Essentials for Peace 1

A Sermon Based on Isaiah 2:1-5

By Donald M. Tuttle

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Preached December 2, 2001

In the final minutes of the Pageant, a tall, thin contestant, dressed in her evening gown and high heel shoes, will stand next to the emcee and prepare herself for that all-important final question. Opening the envelope, the tuxedoed host asks something like this: "If you had only one wish that could come true, what wish would that be?"

What that the contestant nods her perfectly coiffed head, reveals her glistening white teeth and offers the answer for which she has been well prepared. (You know what it is, don’t you?")

"If I had only one wish, I would wish that people everywhere could live in peace."

But we would really like more than that, wouldn’t we? What we would like is what the Hebrew people called "shalom." Shalom connotes more than the absence of war. It entails well being, wholeness, a sense that all is right with the world. It is what all of us want for ourselves, our children, our world. It is the deepest desire of the heart.

The question is why is it so elusive? If everyone wants it, why is it so hard to come by? What would it take to experience true peace?

Over the next four weeks, we are going to explore that question. We are going to do so by looking at four passages of Scripture from the prophet Isaiah, four passages that hold forth the promise of peace. Each identifies an essential for experiencing the shalom we seek.

In addressing the people of Israel, the prophet Isaiah envisioned a time in which the whole world would live at peace. The peace was to be so substantive, so real, that people wouldn’t even need weapons. They would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. They would turn what had been used to destroy into what could be used to create.

But Isaiah knew that such peace wasn’t just going to happen. Human sin is too great for that. He knew peace could only come when people everywhere, when all the nations of the world, recognized that true wisdom comes from God. It would only come when people streamed to God, where they could be taught God’s ways and prepared to walk in God’s path. Peace would come when Israel and all its neighbor gave authority to God’s words.

In short, the first essential for peace is knowledge of and obedience to God’s teachings, or what Isaiah called "the word of the Lord."

Now I know that kind of language makes us nervous. Too often the Scriptures have been misused to oppress people--including slaves and women. Too often the powerful have wielded the Scriptures like a club, beating back anyone who would challenge their wrongdoing. Certainly abuses exist. But I don’t think that is really what makes us uncomfortable. After all, medicines have often been abused but we still use them. Laws have often been used against people, but we still value them. The problem is that if God is really the one true God; if God is the creator, sustainer and redeemer of the universe; if God has revealed God’s self in the people of Israel and in Jesus Christ; and if God has given us the Scriptures, as we claim, then we know that we are to give God’s word authority over our lives. And we don’t want to do that.

The story is told of a man who set out to edit the Bible. He wanted to update it--to make it more relevant to his life and the life of those around him. He wanted to take out all the parts that modern minds might find offensive. Such an effort sounds foolish--even heretical. Yet isn’t that exactly how we approach God’s teachings? Dallas Williard has pointed out that we have come to a place in which we give more authority to others than to God. Ann Landers knows more about marriage, Dr. Ruth knows more about sex, Dr. Spock knows more about childrearing, Jeffery Tobin knows more about money, and James Fletcher more about ethics than God knows about any of these. In fact, one study shows that by a margin of more than two to one, people in the United States reject the notion that the Bible is authoritative in any way. And that is the precise the reverse of 30 years ago. Because we have such a low view of Scriptures, when we do encounter them we edit it, we try to make them conform to us, fit our notions, rather than having our lives conform to it.

And the result is a loss of peace.

I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s--the days of the Vietnam War, of race riots, of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King. I am not nostalgic. I don’t remember any "good old days." And I know that even before that there were serious social problems. But any reasonable analysis of the last 50 years would point to the fact that as people have become less and less aware of God’s teachings, as we have given the Scriptures less and less authority in our lives, we have experience less and less true peace. More and more marriages have been strained to the point of breaking. More and more children have grown up without a moral compass. More and more people have become isolated and despairing. We have witnessed the "Me First" self-centeredness of the ‘80s and the obsessive greed of the ‘90s. We now live in the day of AIDS and of an ever-growing gap between rich and poor, in a time in which language and behaviors that were once brought embarrassment, even shame, are now the order of the day.

Now I don’t dismiss the gains we have made in civil rights and equality, disarmament and technology. But where is the shalom? Where is the well being, the personal and political wholeness? Where is the peace? It is missing because people are missing the first essential, knowledge of and obedience to God’s teachings.

And such knowledge and obedience begins with God’s people.

Our reading from the Book of Isaiah ended with the fifth verse, but what follows is significant. Immediately after envisioning a day of peace in which people everywhere would know and live God’s word, Isaiah calls on the people of Israel to return to God, to walk again in God’s light. It is a call to learn and live God’s ways.

Such is the challenge facing us today. Methodist Bishop Richard Wilke has noted that even many of us in the church are biblically illiterate. Too many in our congregations, he said, have only a hazy, mixed-up understanding of what is actually contained in the Bible. We can’t name five of the Ten Commandments or four of the eight Beatitudes. We don’t really know what the Bible says about marriage or family, stewardship or equality—and we don’t know because we don’t read it. According to George Barna only one out of every 10 members of a mainline Church--Disciples, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian and the like--read the Scriptures anywhere close to a daily basis.

That must change, if we want peace in our lives and in our world. The promised peace comes not when we "study" the Scriptures, as if it were a math textbook, or "analyze" it, as if it were just another piece of great literature, but when we listen to its authoritative voice and let it shape us, when we let it form us rather than trying to make it conform to us.

I know Advent is a busy time. But what better time is there to read what God has given, to begin to learn God’s words and walk in God’s ways. What better time is there than now to take a step toward the shalom for which we all wish.