Repentance and Peace

   This morning’s reading from Isaiah is a familiar and popular image of peace. Predators lie down with prey and children play without danger near the den of snakes. The violent and rapacious have been pacified and the weak and the vulnerable have been emboldened. Harmony prevails where once there was deadly conflict and danger. It’s a vision that has inspired many a painter and poet. 
     Once, the story goes, Isaiah’s vision inspired a zoo to set up a unique exhibit. During the Christmas season, the zoo placed a lion and a lamb in the same cage. The idea of a lion and lamb actually living together seemed to strike a chord with people and the exhibit proved popular. Crowds flocked to see it. The local media took note. A reporter came out to do a story. She asked the zoo’s director if the pairing of a lion and a lamb had created any problems. “Well, not really,” the director replied. “Of course, every few days we do have to put in a new lamb.” 
     In this story we see both the attraction of and the problem with Isaiah’s words. We are drawn to the possibility, but we live in a world where the lamb is not safe in the presence of the lion, a world where the strong exploit and abuse the weak, where might makes right, and where nations and individuals are far more likely to beat their plowshares into swords and their pruning hooks into guns and bombs than they are to turn their arsenals into means of feeding the hungry and housing the refugees.
    On almost any given day we can turn on the television, open the newspaper or log onto the internet and encounter some example of sub and human evil. Several years ago, on the Second Sunday of Advent, I mentioned an epidemic of racist incidents at European soccer matches. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed much. In September, it was reported that less than 30 minutes into the English Premier League season, a black player was racially harassed by a fan. That same weekend, a German Cup match was halted when racial epitaphs insults were hurled at a player. In Italy, an American player was subjected to racial discriminatory remarks from fans after the season opener. All of this followed an incident in Spain a couple weeks before in which a fan was arrested after directing monkey noises and gestures toward a black player. Observers saw evidence of a clear increase in such incidents over the previous season. Additionally, many black players, both native and foreign born are regularly subjected to racist insults on social media, as highlighted this past summer by the harassment of Jess Carter, an English national player whose father is African American (she also plays for Gotham FC in the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League). One commentator tied the surge in racist rhetoric to continent wide political tensions over immigration and the extreme rhetoric used by some far right parties, though it should be acknowledged that racist incidents have been reported for several decades. [Steve Douglas, “Racial abuse of Black players spikes early in European soccer season. 
All of this echoes the report I previously cited in 2019.  That December, in a match in Italy, the Italian fans mocked one of their own players by imitating the gestures and sounds of a monkey, all because his parents came from Ghana. A scholar pointed to fears of demographic change as one of the causes of such racial incidents. Around the same time, Bulgarian fans rained down racial epithets on British players, including monkey sounds and Nazi salutes. When British politicians complained about the treatment of their nation’s players, European soccer president Aleksander Čeferin agreed that they have a real problem. However, he also “pointed the finger back at … politicians who’ve made racist comments. He said they encourage racists who hurl abuse in stadiums. ‘Football is always a reflection of society,’ Čeferin said. ‘And in Europe, I would say things are worse and worse every year.  Given the rise of ultra-nationalist parties in countries like Italy, France and Germany and the election of politicians who run and govern on a politics of racial and ethnic fear, I think it was and is fair to attribute some of the blame to political rhetoric. Prejudiced statements, racial dog whistles, and appeals to people’s fears of those who look and sound different both deepen suspicions and division and also encourage everyday folks to speak and act in hateful, even violent ways.  
If all of this sounds uncomfortably similar to our own American situation, well, unfortunately, it should. Indeed, that is why I’ve revisited this story: because it calls to mind a similar, disturbing tendency in our politics. Witness the President’s recent scurrilous accusations against Somali immigrants; the demonizing of all Afghan immigrants, many of whom risked their lives fighting for their homeland alongside our soldiers, all because of the murderous actions of one man; or the frankly racist rhetoric which the Vice-President directed at Haitians here in Ohio during last year’s campaign. The fear, scapegoating and expressions of bigotry do seem to be getting worse every year—if not every month!
       When one considers these racial and ethnic tensions, alongside the unending gun violence in our cities, schools, and homes; stories of domestic violence; Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine; Hamas’ October 7th attack, the retaliatory destruction of the Gaza Strip and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank; civil unrest in Tanzania because the government refuses to hold free and fair elections; rising tensions between America and Venezuela highlighted by military strikes of questionable legality against boats piloted by alleged criminal civilians; well it’s all more than enough to makes us cry out to God with the modern psalmist, “I can’t believe the news today, / I can’t close my eyes and make it go away. / How long? How long must we sing this song? / How long?” How long, O Lord, how long will violence, hate and oppression continue? How long will they prevail?
    The world in which Isaiah penned his hopeful vision bore some similarity to ours. It was a time of violence and uncertainty. Judah was threatened by foreign powers. Indeed, just before announcing this vision of peace, Isaiah had predicted the downfall of Jerusalem. Yet, Isaiah sees hope for a better future. That hope takes the form of a righteous king. Notice that the peace of v. 6-9, the vision of wolf and lamb living together, is a result of the way in which the king rules. He establishes justice in the land, defending the cause of the poor, the needy and the vulnerable. He sides not with those who are wealthy or politically powerful, but with those who are powerless, and thus in need of help. He is upholding the core Old Testament ethically imperative to care for the orphan, the widow, the poor and the resident alien—the most vulnerable members of society. Such governance leads to the creation of a “peaceful kingdom,” the kind of society which God desires for us. 
    This vision is wholly in line with the Hebrew concept of peace, shalom. Shalom is not merely the absence of violence; it is also the presence of justice. It is the establishment of right relationships within the community, so that none are abused or cheated and the needs of all are met.
      Isaiah’s coming, ideal king is able to bring about such harmony and justice because he is in right relationship with God: “The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, … the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. 3His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.”  Indeed, Isaiah goes on to suggest that the peace he envisions will be the result of a much wider establishment of right relationship with God: “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” This knowledge of God is such that, in the words of John Calvin, if it “takes possession of our minds, it will free us from all malice.” 
    Isaiah’s vision is of a world transformed by God. This scripture, says Walter Bruggeman, “is about deep, radical, limitless transformation in which we—like lion, wolf, and leopard—will have no hunger for injury, no need to devour, no yearning for brutal control, no passion for domination.”  In order for such a transformation to take place, we must be open to the working of God. In order for God to remove from us our hunger for power, our propensity to hurt and use other people, our proclivity to be violent in word and deed, we must repent.
    In our reading from Matthew, John the Baptist bursts onto the scene declaring, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” and “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” 
 John yells at us, urging us to see things in a different light and to respond by changing how we live our lives. He is well aware of a fact that we are often loathe to admit: every one of us is a mixture of good and evil. Too often we view ourselves as good and others as evil, or at least bad, denying both that they have any shred of goodness in them and that we have any shred of evil. We have a tendency to label and categorize people: good (usually us and those like us), bad (usually “them”), friend, enemy, American, foreigner, communist, capitalist, Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, rich, poor, gay, straight, educated, ignorant, black, white, Christian, Muslim, atheist, and so on ad infinitum. While labels help us identify one another, there is a great danger that such labeling will obscure our common humanity—which is rooted in both our common creation in the image of God and in our shared sinfulness—and, by obscuring that shared humanity, make it easier to do violence to each other, be it physical, verbal or spiritual.
Henry Nouwen has done a remarkable job of spelling out the danger. He writes,
Long before we start a war, kill people, or destroy nations, we have already killed our enemies mentally, by making them into abstractions with which no real, intimate human relationship is possible. When men, women, and children who eat, drink, sleep, play, work and love each other as we do have been perverted into an abstract Communist evil that we are called—by God—to destroy, then war has become inevitable. 
Nouwen was writing in the early 1980s. I wonder what group of people we might substitute for “communists” today? Muslims or homosexuals, perhaps? Liberal “snowflakes” or conservative “fascists”? Radical blacks or racist white folks? Immigrants from Africa and Central America? It’s not that we can’t have legitimate differences of opinion or engage in civil debate; it’s that we need to recognize other people as fellow human beings instead of “the other” or “the enemy.” And we must reject extreme, hateful, fear-filled rhetoric. One factor that set the stage for the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994 was the fact that many in the Hutu majority had, for years, referred to their Tutsi neighbors as “cockroaches.” It’s a heck of a lot easier to kill an insect than a human being.
Nouwen continues by diagnosing his own tendency in this direction, especially his tendency to judge other people’s motives:
Constantly I find myself “making up my mind” about somebody else: “He cannot be taken seriously. She is really just asking for attention. They are rabble-rousers who only want to cause trouble.” These judgements are indeed a form of moral killing. I label my fellow human beings, categorize them, and put them at a safe distance from myself. By my judgements I divide my world into those who are good and those who are evil, and I thus play God. But everyone who plays God ends up acting like the demon.
Judging others implies that somehow we stand outside of the place where weak, broken, sinful human beings dwell. It is an arrogant and pretentious act that shows blindness not only toward others but also toward ourselves. 
The truth of course is, as Paul tells us, we “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” We need to recognize this and heed John’s call to repentance. As Thomas Merton wrote, “If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” 
Of course, repentance is not merely saying we were wrong and then going on about our lives. No, repentance is a 180-degree course correction. As Matthew Skinner points out in our Advent Study, repentance is a new way of seeing, “a new perspective…a changed mind,” that leads to a new way of being in the world. [Skinner, The Voices of Advent: The Bible’s Insight’s for a Season of Hope, 37] It has to do with the totality of one’s life. It involves how we think and act. Genuine repentance will be reflected in a change of lifestyle. This is why John tells us to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”
Matthew dose not tell us what this fruit looks like. But in Luke’s Gospel, we find the earliest commentary on what it means to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”  In Luke’s account, John gives concrete examples of such fruit. He tells the crowd, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” And to those who held positions of power, the tax collectors and soldiers, John said, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” and “do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.” John is challenging the norm, because it was accepted practice for tax collectors to take a little extra for themselves and it was not uncommon for soldiers to use their power to extort money to supplement their meager wages. He is declaring that repentance means acting differently toward other people, treating them fairly and equitably. He is speaking of a transformed way of life.
Transformed because the fruit of repentance is a reordered life, a life marked by concern for others. Concern for one’s own survival is no longer the supreme value. It is replaced by a concern for the survival and well-being of others. In the same way that God has reached out to us in Jesus, we are to reach out to our neighbors, no matter how different they are, in efforts to mend our broken, distorted relationships. The first step to this reaching out is to acknowledge our own sin and need. Then our speech and actions will be seasoned with humility, honesty, and concern for others.  Repentance and the fruit it bears are the beginning of the road to the peace which Isaiah envisioned, for they create new, transformed relationships between people.
Boston Globe columnist Linda Weltner tells a story of an interaction she observed one day in the park while watching children playing. For some reason, two children who were playing together got into a heated argument. One shouted at the other, “I hate you! I’m never going to play with you again!” For a few minutes, it was so. The two played on their own. But then, Weltner noticed, much to her surprise, that those two children were again playing together and sharing their toys. Seeing this, she turned to another mother sitting beside her and said, “How do children do that? How do they manage to be so angry with each other one minute and the best of friends the next?” The other mother replied, “It’s easy. They choose happiness over righteousness.” 
If we truly desire the peace that Isaiah envisions, the peace that God offers, this is the choice before us: to choose happiness over righteousness; to choose relationship over being right; to choose concern and care for others—the true righteousness—over fear of others; to choose Beloved Community over the loneliness and division of self-interest, to choose peace over fear and love over hate. This is the life of the kingdom of the Coming Christ; this is the way into which the little Christ child desires to lead us.
So, on this Peace Sunday, may we repent so that the Divine Refiner’s fires may purge us of all hate, all greed, all fear, all self-absorption, all prejudice and all evil. Let us repent so that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge and love of God, so that we might be transformed into instruments of God’s peace—instruments by which God will craft the kingdom of peace. And may God haste the coming of that day when all peoples shall beat their swords into plowshares, when the lion and the lamb shall live together, when we shall all choose the happiness of a just peace over self-righteousness, when nations shall study war no more and the dividing walls shall be torn down and there shall be one new humanity united in the grace and love of God. Amen.