Visions Of Sugar Plums

How many of you occasionally fantasize about winning the lottery? You can spend a lot of time making lists of worthy causes and deserving relatives and fabulous vacations and your dream house. In fact, most of us have dreams we play with when reality gets to be just a little too much for us. When I was a little girl in Brazil, I used to fantasize that Tarzan would come swinging through my window and carry me off to his jungle hideout. Which wasn’t too farfetched, if you believed as I did that Tarzan was real. Because Rio was in the tropics, we had jungle, and vines, and monkeys. The fact that we came up a little shy on lions and elephants didn’t get in my way at all. And then of course there’s the fairy tale with a zillion variations about being granted three wishes. You can spend hours on that one. What’s your favorite fantasy?

I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a bad thing to dream a little about a day when all of our problems will be over, or all our wishes will come true. Sometimes having a vision of a perfect future is the only thing that gets us through hard times.

In Isaiah’s day things looked just about as bad as they could be. Whether you lived in the northern kingdom of Israel that had recently been conquered by Assyria, or in the southern kingdom of Judah, which was not only being overwhelmed by refugees but looked like it was next on Assyria’s shopping list, there was not a whole lot to look forward to. And to make matters worse, the most prominent religious leader in the entire country was telling them that God was mad at them. “I will turn my hand against you,” [Is 1:25] Isaiah says in chapter one, after listing all the appalling things they have been up to, from a corrupt justice system to empty worship.

But all of a sudden, in this chapter Isaiah lays out in front of the people a vision of how things could be, indeed of how things will be. Instead of telling the people God will refuse to hear their prayers until they clean up their act, Isaiah promises them that “all the nations shall stream to [the house of the Lord].” [v. 2] He is telling them that the day will come when not only the disobedient Judeans and the captive Israelites, but the Assyrians, Egyptians and everyone else will fall in line. Not only will they obey God, they will actually hunger for his wisdom and righteousness; the now besieged city of Jerusalem that God has threatened to abandon will be the center of the known world, the source of wisdom and power and goodness.

And when that day comes, there will finally be peace. The people who have escaped the Assyrian sword, perhaps seen family members and neighbors hauled off behind the Assyrians chariots, who knew that it was only a matter of time before the armies would be turned against them, would have no more reason to be afraid.

What a lovely thought. What a wonderful promise. What an impossible dream. What a fantasy to escape to. When all people turn to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who rescued the Israelites from slavery and gave them their land and the law, there will be peace. When God’s perfect justice is the universal standard, “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 any more.” [v. 4]

When is that going to happen?

Is that ever going to happen?

How many wars have there been since Isaiah first spoke these words? Jerusalem was conquered by Babylon, and except for a brief period under the Maccabees was never really free again. After the Persians conquered the Babylonians, Alexander the Great conquered the Persians, and finally the Romans conquered the Greeks. And that little strip of land connecting Europe and Africa and Asia was a battleground in every single one of these conflicts. Shall I go on? After Rome fell, the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean led to the Crusades which were stopped by the brutal Ottoman Empire, which after its fall in the early part of the 20th century led to the partition of Palestine that Arafat’s successors are still fighting over. Folks, it’s been almost 3,000 years since Isaiah promised peace! You can hardly be blamed if you read this passage with the same degree of confidence that you check off the numbers on your lottery ticket. Nice, but hardly realistic.

So how do we handle passages like this? Do we lump it in with the other fantasies we beguile ourselves with when times are hard, do we shrug and resign ourselves to waiting for the Lord’s return? Or can we actually learn something from Isaiah’s words about how to live in the present?