There's A New World Coming

Sermon text for December 2, 2007:
Isaiah 2:1-5

A song says, “There’s a new world somewhere they call the Promised Land, and we’ll be there someday if you will hold my hand. I still need you there beside me …”

The song speaks of deep love between people, but also of the profound hope of Advent. Our faith teaches us that there is a new world coming – a world created in beauty and bathed by God in peace and harmony. Some scholars believe that this promise is “utopian” and that those who believe are naïve. But naïve or not, you and I know that images of an Eden-like existence, give us at least momentary respite from our crazy out-of-control world. We have a deep longing for a time or place in which each part of creation exists in harmony with all of the other parts.

In the second chapter of Isaiah, we find that God gave the Prophet a vision of just such a place. And in the center of the new creation is the Jerusalem Temple. Isaiah had been to the Temple many times, but in this vision something was different. The Temple wasn’t any longer just for Jews, but people from every nation and faith were streaming into God’s house.

Isaiah heard them saying to one another, “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 might walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, on the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

Sometimes we forget that in our faith and in the scriptures we have something that is uniquely important. Some of us are even embarrassed to admit that we are believers, or that we read the Bible. But Isaiah foresees a future in which people from around the world will clamor to learn what we already know.

In God’s new world, people and nations will experience justice. No longer will people be oppressed; no longer will the strong overpower the weak. In the new world God will be fully present, judging equitably between people and nations. It is this future for which we wait during Advent.

In God’s new world, believers will experience the profound peace that the Jews call “Shalom”. In Shalom, people live in harmony with each other and weapons of war and implements of destruction become obsolete so …

"They shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war anymore."

Imagine a day in which God’s presence is so overwhelming that war and violence become unthinkable. “There is a new world somewhere …”

Imagine a day in which God is so fully present that disputes with family, neighbors, and the people who sit near us in the pews are unthinkable. “There is a new world somewhere …”

Imagine a time when God is so fully present that we need to disarm personally; when we offer to God our anger, our cynicism, our passive aggression, our need to be right at any cost. “There’s a new world somewhere …”

Advent is a time of waiting and hoping. Isaiah’s vision helps us believe that God wants something different for us. The song says “There is a new world somewhere they call the Promised Land; and we’ll be there some day if you will hold my hand”.

Friends, take the hand of someone you love, and step out into the future.

“There’s a new world somewhere …”

Copyright © 2007 by Dwight R. Blackstock