealthy were oppressing the poor, controlling both markets and labor. And warfare was imminent.

Once again, the Israelites were doing an impressive job of breaking their covenantal relation with Yahweh. Into this situation steps the prophet Isaiah.

4 Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly, who have forsaken the L ORD , who have despised the Holy One of Israel, who are utterly estranged! 5 Why do you seek further beatings? Why do you continue to rebel? (Isaiah 1:4-5)

In other words, why are you – my people – behaving this way? You are ungrateful. Greedy. Barbarous.

16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17 learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-17)

If you wanted to pitch the story of the Hebrew Bible to Hollywood , there it is right there. The entire synopsis. God makes covenant with Israelites. Israelites break covenant. God warns Israelites. Israelites don't listen. God punishes Israelites. Israelites say “I'm sorry.” And the cycle starts again.

Today I'm interested in the “God warns Israelites” part of this story.

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God has a soft spot for crazy people.

The dreamers. The seers. The idealists. The Utopians. They are the ones who can get away with the truth. Because they live in two worlds. Two kingdoms.

The kingdom of this world. And the kingdom of God . They have free passage between the two – something which is very difficult for the rest of us. We are, for the most part, mired in the kingdom of this world.

We are like those sculptures of Michelangelo, “The Prisoners.” We are half out of the stone and half in the stone. We are reaching, straining. And the kingdom of God is just out of our reach. This kingdom where we all, in the prophet Micah's words, do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

But if all we did was do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God in this world, we would have to be a little crazy.

We know that this Peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah talks about is crazy. It doesn't exist. Mutual of Omaha 's Wild Kingdom is all the proof we need. Put a lion in a field with a lamb, and you get lamb chops. (just as the lamb needs insurance against the lion, so to Mutual of Omaha …) We have a cat, big, pillow-sized fluff ball who sleeps with us at night, purring away. Let him outside, he becomes a serial killer.

And that's exactly why we need the dreamers and the seers to tell us of the kingdom of God . Because without their vision, life is brutish, nasty and short. Without their vision, there is no hope.

And Advent is nothing if not about hope. That something new can be born. That the world as we see it today is not the way things have to be. Because once we start believing the world cannot change, hope dies. Once we start believing that the world cannot change, there is no reason to be sitting in these pews. You might as well be spending your time at Dunkin' Donuts. Once we start believing that our little role doesn't make any difference, the next step is despair.

And despair is hell.

Remember the inscription over the Gates of Hell from Dante's Inferno?

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

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Simply by being here, you are admitting that you are a little crazy. And you're in good company.

Edward Hicks was a little crazy.

Hicks was a Quaker minister at the time that Quakers were fighting among themselves. How do we know they were fighting? They were actually talking to one another.

(That's a Quaker joke.)

Quakers were divided into two camps: those who leaned toward the Bible and the teachings of Jesus and those who were more inclined to the Holy Spirit. Hicks was in the latter camp, and would have called the Holy Spirit the “Inner Light.”

Hicks was a … well, quirky character. He lived his whole life in Buck's County, Pennsylvania – John Updike land. He made a living as a sign painter and a coach painter and didn't turn his hand to what we would call “real” painting until he was about 40. This was, in part, due to the Quaker belief that all painting had to be utilitarian – that is, it had to have some purpose. Art for art's sake was frowned upon.

But around the time he was forty, Hicks became a Quaker minister. And his Inner Light led him to this chapter of Isaiah – The Peaceable Kingdom passage. He became obsessed with this passage. And he began painting the scene, with no illusions of being an artist.

As you can see, Hicks' style is American primitive. He never really mastered the art of perspective. But that didn't interest him. To him, he was producing what he called “painted sermons.” A ll of you should have picked up one of Hicks' paintings with your service folder. If you look to the person next to you, you will see that they are, most likely, a little bit different. They may look the same – but they're not.

You see Hicks didn't paint this scene just a few times. Not just ten times or twenty-five times or fifty times. There are over a hundred known versions of “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Hicks. All just a little bit different. The child might change or the animals might change.

Hicks was obsessed with this vision. It was his one sermon to the world. That the lion should lay down with the lamb. Yea, he was a little nuts. He was a dreamer. He was a seer. He was a prophet.

Oh, we don't think of him as a prophet.

But he was. Prophets present an alternate vision. A dream. A look at God's Kingdom. In a world that can't – or won't – see.

Now why would I consider Hicks to be a prophet? He lived in the early 19 th century. Wasn't much going on then, right?

Ah, history. It ain't a bunch of dates. It's context.

1820, Hicks is moving into his ministry.

1820, the Missouri Compromise. One of the most vicious debates in Congressional history. Allowed slavery into Missouri , if Maine could be admitted to the nation. The first storm clouds of the Civil War.

1831. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, publishes The Liberator. Right here in Boston . The battle lines are being drawn.

1846, just a few years before Hicks died, the Wilmot Proviso. Tried to ban slavery in the territory acquired in the Mexican War.

The United States , like Israel , in 732 B.C., is heading toward a convulsion that will rip the country apart. Hicks keeps preaching and painting the Peaceable Kingdom . He hopes and he's a little crazy. But that's what hope will do to you. Hope will make you crazy. But that's a very good thing.

Hicks just did not stop. He remained true to the vision. And here is the lesson, the good news in all this. Never think your contribution is too small. That the world isn't getting anywhere because of what you do. There's something far more important than results. And that is: keeping hope alive.

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Just about this time last year, we were praying for Lauren Thibeau. How do you keep hope alive when, at every turn, hope is taken away by physical facts? Lauren was just six years old. In this era of medical miracles, none of those miracles was working for Lauren. And then, around Easter, Joe was here and told us that Lauren was making some progress and things were actually starting to look up.

Hope lived!

But it was snatched away from Lauren and Joe and all who loved Lauren once again.

On the surface, Isaiah failed. Israel never experienced the peace he talked about.

Edward Hicks, the same thing. Peace able Kingdom? Think of the fields of Antietam , Fredricksburg, and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg running red with young men's' blood.

Did we fail as a congregation when our prayers were not enough to save Lauren? We kept hope alive. No doubt we will be called on to keep hope alive in some other situation and we will rise to the occasion.