Isaiah 2:1-5 November 30, 2025
Advent 1 – Hope
“to cherish a desire with
anticipation
for example, ‘she hopes to
be
invited to the party”
That’s true and we know
what
they’re talking about,
but hope is more than that
isn’t it?
To live with hope is to be optimistic,
but it’s more than just
optimism.
Martin Luther said,
“everything that is done
in the world is done by
hope.”
Even when the present seems
desperate,
to live with hope in the
future is to live with trust,
to live with faith, to live
with purpose.
Hope is faith that God will
not abandon us
and that the future will be
better.
The prophet Isaiah had
that faith in God and hope for the future.
During Advent, we’ll be
reading from the book of Isaiah.
And the traditional theme for
first Advent is “hope”.
The book of Isaiah is long. 66 chapters.
It’s ascribed to Isaiah the son
of Amoz who lived in the 8th century,
but most scholars believe
that it’s written by several people,
and they divide it into three
different sections:
First Isiah Second Isaiah and
Third Isaiah.
First Isaiah are books 1-39
written around the 700’s BC
before the destruction of
Jerusalem and exile of the Israelites.
Second Isaiah, books 40-55
was in the
500’s BC during the exile of
the Israelites
and Third Isaiah, books 56-66
were written after
the Israelites return from exile
in the 400’s BC.
All our readings this Advent are from the first part
of Isaiah
The time before the invasion
of the Babylonians,
This is a time when Isaiah and other people could feel
that things were going wrong, were heading in the
wrong direction
and were not going according
to God’s will and vision,
and Isaiah was giving a
warning to the country of Israel.
But the siege of Jerusalem
and the exile of the Jews
hadn’t happened yet.
Chapter one starts out with this kind of warning:
Ah, sinful
nation, people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the Lord,
who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
who are utterly estranged!
he goes on:
23 Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan,
and the widow’s cause does not come
before them.
only focused on its own gain.
Leaders using the power they
have to
serve themselves and get rich
rather
than to lift up and support
the most vulnerable.
This was not the country that God had established.
Not the city on a hill for others
to look to and imitate,
But just another corrupt
country that has put
God’s will and those in need
at the bottom of the priority
list.
Maybe we can appreciate Isaiah’s
observations today in this
country.
The hopes for our nation had
been high at one time.
Once we saw ourselves as the
one to emulate,
once we were an example for
others.
But things haven’t been heading in
a good direction for a very long time.
Just like Isaiah said,
people are weighed
down with inequity,
everyone does seem to
love a bribe
criminals and thieves are
the honored ones,
Everyone is just out for
what they can get,
and the widows and the
orphans – which are biblical code words
for the most vulnerable in
our society – are still not cared for.
And violence has been our
fallback since the beginning.
This country is not the one
that we once believed it was.
We’re letting ourselves and
God down in lots of ways.
I think we can feel Isaiah’s sense of foreboding.
This model is not sustainable in the long run.
It feels like we’re on the edge of a precipice,
something that will be very
unpleasant for all of us.
Isaiah warns that these ways will only lead to
destruction
to the dissolution of
everything they knew
he uses phrases like: “humanity
will be brought low”,
“doom will follow”.
Everyone will feel God’s
disappointment.
It might seem, then and now,
like all hope is lost.
But our call as people of
faith is to have hope in
the midst of hopeless
situations.
When we give up hope, then we
stop trying.
We engage in what’s called “premature
capitulation”.
We believe in the power of
the bad in the world,
more than the power of the
good so we give up too soon.
The forces of evil in this
world love that.
The forces of evil love it when
good people give up hope,
Hope is not just blind
optimism, which can be naive.
Hope is acting, it’s
determination. It’s having your ducks in a row
and pushing forward. It’s anticipating
God’s actions and help.
Maybe that’s why our biblical
stories are so full
of miracles –things that seem
impossible.
God wants to get us used to
the impossible happening.
So that we will still have
hope.
I want to remind you about
hope that many of us were involved in.
In February of 2022, I had
heard that Chimney Cove was
going to be torn down to
build luxury apartments.
The developer actually called
me, and thought I would be
happy about this, but I was
not.
So I talked to a lot of
people about it,
and I got a group together to
discuss it.
And most people said that
nothing could be done.
The deal was too far along
too much money was involved.
I remember one friend saying,
“You can’t stop that”.
I heard that and I actually believed
it in a lot of ways.
But when the eviction
notices were given out and people
were given just 30 days to
leave, we didn’t give in to
the fatality of the whole
thing, and we all raised a stink
and we started to go on TV
and mobilize.
And that caused lots of other
people to raise a stink.
We erred on the side of
hope and in the end,
our friends in Chimney Cove
were able to stay.
Was it a miracle? hmm. You
can probably connect the dots and see
how it all happened, but it
sure felt like a miracle.
Had we all just given up and
stayed quiet, and given into
premature capitulation and
not had hope,
the outcome would have been
different.
In the midst of desperate
situations,
Hope is one of our greatest
weapons.
And in the midst of whatever
seems hopeless now
we have to remember those
miracles, and
to use that hope and not give
in too quickly.
And more than just that
one event, I have hope that one day,
the people of Chimney Cove
will not have to worry
about being evicted because
of redevelopment.
I have hope that they will be
saved permanently as workforce housing.
In the midst of Isaiah’s visions
of destruction,
he provides stories of a new
city and a new reality.
He shows that God has not
abandoned the people.
There is promise. There is
hope.
The sadness that the people face
will
not
be permanent, it won’t last forever.
In their trials and
desperation, the people
will understand where they
went wrong.
They will discard all the
things that were useless,
they will reject the ways
that led them astray.
They will go back to capture
the vision that they once had.
That’s what this first
reading for Advent 1 is.
After the warning and
destruction in chapter 1,
there is hope in Chapter 2.
In
this vision, people are flooding to the house of God
not just the steady faithful,
but all people are going
to find wisdom and to learn
the ways of God.
This is not just a dream of
church growth,
or to make this a Christian
nation.
This is a vision of
something much more encompassing,
much more important. People are coming
to learn God’s word and God’s
ways
because the ways of the world
that they have been
following didn’t work. The
world is working together
to live out the way and the
vision of God.
And the sign of this transformation would be this:
“They will turn their swords into ploughshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.”
We’ve heard this phrase so often it might be cliché
now
it appears in both Isaiah and
Micah
but think of how astounding and
hopeful
that vision would be:
That the whole world would find no need for weapons.
Our grandchildren and great
grandchildren
would not need to know anything
about
war, or self-defense, or
violence, or bombings,
or mass shootings, or school
shootings, or accidental shootings,
or active shooter drills, or murders, or stranger danger,
or nuclear bombs, or wounded veterans, or chemical
weapons, or refugees.
So much so, that they would look at guns and
missiles and say, “what do we
need these useless things for?
Let’s melt them down and turn
them
into something we can
actually use.”
This is an amazing vision, better than our current reality.
This is the hope that Isaiah
envisions for all people.
And the whole book of Isaiah tells us that that hope
will be heralded through the
gift of a child.
The shoot that comes off of
Jesse’s tree
Immanuel, God is with us,
Wonderful Counselor,
Prince of peace.
The Messiah.
This is our hope.
This is what we long for,
this is what we pray for,
The one that will deliver us
into a new life.
This is we believe has already come in
the life, cross, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ,
And is still being formed in
us.
The gestation period for this
birth is long.
and it is growing in us every
day.
Part of me says that’s what
the second coming is:
The hope of Christ being born
again in us, in our hearts.
That is the Word of God that Isaiah saw.
When all will be made new
again.
The hope of a world recreated
in God’s
image and according to God’s
will.
The hope of the one that
was,
and is, and is still to come.
The hope of the Messiah.
The hope of Christ.
