Come, Let Us Walk in the Light

Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44

December 2, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

“They shall beat their swords into plowshares….Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.”

“We ain’t gonna study war no more!” as the song puts it.

Yeah, right.

This passage always reminds me of that other prophecy about lions laying down with lambs, and I often have the Woody Allen response to that: “When the lion lays down with the lamb, the lamb better get up!” It’s hard to believe this all could be real, because the world we study in history and the world we see in the daily news and in our personal lives is so not like this.

And that’s where Jesus’ words about not understanding God’s time come in. You see the Greek Bible has another word for God’s time, kairos, which is not linear or predictable like the way we count time (chronos). It’s almost like the concept, beloved of science fiction writers, of a parallel universe. God’s time, God’s world, is constantly breaking into ours, and if we look we can see it. Jesus coming was a big way of God’s world breaking through. But if we think, we can remember others. Did any of you who are at least as old as I am ever think the Berlin Wall would fall without another war? Do you remember our amazement when it happened? God’s world breaking through.

The more of us who live as though God’s world is our world, the more it breaks in. The more lions who stop preying on the weak and lay down beside them, the more lambs with the courage to stay put, the closer this vision comes to reality. That’s what the Bible means by constantly calling us to see the light, God’s light. When we look with the light God shines for us, we can see things that are otherwise invisible to us. Hence the poignant cry of the prophet Isaiah, “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light.”

Now I am looking out there at some of you and I can almost hear the words in your head, “There goes Shelly again, trying to tell us that what we can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears about the reality of this world doesn’t have to be true. Kairos trumping chronos! Parallel universes! She’s been watching too much Star Trek!”

Maybe. But let me tell you something about how my eyes work. I was born with a visual defect that I have discovered is more common than you might think. I do not have the capacity for binocular vision. Not only can I not use binoculars, but I see the world flatter than most of you do. I can’t use kaleidoscopes or look at those puzzle drawings that have pictures hidden inside of them. People show me these things and look at me dumbfounded and say, “Why can’t you see it; it’s right there!”

Well, I can’t. So over the years, I have depended on what other people tell me the world looks like when it has depth and dimension that I can imagine but simply not see. Because I cannot see it does not mean it is not there. As long as I live, I will never see the way most of you do, but I believe the world is as you say it is, because people I love and trust have been seeing for me. I have heard people who have much more profound vision impairments say the same thing: we cannot see but we trust you when you tell us what the world is.

O House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light.

Come, says God, trust me. Let me do the seeing for you. We’re already practicing with this table, for some would see only bread and juice here, but with God’s light we see a feast and the very presence of Jesus. Even if you cannot see it fully, you can walk beside God into the light, and God will see for you until your vision clears. Then you can live as though what God says the world is, is already so. If you do, then others will begin to see it, too, and Isaiah’s vision of peoples and nations streaming to the presence of God just might be more real than we think it ever could be.

Sounds like an adventure to me. O Church of the Redeemer, come, let us walk in the light of God. Amen.