We are currently in the season of Advent. This is the season we wait expectantly for the transformed world. And this is the season that we hope… for many different things and desires of our heart to be fulfilled.
Our hope is not grounded, however, in the comfort of familiar yearly patterns of consumerist preparation for the “holidays” with Black Friday and Cyber Monday as our starting points. Our hope is grounded in the transformed reality of Isaiah 11, a reality that is yet future but is also past and present, especially in the birth, work, death, and resurrection of Jesus … and his followers … and in us. Without the visions and missions, sacrifices and interpretations of all the believers that have gone before us for millennia, our aspirations for and imagination of God’s peaceable kingdom would be greatly impoverished, if not impossible.
This realization and appreciation is what the apostle Paul was getting at in his letter to the bands of Christians in Rome that we just heard spoken here among us: For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. It is fitting that Paul, in culminating his argument in chapters 14 and 15 and, indeed, of the whole of Romans, recalls the words of Isaiah 11:10, The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope. The root of Jesse, of course, is a direct allusion in Christian terms to Jesus.
--Chris Walters
Image & quotation source: John August Swanson, Peaceable Kingdom, https://itinerantchurch.com/isaiah-11-hope-transformation-peaceable-kingdom-advent/
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