Kingdom of God

Blessed are you who are poor?

A sermon preached on Luke’s version of the Beatitudes – Luke 6:20-26.

Luke and Matthew both have accounts of the Beatitudes. They are different. Matthew locates them within an early sermon delivered on a mountain side, Luke also places them in an early sermon but one located on a plane. Matthew has eight, whereas Luke only has four. But then Luke includes four woes that repeat the beatitudes in a negative form. “Happy are you poor”. “How terrible for you who are rich”.

The wording also differs. Luke’s statements are short political statements about life as it was lived at the time. Matthew’s statements are more metaphorical with an essentially spiritual or religious message. Thus, Luke says simply “Happy are you poor” a statement about literal poverty, whereas Matthew says “Happy are you who are spiritually poor”, a statement using poverty as a metaphor for our spiritual health. Luke says “Happy are you who hunger” another literal statement whereas Matthew says “Happy are you who hunger for righteousness”, another metaphor about how we are spiritually.

There has been considerable debate among Christian scholars about how to account for these differences. The overall structure is sufficiently similar to assume that both gospels are referring to the same set of original sayings. Like most preachers Jesus will almost certainly have delivered similar but not identical sermons on different occasions to different people. It might be that Matthew and Luke are referring to different sermons. But then these particularly sayings are formalised almost as poetry. They don’t strike me as casual language that might vary from sermon to sermon, they feel like precisely worded epigrams that Jesus has polished and honed to say exactly what he meant to say. It’s quite possible that Jesus formalised the beatitudes in this way as a teaching tool with the intention that they could be remembered word by word. Here is something that is so important that you must remember it exactly.

The theory that most scholars hold to is that the gospel writers moulded what Jesus said to their own theological perspective. Luke, who probably says more about money and its corrupting power, than any of the other gospel writers, presents the beatitudes as being about actual poverty. Matthew, who is generally much more interested in Jesus as a religious figure, presents the beatitudes as being about spiritual poverty.

So which is correct? What did Jesus actually say? The short answer is we don’t know. Scholars vary in their opinions and, as might be expected those opinions tend to reflect the theology of the scholars. Those who see Jesus as primarily a figure of religious significance, tend to assume that Matthew’s version is the closer to the original. Those who tend to think that Jesus offered a political gospel will tend to prefer Luke’s version.

There are other clues. Generally speaking when similar sayings are found in the gospel, but one is longer than the other scholars tend to assume that it is more likely that an original shorter statement has been added to rather than that words from the longer statement have been deleted. Also in 1945 a “Gospel of Thomas” was discovered in the Egyptian desert and is believed to be a very early collection of the saying of Jesus. It includes another set of beatitudes that are much closer to Luke’s version than Matthew’s. Another argument, that sways me, is that where two such similar statements are found in the gospels, and one seems at odds with how early Christianity was developing at the time that it was written down, then that is most likely to be the true version. It is much more likely that someone would edit material to be in line with later thinking than to contradict it. It seems clear to me that much of the political radicalism that we read in the synoptic gospels was lost as the early Christian movement focussed on Jesus as of primarily religious significance. Luke, as a disciple of Paul, was part of that movement and it seems unlikely to me that he would have edited Jesus’ sayings to make them more political in nature. On balance, I think that Jesus’ original teaching was probably about real poverty and real hunger and real grief.

If we accept this, the first thing we have to ask is, “Does Jesus really think that poor, hungry, weeping people are happier than rich, satisfied, laughing people?” Is he saying that there is something that is inherently good about poverty and hunger? Should we intentionally make ourselves poor and hungry in order to find God? Is poverty the way to godliness?

If we start to think this way, then we have fallen into a trap. When Jesus talks so positively about “the poor”, he is not eulogising their status (he understood the desperation of their poverty all too well to do this), he is celebrating their potential. They are not happy because they are poor, they are happy because they will recognise God’s Kingdom when they see it. They are not happy because they are hungry, they are happy because they will be so appreciative when they are fed. They are not happy because they weep now, they are happy because one day they will laugh.

Another issue is in how we regard “the poor”. When we read this passage as Western Christians in a comfortable church in a reasonably affluent town just south on Manchester, “the poor” is “them”, somebody else, somebody out there. When Jesus was speaking in rural Galilee all those years ago, he was speaking to a crowd who recognised themselves as poor, hungry and weeping. They knew they were subjugated both by local civil and religious authorities and their Roman overlords.  “The poor” is “us”. Jesus is making a statement of solidarity with the people he is speaking to. Jesus is not just saying happy are the poor, he is saying happy are we, we are in this together.

But he is saying more than that he is not just saying “we are in this together”, he is saying “we are in this together and we have wonderful things to share”. When communities share each other’s poverty and hunger and grief they are in a much better position to build a kingdom of love than those who struggle individually to maintain wealth and privilege.

We went out to the cinema for the first time in two years last night. We saw Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s memoire about his early childhood. We were taken to a terraced street in working class Belfast. This was not a place of abject poverty but it was a place of where people struggled to make ends meet and lived in fear for their lives as the political situation deteriorated. But it was also a place of community. The street itself was full of life with children playing and older people taking their chairs outside to sit and pass the time of day with whoever was passing. Everyone knew everyone else, and they cared for each other and helped each other out. Multigenerational families lived their lives in close proximity. When Kenneth’s father suggests that moving to England would give them an opportunity to progress, his mother questions why anyone would want to progress from the strength of that community that supported each other through hardship. Branagh may be seeing that time and place through the rose-tinted spectacles of his childhood, but he is clearly nostalgic for a society that bound people together in solidarity, a society which he has left and can no longer access.     

Of course if Luke’s four beatitudes are about “us”, then the ensuing woes are about “them”, those who are rich, satisfied and laughing.. Those people back in the city concerned only with creating more wealth. Those people back in the religious buildings trying to persuade themselves that a particular form of worship is the gateway to finding God. Those people who separate themselves off from each other so that they can enjoy their wealth on their own. Those people who are incapable of working to build God’s Kingdom because they have lost sight of who God is and what that Kingdom might look like.

When read in this way this passage cuts through to life in twentieth century Britain doesn’t it. We have a divided society. A society in which more and more of God’s people are struggling to make ends meet – to both eat and heat, but also a society that is driven by the conceits of the wealthy and powerful. An elite that separate themselves off from the majority of the people. An elite that are incapable of working towards the coming of God’s Kingdom because they have lost sight of who God is and what that Kingdom might look like.

The beatitudes offer us a choice. We can align ourselves with the poor, the hungry and those who weep, or we can align ourselves with the rich, the satisfied and those who laugh. But they do more than offer us a choice, they tell us which choice we should make and why.

We should align ourselves with the poor, not because we admire their poverty, but because we know that they will recognise God’s Kingdom when they are encounter it. We should align ourselves with the hungry, not because hunger is good, but because of how we know they will savour food when it is provided. We should align ourselves with those who weep, not because we love tears, but because we long to bring laughter. Let’s take these thoughts into our next hymn “Community of Christ”,

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Living for God’s kingdom at a time when it seems to be getting further away

A sermon following the lectionary readings, the first half of Psalm 22 (see here for a powerful Australian paraphrase) and the story of the rich young ruler as told in Mark’s gospel. 

Introduction

I’ve found this a rather difficult week. I have very real reservations about how many things in society are heading at the moment. The rational scientist in me looks at how things are going and concludes a bleak future awaits us all. The feeling Christian in me grieves for all those who will be caught up in this process and the struggles they will have to endure. When I read today’s Psalm, which starts off as a lamentation, it struck me as a powerful, poetic description of what it is I feel. The only difference perhaps being that the psalm is written as a personal lamentation whereas the grief I feel is for our community.

Monday saw the publication of the latest report from the intergovernmental panel on climate change. The report makes salutary reading. Scientists opinions on this subject are always estimates and their analysis of the growing evidence is that these estimates have been too generous in the past. The effects are being seen earlier and more severely than they had expected. They are now saying that we need to take even greater actions even earlier than their previous recommendations. Of course this report comes at a time when world governments are failing to meet even the looser earlier requirements.

But it’s not just climate change. There are a number of other large-scale environmental factors including loss of habit and biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, degradation of soil, pollution of the atmosphere and oceans, and increasing shortages of fresh water (these are summarised well, and not too bleakly, in Kate Raworth’s book, Donut Economics). On all these fronts the future looks bleak if we progress as we now are.

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Then there are economic factors. There is growing inequality in wealth distribution with the rich flourishing and the poor being left to fend for themselves. Economic growth is largely funded by personal and governmental debt which is clearly unsustainable. Within our own country the health, education, law enforcement and social care provision is being starved of funding and is failing to support the most basic needs of many of our population. We see this particularly in the growing debate, in the second half of the week about the consequences of continuing to roll out universal credit in it current form.

And all of this is contributing to a growing crisis in our mental health services. Wednesday was UN World Mental Health Day. It is essential that such days are used to remind ourselves on the scale of this problem but it led to another slice of confronting publicity. We were reminded that mental health problems, and particularly those amongst the young are getting worse. At any given week one in six people experiences as common mental health condition and the funding of mental health services is simply nowhere near what is required to satisfy this need.

The stereotype of the old street preached is based around the message, “Repent all ye sinners for the end of the world is nigh”. The modern equivalent is perhaps not a pronouncement that this world is going to end but that is going to change beyond our imagination in the decades to come and that most of that change is going to be in a direction that we would rather not imagine. I don’t think its healthy to dwell on this all the time but every so often I think it is important that we acknowledge what is going on in our world and how we feel about it.

Reading the story of the Rich Young Ruler as a critique of contemporary society

At first sight the gospel reading doesn’t seem to align with either the psalm, or the reading from the book of Job which is set as an alternative, or the introduction I gave to this service earlier. The story is almost always taken as referring to a particular individual, the rich young ruler. Indeed some commentators have suggested that Jesus teaching should not necessarily be extended to anyone else. This man had a specific problem, they say, and Jesus offered a specific solution. If don’t have that problem then the teaching needn’t apply to us.

It might not surprise you to hear that I don’t buy into this and I’m actually going to take a different slant on this story. I’m going to suggest that this story and Jesus’ subsequent teaching can be taken at a societal level. Indeed when the man has departed disappointed and turns to his disciples Jesus doesn’t lament for an individual, he expresses a generalisation, “How hard will it be for rich people to enter the Kingdom of God”.

Note the difference here between what the man asks for and how Jesus talks afterwards. The man asks what he need do to “inherit eternal life”. Jesus reflects on what is required to enter the “Kingdom of God”. This is characteristic of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, which contain probably the best record we have of what Jesus actually said.  “Eternal life” is obviously tied up with ideas with what will happen somewhere else after we die and is rarely on Jesus’ agenda. He is much more interested in proclaiming the “Kingdom of God”, a vision of how the world is and will be, “on Earth, as it is in Heaven”.

Jesus’ linkage of the coming of the Kingdom to our attitudes to wealth is important in our modern context because almost all of the environmental problems that our world currently faces are a consequence of our focus on accumulating wealth, of wanting more stuff for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren. Whilst our lives are immensely enriched by that stuff, it is the factories and agricultural processes that we use to produce it that are causing the problem. Our industries pump out vast amounts of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere and our farming expands to satisfy our needs leading to environmental degradation, habitat loss and eventually extinction of many species which used to live where we now grow food. The problem isn’t limited to our material wealth. Our wealth is now expressed as much through the experiences we crave for as well as it is through the stuff we accumulate. Travel for tourism is a particularly damaging for the planet through the carbon dioxide emissions from air travel, degradation of once vulnerable and once inaccessible ecosystems, and distortion of local economies to serve the needs of tourists rather than local inhabitants.

Many of our economic and social problems are also, essentially, a consequence of our societal pursuit of wealth. The drive for wealth creation, gross domestic product, under current economic models is leading to suppression of wages for those on low incomes to fund large pay outs for investors and exorbitant salaries for those at the top of industry who maintain this system. The desire for houses and furnishings and cars and holidays keeps us enslaved to our jobs and exacerbate worries about income and job security which are two of the largest drivers of mental health problems.

In short, our society’s obsession with wealth accumulation and economic growth is one of the largest barriers to the coming of God’s Kingdom in our modern world. Jesus clearly didn’t respond to this Biblical incident with a critique of the twenty first century market economy, but he did recognise, in the earlier and more localised economy of which he was a part, exactly the same factors operating as wreak havoc in our world today. There is no doubt in my mind that there are important societal messages in the words we have heard read this afternoon as well as the requirement for a personal response that preachers normally focus on when preaching from this text.

Re-focussing on and celebrating Kingdom priorities

Changing societal attitudes to wealth and wealth creation is a huge political challenge. Where do we start?

Perhaps the first thing is to realise that we don’t have to “start”. The church, at its best, has engaged with this question over the centuries. There have been celebrations this week that Archbishop Oscar Romero is tohas been made a saint. He we must remember was martyred for standing up against the evils of the economic system that was developing in El Salvador in the 1970s. The Archbishop of Canterbury has made important pronouncements about the creation and management of wealth in the modern world. The task has already been started, all that we are invited to do is join in seriously.

The next thing to remark is that we will almost certainly get nowhere by simply criticising wealth. One of the most obvious aspects of this gospel story is that when asked to do give up his wealth the young man simply walked away. If all we do is criticise wealth then the population will simply walk away as he did. We will be left preaching to ourselves.

What Jesus did, and what he continues to do, is to offer an alternative. To allow us to judge success not by the quantity of our possessions but by the quality of our lives and particularly of our relationships. It is interesting that in the final verses of todays readings, the reward that the disciples are offered is new and deeper relationships. We have to show the world that a life following Jesus, whatever income, is a much richer one than a live spent pursuing wealth.

The only way we can do this, as individuals and as a church is to live lives that exemplify this, that show how much more rewarding our lives can be when we turn from pursuing wealth and engaging in pursuits that are destructive of our planet. We need to celebrate those lives and show others how fantastic they can be. About a year ago I decided avoid eating meat and dairy produce as much as possible because of a growing awareness of how much damage modern meat and diary farming does to our planning. Initially this seemed daunting but with the help of a couple of well-chosen cookery books and the wider resources of the internet I’m now revelling in fantastic diet of wonderful food that I would never have considered before. There is no doubt that my life has been enhanced by cutting down on foods that are produced using destructive practices.

For a longer period I’ve tried to cut down on the amount of flying I do. Of all the things that most people can do to help the environment, stopping flying is the easiest and most effective. But by making this choice we have begun to re-discover the beauty of our own country and particularly to revel in the seasons rather than trying to escape them. Of course many people have always lived much more simple lives than I’ve lived for the earlier part of mine and in this case our role is to honour and celebrate those lives and to encourage people to continue within them rather than to beat them up for not being even better.

Living faithfully in a deteriorating world

But how does this fit in with the rather bleak picture I set out in the earlier part of this service. Whatever we achieve at a personal level, it is extremely unlikely that we are going to prevent at least some of the cataclysmic changes that face our world. One of the assertions of the IPCC was that we only have another 12 years to change the way the world operates in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The world’s economic and political systems simply don’t work that quickly. It is inconceivable that we, as a planet, are going to take action quickly and effective enough to avoid extremely serious changes to our climate. We are going to have to live in a world that appears to be growing away from the vision of God’s Kingdom.

The Bible does offer us guidance here but it is very tough guidance to accept. In many Biblical visions of the future the eventual coming of the Kingdom is preceded by some apocalyptic disaster befalling the world. Those who eventually enter the Kingdom are often those who manage to preserve their faith through that apocalypse. In the past those visions were often regarded as prophetic of real events that God would bring about. In the modern world they are perhaps better interpreted as metaphors that allow us to make sense of the coming challenges. Things are almost certain to get worse on this planet, quite possibly, catastrophically worse, but however bad they get it will still be possible to live in accordance with God’s will, to love him and to love other people as we love ourselves. It is only when the whole world bends to this will that we will start to make real progress towards the coming of his Kingdom and, however rocky things become in future years it is our responsibility as Christ’s followers to live in such a way that the vision of that Kingdom is preserved in such a way that eventually all people will come to recognise its power and to work for its realisation. This will not come for many years, and it will only come on an earth that is almost unrecognisable from that we enjoy today, but our Christian hope is that it will come. Each of us has a part, all be it very small, in keeping that vision alive and passing it on to generations yet to come, however, unlikely that its realisation seems.

In conclusion I want to read the second half of the psalm that we heard read earlier. A psalm of lament for the state of our world is transformed into hope filled manifesto for the Kingdom that is yet to come.

At your table, God, the needy will feast;
……..those who hunger for you will be fed till they burst with praise!
……..They will be able to live it up, now and forever!

In every corner of the earth people will wake up to themselves
……..and turn back to you, LORD.
Every race, nation, tribe and family
……..will offer themselves to you in worship,
for you have the last word on everything;
……..what you say goes.

Even the dead will bow down to you, LORD;
……..those who are trampled in the dust will look to you in hope,
…………….and I will live for you and you alone.

Our kids and their kids will serve you, LORD;
……..as we pass the message down from one generation to the next.
People not even born yet will hear the story;
……..they will be told of what you have done to set us free.

Nathan Nettleton, 2001

Thy Kingdom come?

This is based on a sermon preached on Advent Sunday 2013 based on readings from Genesis (1:1-5), Isaiah (2:1-5), Matthew (24:36-44) and Romans (13-11-14). Try an Australian paraphrase of the lectionary readings if you want. 

Looking beyond Christmas

With candle lighting ceremony and lectionary reading this week we’ve had more Bible readings than we’d normally have. These have taken us an immense journey across all of time from the Creation myths in Genesis to three different visions of the final state of our planet, one from Isaiah, one from Paul and one from Matthew. We normally see Advent as a preparation for Christmas but this morning’s readings put this in a wider context. At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Messiah who will lead us into God’s Kingdom. In preparing for the minutiae of Christmas we must be carefully that we don’t lose track of the bigger picture of preparing for the coming of God’s kingdom.

Imminent cataclysm or long term vision for human progress?

It’s worth maybe pausing to think about what we consider God’s Kingdom to be. The New Testament readings present this as an imminent event many, including Paul, believing that it would occur within their lifetimes. They clearly got this wrong, there is no sign of that event 2,000 years later.

They also believed in some sort of cataclysmic god-driven upheaval in which God would make all things new. I’m not sure we have to take this literally either. The early Christians living in pre-scientific communities didn’t really have anything to rely on for predicting the future but their own imaginations. Through modern science we have a range of tools for predicting the future and I suspect that most modern Christians see these as more reliable. The prediction of contemporary physics is that the earth will continue to rotate around the sun getting very gradually closer as the sun gradually expands until one day it will consume the earth. In some ways this is an exceptionally bleak picture but the important thing is that that is an unbelievably slow process. For the best part of the next billion years the earth is going to be substantially as it is at the moment. For all practical human considerations the earth as a planet is going to exist pretty much as it does today for ever.

If there is to  be a coming of God’s Kingdom, and it might be worth saying at this point that this is something I do very much believe in, then it is going come about by a re-structuring of society. If you strip away the clearly mythical and poetic embellishments of any of the biblical descriptions of the coming of God’s Kingdom then this is what you are left with. Isaiah’s poetry probably gives a clearer impression of this than much of the later more apocalyptic writing but I re-iterate that this vision of a re-structuring of society is at the heart of all those visions:

The LORD will settle all disputes between nations,
……..and sort out their competing claims.
They will turn weapons into welcome signs
……..and bombs into tools and toys.
Never again will nations take up arms against one another;
……..never again will young people be trained for war.

The traditional view is that God is going to bring this about through divine intervention whether we (as the human race) like it or not but, again, I think this is an unreasonable adoption of a pre-scientific view point. I suspect that this is a vision that we have been given by God’s prophets but are going to have to work for ourselves if we ever want to see it come. We are the agents of God’s change. If we want to bring about his Kingdom then we are going to have to achieve it. We’ve been inspired by God and we’ll be empowered by his Spirit. It will be His Kingdom – but it is us, his servants, who are charged with bringing it about.

 How does that relate to our present experience?

One of the problems with this sort of theology is that the prospects for the evolution of God’s Kingdom as a product of human development seem so poor. Looking at the depressing state of the world today it looks almost impossible to believe that we are progressing towards God’s Kingdom. I can see why one sector of the church just wants to give up on this and assume that if we just wait long enough God will intervene for us and put all things right – but I suspect it’s going to be a long wait.

To a certain extent this has always been the case but until very recently there has been a general feeling that humanity if progressing. Prosperity has certainly increased, quality of life has been continuously improving and, in the developed world at least, we have escaped the tyranny of warfare as a way of resolving international disputes. Against this background a general belief that human progress is leading towards some positive outcome has seemed quite rational.

But things are changing and it becomes more and more difficult to see God’s Kingdom as an inevitable end-point. For the first time in human history, it appears that our children and grand-children are going to be less well off than we are. We are living through a period of austerity, which the politicians try to sell as temporary, but which is deeply rooted in severe economic problems, principally the unbelievable levels of personal and national debt that are not going to go away quickly, if ever. The old mechanism was to lose debt in sustained economic growth but it is becoming more obvious that economic growth cannot be sustained for ever on a finite planet. We will simply run out of resources.

We are exposed to pressures from international labour markets which are cheaper than ours and as international education levels increase we will no longer be protected by our previous advantages in the knowledge economy. As affluence increases in other parts of the world we will find competition for food and other products that we have always had the freedom to buy (or steal) in the past. It seems unlikely to me that things are going to get better before they get a lot worse (at least for us in the developed world who have had a privileged status for so long). From this perspective it is easy to hanker after the halcyon days that Isaiah was speaking from.

Except that the world that Isaiah was speaking from was no more positive than the world we live in today. Isaiah lived between 800 and 700BCE at a time when Assyria was the emerging power. Israel lived in fear of invasion. These fears were quite rational, it was invaded three times over this period. Being invaded by a world super-power was not a pleasant prospect in those days. Men would have been killed, women raped and children pressed into slavery. Isaiah was not writing from a comfortable world.

The optimistic view of God’s kingdom he proclaimed has been extracted from its context. If you read the passages on either side you’ll see that Isaiah had just as depressing view of the world around him as many of us have today. Not only was he depressed at what he saw but he blamed Israel for letting things get this way. This glorious vision of God’s Kingdom is embedded in rant about how miserable the human world is.

Confidence through bleakness.

I think there is a sense in this of where Isaiah’s confidence in the inevitability of God’s Kingdom is coming from. He understands that the current situation cannot lead to prosperity and peace. Radical change is required. This could come through humanity changing and adopting a different way, God’s way.  Failing this it will come through a failure of the socioeconomic order and people learning through the consequent pain and anguish. (In many ways similar to the experience of two world wars resulting in peace and stability in Europe)  .

I feel very much the same about the current world. It seems obvious to me that the current way we do things cannot succeed. A world in which competition reigns, in which we exploit the environment and in which we feel free to exploit others cannot succeed. It is destined to fail. The only way that the human race will ever to be able to live in peace and prosperity is if we cooperate. If we respect and love each other. If we recognise that the path to satisfaction is to be thankful for what we have rather than greedy for what we lack. I have absolutely no doubt that the end-point of human development will be a society in which we recognise the truth of God’s message because any other society is going to fail.

Time-scale.

Of course this isn’t a short-term view. Where the early church saw the coming of God’s Kingdom as imminent I tend to the opposite viewpoint that the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom still lies an immeasurably far distance in the future – far beyond any timescale that I am likely to see. It is quite possible that the world is going to have to pass through a period of climate catastrophe and terrible wars over food and other resources. Nowhere in the Bible are we promised a peaceful transition to God’s Kingdom and it seems unlikely to me that we are going to get it. But don’t let that blind us to the inevitability of God’s Kingdom emerging eventually.

Our role.

So what is our role within this vision. Paul might have got his timescales wrong but I believe he got his theology right:

let’s make sure that we get rid of any old ways of living that belong to the darkness of our past. Let us live our lives in such a way that we’ll be able to hold our heads high when the broad light of day shows up everything for what it really is.

Our role is to try and live in this world now as if we were already living in God’s Kingdom. This is incredibly difficult. How do we share our resources equitably with all of God’s people in world economic system driven by the desire to accumulate personal wealth? How do we love other people in a system based on competition and exploitation? How do we preserve the gift of our planet in system that assumes continued economic growth?

This is a huge challenge. I’ve just been reading Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan’s book on the first Christmas and they point out that early Christianity was a counter-cultural movement. It realised that it wasn’t possible to live out God’s calling within society as it was then structured and proposed a different way of living. This is why it was dangerous, this is why it was persecuted. This is why it was important. This is what we have lost. When was the last time that the Church was perceived as a serious threat to society? Most of us have been so fully indoctrinated with society’s values that we don’t even recognise the radical nature of Isaiah’s vision when it is read out to us.

There can be no better metaphor for this than our preparations for Christmas. Think about your plans for Christmas. Think about how many of those preparations are essentially reinforcing our current culture. How much money are we going to lavish on ourselves at a time when many in our own culture, let alone throughout the world, are in such desperate need? How much food are we going to be bloated with at a time when so many people in the world starve? How many of us celebrate with close family behind locked doors when God’s vision is of a banquet that we share with all people?

At the start of Advent, as we start to prepare to celebrate Christmas, let us remind ourselves of the wider challenge to prepare for God’s Kingdom. Let’s try to use this next four weeks to imagine a world as Isaiah first imagined it. Let us keep that vision of God’s mountain at the forefront of our thinking:

Come, let’s go and climb the LORD’s mountain;
…………….let us worship in the temple of the God of Jacob.
……..There the LORD will teach us how to live right
…………….so that we can get our lives on track.”