A Spirited Shoot

--When one gets a big box of some product, only to read carefully the fine print which says “Some settling may have occurred during shipping” and we know that we've been had again.

--”New low price” trumpets the sticker on the box, but what is not pointed out is that there is 4 oz. less contents in the box.

WYSIWYG...how many ways can we be deceived?

The list is never-ending, and kept up by the chief deceiver, Satan himself.

For deceptions that trip us are not just about the amount of cereal in a box, but are also about some of the truly important issues of life....like Pilate's question to Jesus: “What is truth?”

What is holy?

What will last forever?

Why am I here?

And if we are stuck with only WYSIWYG, we are going to be depressed in a hurry.

Answers which we invent to those big questions are not at all reassuring.

WYSIWYG – look around and what do we see?

--Death and more death for the people of Syria.

--Hurricanes at the coast and a sudden storm that can devastate our inland valley.

--Cancer, heart disease, epidemics and pain.

--Relationships breaking and divorce painfully common.

WYSIWYG –Do we want to live with only that? It is depressing!

The prophet Isaiah speaks in the same sort of climate.

--It was a time of prosperity for a few, but poverty for the majority.

--There was war and threat of war.

--Greed was having a great time.

--The nation and its citizens are caught up in evil of many sorts.

The prophet knows all this, and points it out, to the great discomfort of those who really don't want to hear about things that need to be changed.

And that is not all that he says.

He wrote passages like the one we heard this morning, one which points to much beyond WYSIWYG.

The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

Get real, Isaiah.

What you are saying here is ridiculous.

Look around: nothing like that could possibly happen.

Put a leopard and a kid together and the leopard has lunch.

Is that all there is?

What sort of a world do we have?

Is it destined only for nature, tooth, and claw, the survival of the fittest, and random acts of violence?

If so, putting lambs and lions together will seem stupid.

But before we dismiss Isaiah as a pious guy who has stayed up too late and has drank too much cold medicine, let us suppose that Isaiah is pointing to another reality, a bigger reality, a final reality.

WHS is not all WYG, thank God!

We tend to measure people by the size of their bank accounts, but Isaiah seems to be defining people in terms of what they desire, of that for which they long, where they place their hope and expectation.

Isaiah says that what is truly real is hope in the actions of the Lord God.

For what do we hope this Advent season?

Is it anything beyond WYS?

Advent and Christmas is a great time to talk about what is beyond WYSIWYG.

--This is the time to hear about other possibilities, to hold onto the hope that God will do something wonderful, fresh, and different with us.

--This hope goes far beyond WYSIWYG; for at Bethlehem we thought we got a scrawny little baby born in obscurity and poverty.

Instead, while the world wasn't looking, we got God's full action of love.

What you see turns out to be only a fraction of what you get!

Martin Luther King began one of his most famous sermons with the assertion: At the center of the Christian faith is the conviction that there is a God of power who is able to do exceedingly abundant things in nature and in history.

It makes all the difference when we believe that.

William Willimon tells of a group of Christians who went on a mission project to South America.

They were briefed on conditions there, but they were not ready emotionally to see children buried every day, to see profound and debilitating hunger, to experience political oppression.

After several days, they were barely able to function, so great was their shock.

One of the local Christian leaders said to them: “You Americans only know how to help someone when you are winning.

Now, look in our faces and you will see faces of hope; not because we are winning, for we have been losing all our lives.

These are our children that we are burying, our stomachs that are hungry.

But when you look at our faces, you will still see faces of hope, because we are convinced that we are being faithful to what God is calling us to do in this moment, and because we have the strong hope that victory will at length come, and it will be ours.”

They are people who understand Isaiah, people who know that what they get is not just what they see now.

This does not mean that they just sit around waiting for the sweet bye and bye.

They, and any of us who would like to join them in Isaiah's path, will begin to speak and act now in ways that are congruent with the ways of that re-made lion-and-lamb community.

That is, they begin to act like heaven now, as much as we poor flawed sinners can.

Here are some questions to ponder this week:

--Am I holding onto Isaiah's vision?

--What is really real?

--What am I doing this week that is a bit like heavenly behavior?

--What am I doing this week that might attract someone else to ask questions and join us in praising God?

--Is WYSIWYG a true word about ourselves and our lives?

Or, does the final word belong to the Lord God and the trust and hope he gives?

We have owned our family homestead for almost 200 years.

About 25 years ago, I walked through the woods one day, and saw a scene of desolation.

The gypsy moth damage was so severe that most all of the mighty oaks were dead.

It had to be timbered, to derive some benefit from the disaster.

But there, among all the mess, I found a new oak seedling starting to grow.

Somehow it had sprouted late enough to avoid the gypsy moth.

What we saw of desolation on that hillside was not all there is to the story; because of those sprouts, my grandchildren may see a forest on that hillside someday.

The final word belong to the Lord God and the trust and hope he gives.

Let's confess it on this Second Sunday in Advent: we haven't seen anything yet!

Let all say. Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.