Word to the Wise
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - Tuesday in the First Week of Advent
[Isaiah 11:1-10 and Luke 10:21-24]Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cows and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox......
When I was a pastor in San Antonio, the feast of St. Francis (October 4) brought with it the usual blessing of the pets. We always did this in a large parking lot because it was clear that given a chance many of those pets would be dead in a very short period of time! Domesticated they may have been, but there was no love lost between them even if circumstance compelled their obedience to their human masters! (That obedience was sorely tried at the blessing!) This memory brings both humor and comfort to the wonderful vision of peace that Isaiah offers "on that day." The animals in the vision represent either diner or dinner! The coming of the Messiah means that those categories will disappear. Even the lion becomes a vegetarian! Perhaps this Advent it might be worthwhile to wonder how each of us can "make peace." Where are there divisions or enmities or old fashioned grudges? Can we even imagine a life without conflict? Does conflict give meaning to our lives? Do we live for our grudges? Can our faith shine through all of this? Can we wish someone or our whole world "peace" instead of "Merry Christmas!" and truly mean it? It seems to me that we will know the Messiah has come personally when those conflicts in our lives are more than a nice reproduction of Edward Hansen's famous painting of the "Peaceable Kingdom." We can't expect Jesus to be a lion-tamer! We have to tame our own "lions!" Getting them to "eat hay" may seem hard, but it's better than them eating us! AMEN