Prophetic Vision:
Seeds of Hope

December 26, 2021 • 1st Sunday of Christmas
Scripture Reading: Isaiah 64:17-25 (The Inclusive Bible)
Pastor Jeff Wells

[You can view the worship video recording, including this message, at: Facebook.com/churchofthevillage/videos.]

Friends, there is no avoiding it – we are living through terrible times. Our world is burdened with an ongoing pandemic, deep economic and social injustice, and an ecological crisis that is threatening life on our planet. How can we look around and not think, “What have we wrought?” 

Every one of us is personally affected. Many of us have felt isolated and alone. We’ve lost jobs. We have lost loved ones. We grieve and we mourn. We are physically, emotionally, and spiritually distraught. We suffer as a community, too. Though the Church of the Village is holding steady, we are not yet strong. Our growth has stagnated and our financial resources have declined. Meanwhile, many churches in our region are failing and will not survive. It’s hard to resist falling into the temptation to despair. In times like these, we long for sources of strength and hope. 

In the face of just such desperate times, we need alluring and inspiring visions like the one painted by Isaiah. The Book of Isaiah was composed over several centuries and by multiple authors. The first sections were written after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the Jewish elite was defeated and sent into exile in Babylon. The section from which we read today’s passage was written when the Jews had, finally, been freed from captivity after 70 years, returned to their own land, and were beginning to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. 

Yet, this part of the Book of Isaiah was not merely a triumphant nationalist proclamation. Immediately before this, the author expresses God’s condemnation of the ways the people had continued to turn away from righteousness and justice. As a whole, the Book of Isaiah intends to move the Jewish people to recognize the gravity of their sin and the desperate situation they have brought upon themselves. Earlier, in Isaiah chapter 58, the author presumes to express God’s holy anger, saying:

Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. Day after day they pretend to seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ways of their God….

Look, you serve your own interest…and oppress all your workers. 

Here is what will satisfy me: loose the bonds of injustice…let the oppressed go free…. Share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house. When you see the naked, to cover them, and care well for all for whom you are responsible. 

The role of the prophet is to wake us up to the reality of selfishness, greed, oppression, and exploitation and to offer us a vision of the way the world could be. Too often, we are trapped in the mindset of what the great biblical scholar, Walter Bruggemann calls, “the royal consciousness” – a false consciousness that tells us that the way things are is the way they have always been and always must be. “All of us,” he wrote, “in one way or another, have deep commitments to it.”

“So the first question is: How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask, as Israel’s prophets never asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.” [1]

The biblical prophets used to have a reputation of being weird, possibly mentally unstable, and existing on the fringe of their society. But actually, they expressed views that resonated deeply among the Jewish people. Jesus quoted Isaiah frequently and some early Christian leaders called the Book of Isaiah the Fifth Gospel.  

For my entire adult life, I have been attracted to and inspired by prophetic voices. For the first 20 years, those were not voices from the Bible or religion, but from secular political figures. Like Isaiah and other Biblical prophets, they sought to awaken people to the horrors of the existing systems of oppression and exploitation. They also offered a vision of a new world organized around the common good they saw as possible. I am very grateful that this immersion in justice-oriented prophetic speech, along with my experience of coming of age in the era of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and others, loosened the hold of the “royal consciousness” over me. 

In the 1990s, I rediscovered Jesus and found in him a prophet for the divine commonwealth – a vision of a world in which the accumulation of wealth and power would no longer be the organizing principle. So, for the most recent 20 years of my life, while I have not abandoned the underlying dream of a communalist society, I have grounded my hopes in Jesus’ teaching that love of God and neighbor is the foundation for the new world I believe is possible. Jesus himself drew much of his inspiration and energy from the visions of Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah. I, along with millions of others, have followed in his footsteps. I have always tried to be a good pastor. Yet, when I look back at my career as a preacher, I can see clearly that, while I am not nearly as gifted, I have been molded by my experience and inclinations very much in the vein of the prophetic preaching of Isaiah, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many others. 

Like Isaiah, Dr. King spent a lot of his time and energy highlighting racial injustice and the horrors of poverty and war. Yet, he also creatively and energetically imagines a different world he knew was possible. King did that most famously in his “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he envisioned a time when “…even the state of Mississippi…will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” Well, that hasn’t happened yet! And he imagined a day when his four children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” And then, quoting from the Book of Isaiah, Dr. King declared, 

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." [2]

God continues to lure us toward new expressions of goodness, beauty, truth, and love – new expressions that are possible. God longs to free us from the grip of “royal consciousness” that assumes the vast and growing wealth for a few hundred billionaires and poverty and degradation for masses of people is the way things ought to be. God deeply desires to liberate us from our human-centeredness so we might be able to envision a way of being in cooperation and love with the rest of the ecosphere.

God is luring, inspiring, and raising up new prophetic voices all the time. Dr. King’s dream planted seeds that are still growing and flowering in the Movement for Black Lives, the promotion of Black Joy, and much more. God’s luring inspired Pope Francis to compose his encyclical, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home. And way back in 1973, God inspired John Cobb to sound the alarm about the already growing ecological crisis in his book, Is It Too Late?: A Theology of Ecology. 

I am so grateful our community and I personally are building a close relationship with John Cobb. He has been a prophetic voice in many spheres for decades– around process philosophy and theology, environmentalism, ecological economics, the decline of Mainline Christianity, education, science, and so much more. 

During his sermon series in September with the Church of the Village, he delivered a powerful benediction calling on the U.S. and China to come together and fundamentally cooperate to save the planet. That led him to write a letter to Presidents Biden and Xi and to try to get the letter into their hands.

Out of that vision, a small group of leaders, including John, came together to continue building momentum for this effort and to promote ecological civilization. Recently, Bonnie Tarwarter and I became co-conveners of this group we are tentatively calling the Living Planet Project. So, the Church of the Village is very much a part of this “vision” and this effort. 

The U.S. and China seem intent on moving toward war, rather than peace and cooperation. Both continue to waste time and money on building nuclear and conventional military capacity. But, as a prophet for ecological civilization wrote recently, “There are no winners on a dead Earth.” We know that getting the U.S. and China to back down, reduce tensions, and work together is an uphill climb. But we cannot allow our vision to be limited to what is “realistic, politically practical, or economically viable.” We have reach for what is imaginable. A small ray of hope has already been made in the two nations assigning senior climate representatives, John Kerry and Zie Zhinhua, to come up with a serious plan. 

Isaiah envisioned a “new creation” in which righteousness and justice reign. Even though this vision has not been realized in its fullness, it continues to inspire hope in us. I don’t mean “optimism” or passive hope, like “gee, I hope something good happens.” No, I’m talking about a living hope that moves us to act in the world, even against the odds. Neither God nor Jesus will simply make the “new creation” come, but we can draw strength, courage, and hope from them in order to move forward, even when we don’t know exactly where we are going or how to get there.

Friends, imagine a world without war and violence. Dream of a world in which every living being has enough to eat, a healthy habitat, and a purposeful role in the ecological system. There can be a humanity that values generosity over greed, servanthood over selfishness, relationship over alienation, and reconciliation over retribution. God desires an existence so much better for the vast majority of humanity and for the whole of the ecosphere and, if we listen and respond in living hope, God will lead, lure, and love us into participating in this new creation. May it be so.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, Kindle Edition), p. 39.

[2] Isaiah 40:4-5

(c) 2022 Jeff Wells
All rights reserved.