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“The wolf shall live with the lamb”–and Paul’s readers in Rome struggle to make that work! Second Sunday of Advent, 12/7/2025

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Readings

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” So Paul to the Romans in our second reading. Hope: today’s readings flesh that out in some encouraging ways. Let’s dive in.

Whatever else it is, our reading from Isaiah, an exercise in hope.” A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” “Stump of Jesse:” that assumes that things have not gone well. Just a few chapters back we heard Isaiah warning Ahaz “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all” (7:9), but Ahaz is showing no sign of that faith; he’s putting his faith in the king of Assyria! Nevertheless, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” The faithlessness of Ahaz—of most of the kings of Judah—will not get the last word. And what a shoot! “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”“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 what is happening in Jerusalem will get international attention: “On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him…” It sounds like what we heard last week from Isaiah (“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’” [Isa 2:3]). Hope.

This hope for what God will do through the shoot drives today’s psalm in more general terms: what God will do through any king. Prosperity, international security: yes. The surprise is that what the king is doing focuses almost entirely on defending the needy, rescuing the poor. From the part the lectionary omitted:

For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress, *
and the oppressed who has no helper.
He shall have pity on the lowly and poor; *
he shall preserve the lives of the needy.
He shall redeem their lives from oppression and violence, *
and dear shall their blood be in his sight.

God to the king: you worry about the poor; I’ll worry about prosperity and the other nations. The tragedy of Israel’s history: like Ahaz, most of the kings worried about prosperity and the other nations, with the poor toward the bottom of the to-do list. Gentile rulers—to whom the offer is implicitly extended—have tended to do no better. So the hand-copying of Psalm 72 in the centuries before Gutenberg, also an exercise in hope that someone will take it seriously.

So when John the Baptist proclaims “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” that does encourage the hope that God is doing something about those words from Isaiah and the psalm. He’s baptizing at the Jordan, that river that Joshua and Israel crossed to enter the land. It’s a powerful promise: we can begin again. At the same time, there’s that word “repent.” The problem isn’t “those people.” John’s right there with Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That image of wheat and chaff with which our reading ends? The wheat: not those who don’t need to repent, but those who are doing so. So the first of our brother Martin Luther’s 95 theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Which brings us to our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “Abound in hope:” particularly a challenge in the capital of the Roman Empire, whose legions, architecture, and stories had no intention of going anywhere! Virgil, the Empire’s poet, has Jupiter, king of the gods, saying this of the Romans:

“On them I set no limits, space or time:
I have granted them power, empire without end.” (Aeneid i.333-334)

Living among competing narratives is nothing new! So Paul “May the God of hope–not to be confused with Jupiter–fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” How does Paul think this works, particularly “believing”? Our reading is at the end of a section in which he’s dealing with the challenge of Jewish and Gentile believers living together. Some, in faith, keep kosher and observe particular days; some, also in faith, eat whatever they want and treat all days equally. All are tempted to judge, to enlighten the others. While Paul talks about the groups as the strong and the weak, each group would have seen itself as strong and faithful in contrast to the other groups.

Paul: “Welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed you.” It’s not a call to toleration (too often simply a temporary ceasefire until one of the groups feels strong enough to resume hostiliities), but to actively supporting each other’s different understandings of faithfulness.

Isaiah: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” Lovely words, but Isaiah didn’t have to figure out how that actually works. Paul—and the Romans—do. Wolves, lambs, leopards, kids: in God’s faithfulness all thrown together in Rome’s various house churches. Potlucks are going to stay complicated. (With increased awareness of food intolerances in our congregations, we should be able to sympathize!)

And this welcoming one another, encouraging one another, wolves as wolves and lambs as lambs, is a powerful sign that Isaiah’s words aren’t just words, but a world that God is birthing in their midst. So there’s reason for hope. But it’s a hope that doesn’t come cheap. It means the repenting, the turning, that John the Baptist proclaimed, repenting of the natural assumption that our group’s right, that they’re the ones who need to change, that they’re not sufficiently grateful for our tolerance.

Let’s step back for a minute. To the first century Romans Paul writes “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (14:17). But despite the presence of this section in his letter (14:1-15:13) we Christians have been really proficient at finding equivalents to food and drink over which to divide. Within the Anglican tradition, even over the presence or absence of candles on the altar! The problem is that if we’ve got “Welcome one another,” we also have (from Paul’s letter to the Galatians) “if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!” (1:9). Discerning which is applicable in any given situation has never been easy. Nevertheless, this section from Romans is a standing challenge to our tendency to build walls when we should be building bridges.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Not because hope in itself is a good thing; it depends on what we’re hoping for. Our hope centers in prayers like “Your kingdom come” or “Come, Lord Jesus.” How do we “abound in hope”? As our believing shapes our behavior so that our common life offers glimpses of what we’re hoping for, of Jesus’ presence, of Isaiah’s vision: “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.”

Who is blessed/happy? (6th Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/16/2025)

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Readings

Whether we respond to the readings with “The Word of the Lord” or “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church,” I take the readings to set the agenda for the preacher: what might the Spirit want us to hear today in these words of the Lord? That agenda’s in the form of a question, so most of the time the sermon’s an invitation to reflect together. So let’s dive in.

Words like ‘happy’ or ‘blessed’ appear in three of our texts. ‘Happy’ has a broad range of meanings; what are these texts talking about? Well, it looks like they’re part of a long conversation in the Mediterranean world about what counted as a life well-lived. It’s certainly about something more basic than one’s momentary emotional state. ‘Happy’ is the first word in the Book of Psalms, despite many of the psalms assuming situations that have the speakers crying “Help!” In this sense there’s considerable overlap between ‘happy’ in that psalm and Jeremiah’s ‘blessed.’

Both texts talk about two groups, their behavior and the results of that behavior. The Psalm speaks of the righteous and wicked, the behavior of the righteous captured by “Their delight is in the law of the Lord.” Jeremiah speaks of those who trust and those who don’t trust the Lord. Both use the tree image: those who delight in the law, those who trust: they’re like well-watered trees: they endure; they’re fruitful. They’re the ones who are happy (Psalm 1), blessed (Jeremiah). Trees: the image suggests a rather long timeframe. Fruit, or the effects of drought: these take time. The image is hopeful and can nourish our hope. Droughts: they’re a given; we don’t need to fear them.

So these texts are saying that in this life, this world the righteous prosper and the wicked fail? No, for starters because Jeremiah’s career is the antithesis of ‘prosper.’ They are saying that delighting in the law of the Lord, trusting the Lord are life-giving. Notice the careful language with which Psalm 1 closes (and introduces the entire book): “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, / but the way of the wicked is doomed.”

In other words, whether all this plays out in a satisfactory way in this life, this world is left unanswered. Earlier texts often seem to assume that it does; our latest texts—like Daniel or the Wisdom of Solomon—are sure that it doesn’t. Paul’s words to the Corinthians continue this trajectory: without a resurrection in which each receive their due “we are of all people most to be pitied.”

But returning to Jeremiah and the psalm, notice that while for both of them the Lord’s torah (law, or, more broadly, teaching) is fundamental, neither narrows the focus to obeying or not obeying. Jeremiah understands that the issue is often trust, who or what we put our weight on. The psalmist speaks of delight in the Lord’s law or teaching. That’s an invitation to a life of continual discovery. Paul to the Ephesians: “test everything to see what’s pleasing to the Lord” (5:10 CEB).Cue the music from the various iterations of Star Trek, one contemporary vision of a corporate life well-lived.

Hearing Jesus’ words after Jeremiah and the psalm, we might hear them as encouragement: even if you’re poor, hungry, etc., you’re still in the life-well-lived game. And that wouldn’t be a bad way of hearing them. But there’s more.

Earlier in the Gospel Luke recorded Mary’s song. “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the lowly. / He has filled the hungry with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty.” Growing up with your mother singing songs like that will do things—good things—to your head. Three Sundays ago we heard Jesus reading Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…” and here Jesus is doing just that.

“Whoa, Mary, Jesus! Pretty hard on the rich!” we might think. Well, their words reflect centuries of their people’s experience. Of course riches can be used in good ways, but usually? Sirach nails it: “Wild asses in the wilderness are the prey of lions; / likewise the poor are feeding grounds for the rich” (13:19). We shouldn’t assume that these words match our reality, nor should we assume that they don’t. (And, by the way, the next thing Jesus says—which we’ll hear next Sunday—is “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” So however we read our situation, we’ve been told how to respond.)

Happy those poor, hungry, weeping, hated. Not because these are positives, but because God’s reign is—as Jesus proclaims—at hand. Now, in our text we hear “for surely your reward is great in heaven.” So isn’t this another version of “pie in the sky when you die”? No, first, because the border between heaven and earth is porous, and a reward “great in heaven” is a sight better than having received all the consolation you’re going to get. Second, because of where Luke is taking this. Later in the Gospel we hear “And [Jesus] said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life’” (18:29-30; italics mine). So, describing the church in Jerusalem, Luke writes “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34-35). What is the Church for? It is where the truth of Jesus’ Beatitudes can be experienced.

How might we wrap this up? Already in the Old Testament we have the contours of a life well-lived: a life in which our trust in the Lord is growing, a life in which our delight in the Lord’s teaching is growing. To quibble a little with Gene Roddenberry, for all practical purposes the final frontier is not space, but the week ahead.

And with the power of the Lord Jesus’ Spirit active in our midst, this life well-lived is particularly good news for the poor, the hungry, those weeping, those excluded, reviled, and defamed on account of the Son of Man. As one of our Eucharistic Prayers puts it, “that we might live no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for us, he sent the Holy Spirit, his own first gift for those who believe, to complete his work in the world, and to bring to fulfillment the sanctification of all” (BCP 374).