During the month of December the weekly news magazine, the London Economist, publishes a prospective on the coming year. You can purchase it now on most newsstands and you will find it under the title, “The World in 2002.” The magazine’s analysts offer a potpourri of reflections on the state of the world. They suggest, for instance, “The Middle East enters 2002, the year of the prophet 1423, as a more dangerous and unhappy place than it has been at any time in the past decade.” They see Europe resisting Russian pleas to extend the European Union’s border to the Pacific Ocean with power tilting that way too. And Africa? “Winter,” writes The Economist, the war on terror sidelining debt relief and medicines for HIV/AIDS and malaria.

And for the United States? A nation at war; an economy in recession. The analysts cite for the United States, among other things, the realization that a mighty military arsenal costing a third of trillion dollars makes us no less vulnerable to an enemy eschewing the traditional battlefield, exploiting our weaknesses, joining in the new face of battle, “asymmetrical warfare,” a strategy as old as David and Goliath.

And yes, another allusion to post-September 11? America rediscovers diplomacy. “A reabsorbtion in the wider world is overdue,” says The Economist. And among us voters, resistance will rise to any increased global engagement. “America may prefer to retreat behind the country’s own walls, to boost security on airlines, to take a tougher line on immigration and to keep clear of foreign escapades. Isolation has always had its supporters. Many foreigners, too, would prefer an inward-looking America. Indeed, they have already made the argument that the World Trade Center attacks were the inevitable result of American imperialism.” Yet, The Economist insists America must stay engaged for three reasons: isolation does not protect America from attack; the United States can assist with the solution of other serious geopolitical problems, such as the Palestinians and Israelis, the future of the United Nations; and lastly, engagement will provide global vindication of democracy and freedom. To fail that,” says The Economist “would allow the terrorists to win their greatest victory.”

The world in 2002? America’s reabsorption in the wider world? The rediscovery of diplomacy? This for Advent? What is going on? Well, there is another reflection on diplomacy, asymmetrical warfare, and the approach to geopolitical issues you can also find at a good newsstand or at Borders, Barnes and Noble, or Doubleday bookstores. Most of you possess it in your own home. Anyway, you packed it among the books in the den, you can find it on a coffee table or stashed away with those old college texts in the basement. And if you don’t have it, I suggest you purchase it at the Massachusetts Bible Society and stop in and talk with Donald Wells the Bible Society’s Executive Director—who with Betsy greeted you this morning. The treatise on geopolitical diplomacy is the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah spent his whole mature life contemplating, reviewing, reflecting on, reporting about, analyzing, and yes, decrying, vilifying, reviling, censuring, berating, rebuking the diplomacy, statecraft and foreign policy of his contemporaries. Isaiah fulminated against the political alignments, the international intrigues, the brutal tyrannies threatening the vulnerable peoples of his own time. He acted as a one man foreign relations committee, writing legislation, voting on it, overriding the vetoes of the king, attacking and defining as duplicitous, corrupt, and ethically challenged the leaders of his nation. Anyone who might want to divorce religion from politics never met Isaiah. And although almost 3000 years old, he comes as a contemporary, his polemics and observations ripe for the latest edition of The Economist’s World of 2002.

You see, Isaiah lives amid the busy trade routes joining Assyria and Egypt. Generation, after generation, century after century he and his people experience the terror of imperial regimes, the ransacking of their cities, the raping of their women, the starving of their children, the ruin of their villages. Isaiah and his fellow citizens stagger under servile treaties appeasing the powerful; they surrender to and accommodate the enemy’s cultural ethos, its military and political priorities. But worst of all—driving Isaiah nearly apoplectic—they buy into the enemy’s pagan religious practice and loyalties. At wit’s end, grieved and incensed, Isaiah finally rejects the religious charlatans and political hacks he believes bring his nation to disaster. He is convinced they have it all backwards. They put faith in armaments, confidence in bribes, trust in military coalitions; exercise confidence in focus groups; place dependence on economic sanctions. And Isaiah believes all of this ultimate reliance on the instruments of militarism and the threats of force are, in God’s eyes, an illusion, an ethical sell-out, an egregious diplomatic blunder, an iniquitous religious betrayal. What Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and President Bush, and what many of us might call political realism, the power arrangements inevitable and necessary to protect and sustain a national community, Isaiah sees as a slippery slope to geopolitical and religious catastrophe. The dickering with these arrangements saves nobody; justice gets lost in the arrogance and police power of the strong; peace, in one way or another, becomes just another imperium working its will, perhaps another balance of terror. And Isaiah is right! Trust in force, marshaling military muscle, the coveting of power, the pursuit of status, an obsession with armed superiority, the resort to violence gets us human types into trouble. We know it. Our world proves it this very morning. We see it in our headlines, face it on our streets, encounter it in our schools, feel it in our tax bills, worry about it with our kids. The unpredictable and explosive world The London Economist anticipates in 2002 and the world Isaiah observes and condemns 2700 years ago are cut from the same cloth. No progress. No difference. Politics as usual. “The same old, same old.” Cynicism the order of the day. Heaven forbid!

II

Question: is there another way? Please, God, there is! And Advent provides the time to think, to pray, to work, to envision such a time. As we suggest time and again during the Advent season, we look forward, not simply to the birth of a child on Christmas Day, but what the child represents: a new world, a new way of treating one another, an era of civil society where the weak and powerless get a fair shake, where justice becomes the benchmark for government and where the supposed polarities within creation dissolve: the leopard lives with the lamb, the lion, the calf and the fatling together; a child playing over a serpent’s hole; the outsiders, the outcasts, all those beyond the cultural religious, racial, ethnic borders now embraced. Indeed, a signal, a beacon, an ensign to the nations, of mutuality and peace. How might we look at such a possibility? How do we share the Advent vision? Well, let’s take another look at our world from another perspective, this from an E-mail sent by one of our kindly members who seems always on the look-out for sermon material and who sends it along without any request for a finder’s fee. In this case, another look at our world: “If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human conditions the same, it would look something like the following: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south, 8 Africans.

52 would be female, 48 would be male.
70 would be non-white, 30 would be white.
70 would be non-Christian, 30 would be Christian.
89 would be heterosexual, 11 would be homosexual.
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read.
50 would suffer from malnutrition.
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth.
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education.
1 would own a computer.

When one considers the world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent,” says this small reflection. And then it continues:

The following is something else to ponder: If you woke up this morning with more health than illness…you are far more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, of the pangs of starvation…you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.
If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the people in the world.
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and some change in a dish somewhere, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.
If your parents are still alive and still married…you are very rare, even in the United States and Canada.
If you can read this message [as I do right now] you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all…
Someone once said: ‘What goes around comes around.’

Talk about prophecy! “What goes around comes around.” However we may perceive the collapse of those twin towers and the wreck at the Pentagon, the shock, the terror, the magnitude of that occasion cannot be trivialized in any way, nor justified by any religious rationale, yet—yet— the hatred expressed in that astounding event arose, we know, from furious resentment, a blind malice aimed at all of us. As Fouad Ajami writes in this month’s Foreign Affairs, “…in thwarted resentful societies there was satisfaction on September 11 that the American bull run and the triumphalism that had awed the world had been battered, that there was soot and ruin in New York’s Streets.” “Satisfaction?” How come? “What” for instance, “prompts an impoverished old man in Istanbul, “asks the Turkish novelist and one time resident of Manhattan, Orhan Pamuk in The New York Review of Books, “What prompts an impoverished old man in Istanbul to condone terror in New York in a moment of anger, or a Palestinian youth fed up with Israeli oppression to admire the Taliban, [the Taliban] who throw nitric acid at women because they reveal their faces?” He answers his own question, “It is the feeling of impotence arising from degradation, the failure to be understood, and the inability of such people to make their voices heard.” For Iqbal Asaria, a Ugandan-born economist, quoted by John Lloyd in yesterday’s Financial Times, “the fatal undermining of the West has been betrayal of its own liberal and democratic promise: ‘People everywhere want certain aspects of living better. But if you offer them despotic systems as a way of modernizing then they will sooner or later rebel. Muslims are able to live with modern constitutional orders provided they have a say.’”

And Ziauddin Sardar, a Pakstani-born writer and teacher says, “It feels to many in the third world that the rich world leaves no space. There is no alternative to its economics, its societies, its culture. For many societies who live in pre-modern ways, to come into the modern world is seen as asking them to commit cultural suicide. You need to have some way of becoming modern with all its enmities, while remaining culturally traditional. But there are no examples because there are no spaces for people to do it.”

And the reporter, John Lloyd himself then comments, “For the west, the equation of economic modernity with civil rights, female emancipation and democratic systems has become absolute. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the political economist Francis Fukuyama insisted there was no alternative—Remember “The end of history?”—no alternative, no space left, as Sardar would put it.”

Poverty? Illiteracy? Collaboration with repression? Trafficking in arms? What goes around comes around. Can we not as Christians—Christians—identify with the vision of Isaiah, where public policy, as he says, will tilt toward equity for the meek of the earth, and with righteousness seek the encouragement and support of the poor? An ensign! We churches, we at Old South, an ensign for peace with justice. It is inevitable: no justice, no peace—our church an ensign to this nation, to the nations, for a just peace.

III

And yes an ensign to this city, to this nation, to the world, an ensign for inclusion. I was taken by an article, believe it or not, in Yankee Magazine this month. It tells the story of the Rutland Herald and its winning the Putlizer Prize for editorials written by David Moats. Moats won the prize for an “even handed and influential series of editorials” during the struggle in Vermont last year—the most serious since the Civil War, said some—during the struggle over the legalization of domestic partnerships. Vermont newspapers, television news, town meetings, religious forums overflowed with rage and hate, with legal and constitutional argument; tears and fears. Vermont split. During that high pitched battle a letter appeared in Lebanon, New Hampshire’s Valley News from the Vermont mother of a gay son, a letter sick to death of the bigotry spewing forth across that Northern Kingdom. “I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric,” she began.

Your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children, I’m sick of that. You are cruel and you are ignorant. You have been robbing me of joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny. My first born son started suffering at the hands of moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in first grade. In high school, while your children were doing what children that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him and millions like him on earth to give you someone to abuse.

A popular theme in your letters is that our state has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I’ll thank you to stop saying you are speaking for ‘true Vermonters’.

And amid this public policy struggle: the Pulitzer winning editorials? Brilliant examples of irenic argument for fairness, equal rights under the law, an appreciation of a diverse humanity. In one of them David Moats insists Catholic resistance to civil unions comes legitimately within the realm of Catholic sexual ethics: ethics pointing toward procreation as a major function of sex. Moats writes,

It is possible to disagree with the Catholic sexual ethic while still recognizing it to be a legitimate doctrine of a major religion aimed at providing guidance in the chaotic realm of human sexuality. It may offer some comfort to supporters of same sex marriage to see through to the humanity of the opposition and to recognize the reasons for opposition are not always founded on bigotry. At the same time, opponents of same-sex marriage have an obligation to see through to the humanity of a vulnerable minority. Anyone tempted to condemn homosexuality as other than normal ought to consider that it is quite normal, that within our population 5 to 10 percent—the number is not important—happen to be gay or lesbian. For each of us, it is normal to be who we are, whether we are heterosexual or homosexual. It has always been that way, and the sooner we recognize it the better.

Of course. It is normal to be who we are: heterosexual, homosexual, black white, yellow, male, female, Anglo, Latino, Nordic, Hispanic, Asian, African—whatever—and as our world becomes smaller, we discover, as another prescient article in The Economist’s look at 2002 suggests, that “racial mixture renders racial categories meaningless” and that we find ourselves in a “race to end race.”

An ensign, for God’s sake, of inclusion.

O friends, in these Advent weeks, as we approach the birth of the child at Bethlehem, we dare never forget the new world that child’s life embodies and promises: ultimately, as our prophet so vividly anticipates, a world where a just peace reigns, where the leopard lives with the lamb, the cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, where the nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. And yes, where they—where we—will not hurt or destroy in God’s good creation, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

SCRIPTURE READING
Isaiah 11:1-12

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch
shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of
wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge
by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with
equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth
with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his
lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness
the belt around his loins.
The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.
On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall
inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
On that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that is
left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia, from Elam,
from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea.
He will raise a signal for the nations, and will assemble the
outcasts of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah
from the four corners of the earth.