Blessings in this first week of Advent, the week of hope. A time of waiting with confidence that the kingdom of God is being revealed. We wait patiently, and yet we wait with sureness, and we do this year after year knowing that Christ is indeed born. What a gift that we don’t have to wonder, we only have to hold onto the hopeful promise of what is being offered. Let us walk into this season with that confidence, and that trust as we pray that the love, the caring, the healing of Christ will be born in us as we join in this path of faithful hopefulness. 

This will seem an odd turn but just for fun, have you seen the movie Young Frankenstein? I’m not entirely sure how this was so seared into my memory as a movie of my youth because it was released when I was barely a year old, but somehow, in those days before streaming and video tapes I saw it, and I saw it more than once as a young person. If you have not seen it let me heartily recommend it now, not as a fount of spiritual development, but as some good comedic moments that have left an impression down the decades for many. If you have seen it you will perhaps recall that in the early part of the film, when the young Dr. Frankenstein, played by Gene Wilder, arrives in Transylvania he is met at the train station by a brilliant Marty Feldman as Igor. If you have seen the movie make sure you are pronouncing the names with long ‘e’ and long ‘I’ in the correct places.

As they prepare to leave the station Igor who is humped and walks with a short cane instructs Dr. Frankstein to ‘walk this way.’ You would think this is just directional, but it is much more specifically instructive. When Igor says ‘walk this way’ he means in a sideways stoop, using the short cane. It doesn’t matter that Frankenstein does’t need a cane and doesn’t stoop, the direction is to walk as Igor walks, and Igor, after descending the stairs kindly hands the cane up and gestures the directions. It’s ridiculous and brilliant comedy. And I think it is an instructive example as we explore these passages from Isaiah and Romans. 

Here are some questions I want you to sit with looking at the text: why would you walk in a particular way, why would you put on physical (or spiritual) attributes for movement, if you don’t have to and you can move freely in a direction without them? If I don’t need a cane why would I use one? If I am able to just get down the stairs, or just follow a path without additive behaviors and I’m getting generally where I want to go, or where I think I want to go, why does it matter what I’m doing to get there? I hope that we will answer these questions in this text, and I hope that walk a little differently after you read this.

We’ll start with context because I think that is critical to a deep understanding of the text. The book of Isaiah is, as you probably know, more than one book. Most scholars think it has at least three authors from three different periods affecting the region of Judah, but there is a significant body of scholarship to suggest it is actually four distinct writers and periods written over more than a hundred years and then altered in compilation to tell a more unitive story. For our purposes we are looking at First Isaiah written in time when the Assyrians are expanding their influence and starting to threaten the Southern kingdom of Judah, but it is well prior to the time of the actual Babylonian exile. The Northern kingdom of Israel is already functionally gone, operating as a vassal state of larger ruling bodies. This part of the Isaiah is written in a tone of condemnation for the direction that the community, the country, is headed in spiritually, but practically at this moment day to day life is not bad for the people of Judah, if you were someone with a moderate degree of power. Kind of like how it is always. 

There is materially wealth, there is integration with the other cultures in the area, there may be some degree of regional political influence, so all of this should feel fairly familiar and not terrible, right? And when things are going well, when you have food on the table and a nice house and you can afford some of the little extra things that make life fun it’s not so easy to hear that there is a problem or that God might not be happy with you. Probably you can acknowledge that there are problems, there are people who are suffering, and maybe you even feel bad about that. But fundamentally, business is good, life is good, it’s not your problem. Broadly speaking and without spending too much time on the nuances of history, this is the setting in which the prophet Isaiah is running around decrying the system. 

And if we were to read just the passage that we have in front of us today, and that is the passage specified in the lectionary, we get sort of a partial view that suggests something might not have been perfect but it’s going to be beautiful in the future. It is a fitting passage for this first Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of hope. But it’s hope out of context and while there are probably a lot of pastors preaching about pacifism in this passage I am going to suggest that our hope, the hopefulness in these words, comes not in a vague space of agrarian restoration, but instead in active, intentional repentance that requires we walk in a way that stoops us more than we might like and demands we rely on tools we don’t think we need. Hope is not a pastoral picture that God will provide, hope is made real when we choose to walk with God, the way God tells us to walk. 

Just before we come to this section, Isaiah proclaims in chapter 1 verses 21-23, “How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her – but now murderers! Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water. 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.” We need to understand what Isaiah is looking at to fully understand what it means when we get to the portion we are reading; this is not about God magically intervening, this is about how we are walking and we are not doing it the way God wants. In 1:27 Isaiah looks ahead and says, “Zion will be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness.” We have to change our ways is what Isaiah is saying, we have to recognize the ways in which we have fallen into debauchery and abuse, to repent and to walk with God. This makes sense then when we hear in 2:3, “Come, let us go up the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” 

Walk this way is what Isaiah is saying, and he tells us what the world will look like when we do that: we will beat our swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Our energy will be spent on growing what nourishes. We won’t be engaged in wars of extraction and expansion, because we won’t be chasing ever more. Folks, this is no different than where we find ourselves, no different that what our world looks like. Lest you think words from thousands of years ago are just nice sign posts and aren’t actively calling us, all we have to do is look around and recognize Isaiah is shouting at us to start walking a different way. This message is not for someone else, it is for us. 

When Isaiah says ‘their wine is mixed with water’ he’s just talking about the ways in which we cheat. A little here, a little there, it’s okay right? Maybe you don’t blatantly take a bribe, maybe you don’t have that power, but what do you take that you shouldn’t? What are the little things that are just the norm, or expected, or what everyone does? When we hear about defending the orphan and widow it feels remote, we don’t really talk about people like that anymore not with those words, but let me ask it this way: are we defending children who don’t have advocates for a demanding education, for safety and shelter, for programs that keep them off the street and out of trouble? Are we advocating for the people who have been abandoned socially, confusing autonomy with empowerment, and approval with acceptance? Not showing up with the difficult care and protection that is truly needed? 

I am personally accused in these words and convicted by the fact that I don’t answer; I am guilty of walking in a way that may look at righteousness but is not moving in the manner of righteousness, and I need to remind myself everyday that walking with God in God’s way is not my first instinct. 

A few years ago I ordered something from Amazon for my cousin, and it didn’t arrive when it was supposed to so I cancelled the order and bought her something else. I got the refund for the order so all was good. A week later the first item showed up, so now she had two gifts but I had only paid for one, and I thought cool now she has another thing that she needs and then I felt bad because I didn’t want to steal. I knew what the right things to do was but I didn’t;t want to do it, I wanted to just keep the money now that I had it back. A few minutes after these mental gymnastics I got on the amazon chat and asked to pay for the original item. The chat agent had no idea what I was trying to do so they had someone call me. The person on the phone didn’t understand why I was trying to pay if I didn’t have to and was perplexed when I kept saying that I didn’t want to steal from them. What we eventually determined was that I would have to order another of the first item in order to be able to be charged for it, but that would result in me having yet another item and still not paying for the original, and if I then tried to return it I would get another refund. Finally the person on the phone said, ‘we don’t have any way to deal with this, you can try to return it but I don’t know what will happen, and I don’t know how you can return it because there is no way to get you a shipping label and we won’t accept it if you just drop it off somewhere.’ 

The expectation of a certain amount of theft is called ‘inventory shrink’ and you just include it in the budget, it’s expected. They just build it into the system and it doesn’t even sound bad. The person I was speaking to eventually said, ‘thank you for trying, it’s good to know there are some decent people.’ But it wasn’t the first thing I was going to do, my instinct wasn’t for good. Living in a world, being a part of a world that just expects theft and cheating is not God’s way. I had to remember that walking with God could sometimes be an unsatisfying pain in the —. Incidentally I did not just keep the money, I couldn’t get it back to amazon so I donated it to the church, it felt like a reasonable spiritual compromise. 

“Let us go up the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” What are God’s ways? What does it look like to ‘walk this way’ with God? What does God give us as tools, and direction? Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans: “let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ…” 

Every week after we read the scripture we say, ‘for the word in scripture, the word made flesh, and the word in our hearts – thanks be to God.’ The good news here is that God has given us both the example and the tools that we need in order to walk in God’s way. We have the form of Jesus showing us what it looks like to walk with God. It looks like offering hope to people who are hopeless, it looks like offering healing to those in pain, welcome to those who are rejected, a second chance for people deemed unworthy. So how do we do this, how do we actually express these things and make them happen in the world. We aren’t all Jesus, we don’t just instinctually move the right way. 

Conveniently we just spent seven weeks exploring the fruit of the spirit and I would suggest that those fruits are both the internal motivations that actually help us to walk the way God wants us to walk, and the external expressions of that walk. The are what righteousness feel like and what justice looks like. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

Love: treat everyone as if you know that they are dear to God, including yourself; remember that Jesus was the first to invite sinners to the table

Joy: be surprised when God breaks through the busyness of the day, when your heart delights in something, go slow enough to be able to feel it;

Peace: shalom, the enveloping comfort of the divine, allow yourself to sit and be in this presence, feel God descend on you and call you by name

Patience: we can’t always see it, but know that God is there working, allow yourself to be a part of the unfolding, don’t force it, we could not imagine the resurrection and now we take it foe granted most of the time;

Kindness: tell the truth, say what needs to be said, the best thing you can often do is offer someone the respect of being real, name the demons to set them free;

Generosity: give a little bit more than what is expected, all the time;

Goodness: you know what the right thing is, do it even when you don’t want to because it is not the easiest path;

Faithfulness: know, really know that God is trustworthy and will be there, we don’t always feel it and we don’t like it when we don’t get what we want, when we want it, but we are asked to trust and we see the promise realized over and over;

Gentleness: be humble, know that you are of the earth and that we all have much to learn from each other;

Self-control: be intentional, be disciplined in your choices, take the time to know what you are about and why, when you don’t know what to do, take a minute and sit and pray.

Paul tells us in Romans that it is time to wake from sleep, he offers us the hopeful promise that salvation is near. Isaiah reminds us that the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established, we will want to walk up that mountain and learn how to walk with God, God’s way, and it will be a time of goodness when we do. This is the hope of advent, this is the reminder for today, that we have these guides to show us, we have these tools we can use right now. They have been handed over to us and we are being shown what the movement looks like, we have to be willing to do it. 

At the beginning of this piece I asked you to think about a few questions. One of those questions was this: why would you walk in a particular way, why would you put on physical (or spiritual) attributes for movement, if you don’t have to and you can move freely in a direction without them? For many of us things are okay. Life may not be perfect but it’s pretty good. We can just keep doing what we are doing, most of us are probably pretty decent the majority of the time. But I don’t think that’s enough, I don’t think most of or kind of or generally, is God’s way; I think there are those all around us all the time, physically, emotionally, spiritually who are being taken advantage of, who are undefended, who are unprotected, who need us walking in a way where we can notice. We need to put on Paul’s armor of light, we need to actively express those attributes of light, because God has taught us that this is what we need to be doing in order to walk the good way. We need to be willing to stoop, to take up the tools, to get uncomfortable, and to trust. 

We will redeem our world when we walk with justice, we will feel that righteousness when we are willing to walk in a way we are not used to, but that is good. 

Walk with God friends, today, and everyday. 

*’The word that Isaiah son of Amos saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Sion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ -Isaiah 2:1-5

‘Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.’ -Romans 13: 11-14 nrsv